A national initiative on crime, incarcerations & injustice - Company Message
The 13th Amendment 
of the U.S. Constitution
 
 
 "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. "
 
 
 
Often the 13th Amendment is quoted only in part - " Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States..." omitting the critical words "except as a punishment for crime" that are so relevant and critical to the welfare of millions of American citizens today. While the photo above reflects a broken chain, those chains were broken only as they existed as a physcial restraint.  So called freed African Americans continued to be chained by contrived debt owed to their "owners", the ravages of years of oppression and abuse, and by "Black laws" that criminalized their behaviors and almost insured their imprisonment and re-enslavement in cotton fields, steel mills and mines.
 
The following description from Wikipedia is one of the few sites that accurately reflects the correct wording of the amendment. Other sites have corrected their representation only upon request of The Ethics Project.
 
"The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially abolished and continues to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, passed by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On December 18, Secretary of StateWilliam H. Seward, in a proclamation, declared it to have been adopted. It was the first of the Reconstruction Amendments"     For more information from Wikipedia go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution