Manon McCollum, 23 cents an hour: The perfectly legal slavery happening in modern-day America

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/

Summary: 

This article focuses on prison labor in the Angola State Penitentiary and the greater United States. The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution states that "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."
The inmates at Angola work in the fields or manufacturing warehouses, for as little as 2 cents an hour; the majority serving life sentences with no chance of parole. Inmates who do not work can be put into solitary confinement, and, since they are not technically "employees" are not protected under any labor laws. 
The similarities between prison labor and chattel slavery get only more disturbing when you learn that the Angola farm was once a plantation, and that it was converted into a prison during the Reconstruction era following the civil war. Then, it was quickly filled with black men, reminiscent of its previous purpose, and its current demographic breakdown. 
One argument in favor of prison labor is: if people do not act like decent human beings, they dont deserve to be treated like decent human beings. However, some reports state that more than half of prison inmates are suffering from mental illness, and countless more are illiterate, crushingly poor, or drug-addicted. 

Analysis: 

I think that the abuses sighted in this article are morally reprehensible, and represent modern day slavery. In state prisons, black men are incarcerated over white men at a rate of 5 to one. The fact that these prisoners are being forced to work for practically nothing can only remind me of the violent race based caste system that dominated our country for the first 300 years of its history

Though the article was published in 2015, Angola and other state prisons are operating in the exact same way

As stated in the article, this issue is disturbingly similar to the legal enslavement of black people in this country beginning in 1619, and how slavery is still technically legal if the enslaved persons have committed a crime. The article also draws a direct link between the plantation system of the antebellum south and the prison-industrial complex of the Restoration through to today.