on slavery as punishment

  The thirteenth amendment to the US Constitution reads, 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.
  By any measure, this amendment does not abolish slavery, turning it rather into an institution of punishment. If my memory serves me correctly, however, few if any convicted criminals have been sentenced recently to slavery or indentured servitude. The use of slavery as a punitive measure would be more useful in some situations, less in others. A petty thief is unlikely to renounce his life of crime after a few hard seasons under the lash, while a corporate officer convicted of fraud and embezzlement, one accustomed to the finest treatment his ill-won gains could afford, might just emerge from his grueling months under the hot summer sun a humble and reformed person. Similarly, a manslaughtering cuckold is unlikely to find redemption in the tall swaying fields of sugarcane (a modern industry in which, even today, slavery is common), while the bankers who were allowed to profit enormously from the sale of dressed up mortgage-backed securities would truly understand the meaning of labor if put to task making self-guided rockets in a cave in southern Germany.     

  Perhaps is is because so many Americans have enslaved themselves willingly to small-scale capital gain and conspicuous materialism that slavery is not used more frequently as a punitive measure; the slave is already under the yoke, so allowing her to max out her credit cards and providing her with no better outlet at which to express her abounding creativity and endless potential - in her pursuit of food, shelter, and clothing, the Three Fundamental Components of Safety - than a menial, repetitive job ensures that the fruits of her hard labor are not afforded to her, but to the few who sit in the All Seeing Eye atop the pyramid of capitalism. The slave will be in debt until the day she dies, always struggling to make the minimal payment for things she did not truly need and could not truly afford.
  If we start using slavery as a punitive measure, we should seek out someone with knowledge of mass-production and streamlining, as Hitler did when he employed Henry Ford in his efforts to make the vast armies of Nazi slaves more efficient.

  I abhor slavery. I do not think people should ever be put in chains, but as long as our Constitution states that slavery can be considered as punishment for a crime, we should consider using it to bring the false princes of capitalism down a peg or two. The humble are not just the backbone of civil society, they are akin to gods.

So be it.
JPR