TIP POLITICAL PARTY

No Exceptions: Finish Abolition

Removing the slavery clause from the 13th Amendment

IN SHORT

The 13th Amendment did not fully end slavery. It bans slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” Within months of its ratification in 1865, Southern states passed Black Codes and vagrancy laws that made ordinary life a crime for freed people, then leased those they convicted to mines, railroads, and plantations. That exception is still in the Constitution. Today it allows states to force incarcerated people to work for pennies an hour or nothing, in a prison system where Black Americans are held at about five times the rate of white Americans. Meanwhile, private prison companies are reporting record revenue from immigration detention, the same profit motive that drove convict leasing. And the same system that can wrongly convict can wrongly sentence people to death: at least 203 people have been exonerated from death row, and death sentences fall hardest on Black and poor defendants.

TIP supports a constitutional amendment to remove the exception. Below we set out the history, address Heritage Americans and constitutionalists directly, and present the strongest arguments against our position along with our answers. No slavery. No exceptions.

 

A NOTE FROM OUR FOUNDER

Once, I took my kids to 7-Eleven for some treats. While I was parked, a police officer came to my car and asked for my identification. He said I fit the description. I showed him my ID, and he left. My kids never saw it happen. But it could have gone the other way, especially if I hadn’t had my ID with me. In 1865, the Black Codes made it a crime for a Black man not to carry proof of employment. The paper has changed. The question has not.

— Greg Peace, Founder and Chief Navigator, TIP Political Party

The sentence most Americans have never read

Most Americans believe the 13th Amendment ended slavery. Read it closely:

“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 exception is in the middle of the sentence. In 1865 the nation abolished slavery and wrote in a way to bring it back. The Southern states used that exception within months. TIP Political Party stands for removing it, with no conditions.

1865: The loophole goes to work

The exception did not sit unused. Southern state legislatures quickly passed “Black Codes,” laws that applied only to Black people and made them subject to prosecution for loitering, breaking curfew, vagrancy, having weapons, and not carrying proof of employment. Under vagrancy laws, being unemployed or walking the wrong road became a crime. A freedman could leave a plantation in the morning and be back in chains by nightfall, and the Constitution permitted it, because he had been “duly convicted.”

The results showed quickly. For the first time in U.S. history, many state penal systems held more Black prisoners than white, and all of them could be leased for profit.

Convict leasing: slavery under new management

Under convict leasing, businesses worked prisoners in coal mines, turpentine camps, railroad construction, and cotton fields, paid the state a fee per prisoner, and took no further responsibility for what happened to the men they leased. A slaveholder at least had a financial reason to keep an enslaved person alive. A lessee had none. When one prisoner died, the state supplied another.

The states depended on the system. In Alabama, convict leasing brought in 10% of state revenue in 1883 and 73% by 1898, which gave the state a financial reason to arrest more people and convict them of more offenses. In 1871, Virginia’s highest court said openly what the system was, declaring that a convicted prisoner was for the time being “the slave of the State.” In 1893, a pamphlet by Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass protesting the exclusion of Black Americans from the Chicago World’s Fair called the convict lease system and lynch law “twin infamies.”

The remains are still being found. In 2018, construction workers in Sugar Land, Texas uncovered the remains of 95 African Americans believed to have worked under convict leasing, who died on a sugar plantation camp sometime between 1878 and 1911. They are known today as the Sugar Land 95.

On June 30, 1928, Alabama became the last state to abolish the convict lease system. The practice ended but the forced labor continued in other forms. State-run prison farms such as Angola in Louisiana and Parchman in Mississippi replaced leasing, with the state running the plantation itself. Chain gangs followed. The exception clause remained in the Constitution throughout.

From the chain gang to the cell block

The exception clause did not cause mass incarceration by itself. It does make the damage worse, because it leaves in place a population of more than a million Americans who have no constitutional protection against forced labor.

The United States imprisons people on a scale no other nation matches. The prison population in 2021 was nearly six times as large as 50 years earlier, and Black Americans were still imprisoned at five times the rate of whites. Black Americans make up 14% of the U.S. population but 33% of those imprisoned, and 46% of those held 10 years or more. One in five Black men born in 2001 is likely to be imprisoned during his lifetime.

Once people are inside, the exception clause governs their labor. According to a 2022 national report, nearly 800,000 of the 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated. As of that report, seven state prison systems (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) pay nothing for most prison work, and other states average between 15 and 52 cents an hour for non-industry jobs. More than 75 percent of workers surveyed reported facing discipline if they refused certain tasks, and the punishments can include losing family visits or being placed in solitary confinement. Their work is worth a great deal: incarcerated workers produce at least $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in prison maintenance services each year.

When a person has to work under threat of punishment, for little or no pay, with no right to refuse, the Constitution’s own word for it is “involuntary servitude,” and the Constitution currently allows it.

Detention for profit

Convict leasing showed what happens when locking people up becomes a source of revenue. That incentive has returned, this time through immigration detention.

The two largest private prison companies are reporting record results from their contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). GEO Group called 2025 the largest year of new business in its history and reported its highest-ever ICE detention population, about 24,000 people. CoreCivic’s ICE revenue doubled in a single year, from $120 million in the last quarter of 2024 to $245 million in the last quarter of 2025. Growth continued into 2026: in the second quarter, GEO’s revenue rose 15% and CoreCivic’s rose 27%.

Investors want more. On one earnings call, an investment analyst complained that ICE detention had reached only about 70,000 people when investors had expected 100,000. In 1898, leasing prisoners supplied 73% of Alabama’s state revenue. In 2026, shareholders are asking for more detainees.

The labor pattern has returned too. For years, GEO Group paid immigrant detainees at its Tacoma, Washington facility $1 a day, or sometimes extra food, to do the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and repairs that kept the facility running. A jury ordered the company to pay more than $23 million in back wages and restitution, and a federal appeals court upheld the verdict. Rather than pay minimum wage, the company suspended the work program.

An accuracy note: immigration detainees have not been convicted of crimes, so the 13th Amendment’s exception does not technically apply to them. Their case was fought under state wage law. But it rests on the same assumption the exception clause wrote into the Constitution: that people in government custody can be made to work for almost nothing. Removing the exception rejects that assumption for everyone.

The companies’ side: GEO Group and CoreCivic say they supply detention capacity the federal government does not have, operate under federal standards, and that the detainee work program is voluntary and required by ICE contracts. GEO argued that federal law, not state wage law, should govern what it pays. A jury and the federal appeals court rejected that argument in the Washington case.

TIP’s position: a country that profits from holding people will always find more people to hold. The incentive has to end, not just the worst abuses.

The punishment that can’t be undone

This tab turns on two words in the 13th Amendment: “duly convicted.” Convictions can be wrong. Between 1989 and 2020, DNA evidence cleared 375 people convicted of crimes they did not commit. As of 2026, at least 203 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973, and DNA evidence played a part in only a small share of those cases, about one in six. Most were cleared by other evidence. Among those freed from death row by DNA, the average time spent there was 18.6 years.

A person wrongly sentenced to prison can be released and compensated. A person wrongly executed cannot be brought back.

The federal death penalty is expanding. As of April 2026, the Justice Department had lifted the moratorium on federal executions and authorized seeking death sentences against 44 defendants. Many of the new federal cases come from states whose voters or legislatures abolished the death penalty, including New Mexico, Colorado, and Maryland.

TIP’s position: Congress should abolish the federal death penalty. This does not require a constitutional amendment. Congress can do it by passing a law, and a bill to do so, the Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act, has been introduced repeatedly. Our position covers every federal case, including the worst. Life in prison is still a death sentence: the person will die behind bars. The difference is that the government does not do the killing, and if the conviction turns out to be wrong, the person can still walk free.

In the states: As of 2026, 23 states have abolished capital punishment, and 4 more have paused executions by order of the governor. TIP supports state repeal efforts everywhere else.

Who gets sentenced to death

Race. Black Americans are about 13% of the population but, in recent counts, 41% of the people on death row and 34% of those executed. The race of the victim matters even more. More than 75% of people executed were sentenced for killing white victims, even though about half of all homicide victims in the United States are Black. In 1987, in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court reviewed evidence that Georgia defendants were more than four times as likely to be sentenced to death when the victim was white. The Court accepted the data as accurate and upheld the death sentence anyway, treating racial bias in sentencing as an unavoidable part of the justice system. Errors fall unevenly too: Black defendants make up 41.7% of those sentenced to death over the past 50 years but 54% of those later exonerated.

Class. Few people facing a capital charge can afford to hire a lawyer. Most depend on court-appointed attorneys who are often overworked, underpaid, and inexperienced in death penalty trials, with little money for investigators or expert witnesses. Appointed lawyers in capital cases have slept through parts of trials, arrived in court intoxicated, or done no work to prepare for sentencing. The legal scholar Stephen Bright summed it up in the title of a 1994 Yale Law Journal article: the death sentence goes “not for the worst crime but for the worst lawyer.”

Place. Just 2% of U.S. counties account for more than 60% of the people on state death rows. Where the crime happened, who the victim was, and what lawyer the defendant could afford can decide the sentence as much as the crime itself. The people the Black Codes targeted in 1865, Black and poor, are the same people the death penalty reaches most often today.

The other side on the death penalty

“Some crimes deserve death.” Many families of murder victims believe execution is the only just response to the worst crimes, and supporters point to cases like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charleston church and Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, whose perpetrators remain on federal death row. This is the strongest argument for capital punishment, and TIP respects the grief behind it.

Our answer: Life without parole means the person never leaves prison and dies there. It punishes the worst crimes without giving the government a power it has shown it cannot use without error.

“The death penalty deters murder.” Supporters argue that the threat of execution prevents killings. Researchers have debated this for decades without settling it.

Our answer: A punishment that cannot be shown to prevent crime, and that has already been imposed on at least 203 people later exonerated, does not justify the risk of executing an innocent person.

“DNA testing has fixed the error problem.” Some argue modern forensic science makes wrongful executions far less likely than in the past.

Our answer: Most death row exonerations did not involve DNA at all, because most cases have no biological evidence to test. Better science reduces errors in some cases. It does not eliminate them.

“The disparities reflect the facts of the cases, not bias.” Supporters argue that differences in who is sentenced to death come from differences in the circumstances of the crimes and the defendants’ records, and researchers acknowledge that truly comparable cases are hard to find.

Our answer: The race-of-victim pattern has appeared in study after study. In 82% of the studies reviewed by the federal government’s General Accounting Office, the victim’s race influenced whether defendants were charged with capital murder or sentenced to death. The Supreme Court itself accepted the Georgia data in McCleskey. A punishment that cannot be applied without bias should not be applied at all.

A question we expect: “How can TIP oppose mass incarceration and support life in prison?”

The two positions address different problems. Mass incarceration is about the scale of the system: a prison population nearly six times as large as it was 50 years ago, built largely on drug laws, mandatory minimums, and long sentences for lesser crimes. Our death penalty position concerns a far smaller group, about 2,000 people on death row nationwide. The Death Penalty Information Center counted 2,004 people facing active death sentences in January 2026, and by mid-2026 the number had fallen below 2,000 for the first time since the 1980s. Replacing their death sentences with life sentences does not add a single person to the prison population.

A life sentence can also be corrected, and a death sentence cannot. At least 203 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973. As long as a person is alive, new evidence can free them.

Supporting life without parole in place of execution is not an endorsement of life sentences in general. Whether life sentences are overused for other crimes is a separate question, and TIP will address it with the rest of sentencing reform. When we say life in prison is still a death sentence, we mean it is a severe punishment reserved for the worst crimes. We want a system where the government does not carry out killings, and where it locks up far fewer people.

“The Talk”

Across generations, Black parents in America have had a conversation with their children, especially their sons, that most other parents never need to have. It is known simply as “The Talk.” It teaches a child how to survive an encounter with police: keep your hands where they can be seen, make no sudden moves, don’t reach for anything without saying so first, say “yes, officer,” don’t argue, and carry your ID. The best versions pair those survival rules with pride, so the child learns how to stay safe without learning to feel small.

The research confirms what Black families already know. A study of more than 3,500 students in St. Louis County, Missouri, found that Black youth and boys were significantly more likely than other groups to receive The Talk, and that White and Latino students had 59 percent lower odds of receiving it than Black students. A 2026 Rutgers study found that Black young adults were more likely to have been told by their parents that police can be dangerous, and less likely to have been told that police are protectors. Most Americans understand why: in a 2020 YouGov survey, 61% of Americans, including 73% of Black Americans, said parents who give The Talk are justified in their concerns.

The Talk works. Johns Hopkins researchers found that Black youth in Baltimore who had received it were far less likely to report severe stress about police brutality, 28.6% compared with 53.1% of those who had not. That is exactly what makes it so unfair. A child should not need training to survive a traffic stop, and a parent should not have to prepare a son to answer for a description that was never about him. The burden of a system’s failures is placed on the shoulders of children.

The other side: some argue that The Talk is simply good advice for every young person, and that officers and parents of all backgrounds teach the same rules of calm and cooperation. The same research shows that many parents do talk to their children about police, but that the messages differ by race. White and Latino youth are more likely to hear that police are protectors.

Our answer: We don’t disagree with the advice. We disagree with the need for it. The goal is a country where no parent has to give The Talk, because no child is treated as a suspect for the way he looks.

A word to Heritage Americans

“Heritage American” has become a common phrase in national politics. It gained popularity in national conservatism and the MAGA movement in 2025, and definitions vary. It often refers to Americans whose family histories go back to the Civil War period, while others define it as descent from those present before the American Revolution. Supporters describe it as a celebration of the nation’s heritage and culture. Critics say it has been used to make white nationalism sound neutral.

TIP’s position is to judge the term by its own standard. If being a Heritage American means having deep roots on this soil, then the descendants of the enslaved qualify as fully as anyone. Enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, a year before the Mayflower. Their descendants cleared the land, built the Capitol, fought in every American war, and paid for this country’s freedom with more generations of labor than almost any other family line. Yet even among people who use the term, whether the descendants of the enslaved count is openly debated.

Measured by that definition, the men in the Sugar Land cemetery were Heritage Americans. The people arrested under vagrancy laws and leased to the Alabama mines were Heritage Americans. So the question for anyone who uses the term is whether they will defend the freedom of the people who have the longest American heritage of all. Heritage includes the whole record: the Revolution and the slave ship, the Constitution and its exception. Taking pride in the country’s history means finishing the parts of it that were left undone.

A word to constitutionalists

Removing the exception is a constitutionalist position, for four reasons.

Article V is the Constitution’s own method of correction. The 13th Amendment corrected the original document’s accommodation of slavery. Finishing that correction through Article V follows the process the founders designed.

The exception comes from the founding era. Its wording follows the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery in the territories “otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” The founders began that work, the generation of 1865 continued it, and it has still not been completed.

Limited government. Forcing a person to labor is the most extreme power a government can hold over a human being. People who distrust government power over speech, property, and firearms should be even more wary of government power to require unpaid work from its own citizens.

Conservative states have already acted. As of the 2024 elections, voters had approved removal measures in Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont, and in 2024 Nevada’s measure passed with 60% voter approval. Several of those states are among the most conservative in the country. This is an issue for all Americans.

The other side of the argument

TIP believes supporters should hear the strongest objections to this amendment, not a weakened version of them. Here they are, with our answers.

“Prison work is rehabilitation, not slavery.”

Many corrections officials and conservatives argue that work gives incarcerated people structure, discipline, job skills, and something to do other than sit idle. They see it as part of paying a debt to society and preparing for life after release.

Our answer: We agree that work can be rehabilitative, which is why the amendment protects it. What we oppose is forced work. Work that someone chooses, is paid for, and can learn from is rehabilitation. Work performed under threat of solitary confinement for no pay is not, whatever it is called.

“Prisons can’t run without it, and taxpayers will pay more.”

Critics warn that if incarcerated workers can refuse cooking, cleaning, and maintenance jobs, prisons will have to hire outside staff or raise wages, and taxpayers will cover the cost. That concern is legitimate. California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst found the fiscal effects uncertain. If prisons encourage work by raising pay, costs go up. If they offer time credits toward release instead, costs go down because people serve less time.

Our answer: A system that depends on unpaid forced labor is underfunded, and that is not a reason to keep the labor forced. The analyst’s finding also shows a path that saves money: reward work with earned time off a sentence. That shortens sentences, reduces the prison population, and lowers the cost to taxpayers.

“Mass incarceration isn’t really driven by prison labor profits.”

This objection is serious and supported by evidence. Most prison work is facility maintenance, and only about 3% of incarcerated workers are employed by private companies. Many researchers conclude that the size of the prison population depends mainly on sentencing laws, drug policy, and crime rates, not on the value of prison labor.

Our answer: We accept that point. TIP does not claim the exception clause alone created mass incarceration. Our claim is narrower: the clause leaves more than a million Americans without constitutional protection against forced labor. Removing it will not end mass incarceration by itself. Sentencing reform has to accompany it. But a country cannot credibly work to end mass incarceration while its Constitution still allows the people it imprisons to be enslaved.

“Removing it is only symbolic.”

Some argue that deleting the clause changes nothing in practice. Where states have removed it, the results are still unsettled. In Colorado, the first state to remove its exception, incarcerated people sued the corrections department in 2022, and courts are still deciding what the change requires.

Our answer: The lawsuits show the change has legal force. A purely symbolic change would not produce litigation. And if the removal were only symbolic, there would be little reason to keep a clause permitting slavery in the nation’s founding document. The symbolism also matters, because it is what every American learns about the 13th Amendment in school.

“Voters don’t want it. California said no.”

In 2024, California voters rejected Proposition 6, which would have ended forced labor in prisons and jails, even with support from party leaders, labor unions, and dozens of advocacy groups.

Our answer: The problem was the ballot wording. California’s ballot never used the word “slavery.” It said “involuntary servitude,” a phrase many voters did not recognize. On the same day, Nevada’s measure passed with 60% voter approval, and its ballot language referred to slavery directly. When voters understand the question, they have voted to remove the exception. TIP will always use the plain word.

“Heritage American isn’t about race.”

Many who use the term say they mean civic and cultural continuity: families who have shared in the American story across generations. They say it describes rootedness, not skin color, and they reject the critics’ characterization.

Our answer: We take that definition at face value and apply it. By that standard, the descendants of people enslaved in America, whose families go back to 1619, are among the most rooted Americans in the country. If the term means what its supporters say, those supporters should be among the strongest advocates for this amendment.

Why we’re showing you this

TIP is built on the belief that supporters can weigh evidence for themselves. An argument that only holds up when the opposing side is left out is a weak argument. The case for removing the exception holds up against these objections, so we have presented both sides.

Where TIP stands

TIP Political Party supports a constitutional amendment that states plainly: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime.” This is the language of the Abolition Amendment, which has been introduced in Congress repeatedly. We also support state measures to remove the exception from every state constitution.

TIP also supports abolishing the federal death penalty by act of Congress, and repealing the death penalty in every state that still has it.

The amendment does not prevent incarcerated people from working. Voluntary work, paid work, job training, and education programs all remain available. It ends only the government’s power to force labor as a punishment.

The Americans arrested under vagrancy laws, the leased convicts, and the Sugar Land 95 cannot see the amendment finished. Their descendants can.

Every era of this history teaches the same lesson. When the machine lost one source of bodies, it found another: freed people became convicts, leased convicts became prison farm laborers, and today’s investors ask for more detainees. The machine will always need bodies until we stop feeding it.

The AI and Crypto generation will end mass incarceration. Not reform it. End it. Removing the exception is the first step.

No slavery. No exceptions.

A note to future readers

TIP writes its positions as a blueprint, meant to be used long after the people who wrote them. This tab contains two kinds of material, and they should be treated differently.

The principles are fixed. No person should be enslaved or held in involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. The government should not execute its own citizens. Holding people in custody should never be a source of profit. Supporters deserve to hear the strongest case against our positions, along with our answers. These commitments do not expire.

The figures should be updated. Every number in this tab was current as of September 2026. Prison populations, wages, death row counts, exonerations, detention totals, and the list of states that have acted will all change. When they do, update the figures from the same kinds of sources used here: courts, government records, museums, universities, and established research organizations. Keep each figure tied to its date and its source, keep the other side’s arguments in the tab, and let the record speak.

Measure progress against the principles. If the exception clause is gone, the federal death penalty is abolished, and no one profits from holding people in custody, and no parent has to give The Talk, this tab has done its work. Until then, keep it current and keep going.

Sources

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Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Alabama revenue figures as summarized in the H-Net/EH.Net review. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3523

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