The fundamental reason for this is that the 13th amendment provided a convenient escape hatch to allow the continuation of slavery: just charge people with crim

The fundamental reason for this is that the 13th amendment provided a convenient escape hatch to allow the continuation of slavery: just charge people with crimes - constitutionality of the law is not relevant, nor is the problem of finding someone guilty. Just send people to prison and suddenly you get free labor. Here's the solution: require that _all_ revenue from prison labor go to the relevant state or federal government. The money received for labour by a given slave can only be passed on to the victim of a crime, capped to the financial loss caused by the crime in the case of financial crimes. For non-financial crimes with actual victims, all income from the slave for the entire period of incarceration must be provided to the victims. After that disbursement, the state or federal government (as appropriate) can take no more of the money than they are charged for housing the slave. every cent left over after that point must be put aside for when the slave is released, at which point they are provided their net earnings. Similarly prisons do not get to charge any kind of premium or markup on goods in their "stores", they also aren't allowed to charge for basic necessities or hygiene. There are a few other requirements of course: any person incarcerated during trial ("bail") and subsequently release without jail time shall be compensated for the entire period of their incarceration at the rate of, say, the higher compensation of the prosecutor, judge, chief of police, or governor/president (as appropriate), multiplied by two in addition to any losses such incarceration has caused - again multiplied by two. If the person is found not guilty then rather than scaling by two, it should be scaled by four. If there were any illegal or unconstitutional acts by any agent of the government, then when can multiply that again by two - without preventing or impacting their right to file suit against the relevant agencies and individuals. To me the first part of this is required to stop criminalizing people as being a trivial path to profit through "legal" slavery. The latter is more generally needed in the US at least due to the abusive, unconstitutional, and generally illegal behavior of law enforcement. I'd say those fines should come out of the bonus, promotion, and pension funds of the relevant law enforcement agencies. Let's see how long police officers ignore illegal behaviour from the "bad apples" when the resultant lawsuits come out of the "good apple"'s wallets.