The Progressive Enslaver: A History of Repackaged Justifications for Forced Carceral Labor

In November 2024, California voters rejected Proposition 6, effectively choosing to maintain forced prison labor. This paradox frames my research question: How did coerced extraction become so entrenched in a progressive state that its elimination became practically unthinkable? I argue that California's carceral economy is the culmination of a century-long rhetorical project. By weaponizing the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause, the state executed a unique "merger" of penal traditions, adopting the moral, rehabilitative logic of the Northern penitentiary to camouflage the extractive reality of the South. Tracing state archival rhetoric from nineteenth-century "factories of obedience" through Progressive Era highway camps to the modern Prison Industry Authority, this research exposes how California bureaucratized coercion under rotating narratives of reform, consistently prioritizing fiscal survival and proving the state's prison system remains a site of unrecognized slavery.