As written in Politico, there is an exception to the 13th Amendment’s abolition of slavery: involuntary servitude can still be used as punishment for crime, creating the foundation for our modern prison labor system (Schultheis 2024). In California, Proposition 6, which sought to end forced labor as punishment, failed by a narrow 5% margin. This raises critical questions: What went wrong, and where do we go from here? This essay will illuminate systemic injustices within prisons, highlighting how they profit from forced labor. I will use the framework of disaster studies to understand how marginalized and oppressed populations experience exacerbated […]