Legal Framework
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which ended slavery, specifically perpetuated the concept of penal servitude — i.e., unfree labor as a punishment for a crime.
Britain had a long history of penal servitude even prior to the passage of the Penal Servitude Act of 1853, and routinely used convict labor to settle its conquests, either through penal colonies or by selling convicts to settlers to serve as slaves for a term of years as indentured servants.
Read more about this topic: Prison Farm
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