The badges and incidents of slavery.
The Thirteenth Amendment does two things. Section 1 abolishes the status. Section 2 gives Congress the power to reach what the status leaves behind: the disabilities that outlive the institution and reproduce it. The courts named those "badges and incidents of slavery" in 1883 and confirmed the power in 1968. Nobody has ever catalogued them. The network measures them.
Congress has the power under the Thirteenth Amendment "rationally to determine what are the badges and the incidents of slavery, and the authority to translate that determination into effective legislation."
Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 440 (1968). The phrase itself: Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 20 (1883).
Not the shackle. The disability that outlives it.
Slavery is a status: the exercise of the powers of ownership over a person. A badge is what a jurisdiction builds and maintains around that status, and keeps after the status is formally gone. The Court's first examples were the plainest: restraints on owning property and on making contracts. The scholarship since has traced the rest: exclusion from housing and credit, disenfranchisement, courtroom degradation, the conversion of children into the adult status, and the income and wealth gaps that carry it all forward a generation.
The doctrine is real and it is thin. The power belongs to Congress, the review is deferential, and no court has ever needed to write the catalog, because under Jones the determination is Congress's to make. That is the gap the network's instrument fills. The Badges and Incidents Audit Instrument, the BIAI, scores what a Section 2 determination would encompass, on the standard Jones set, and says so on its face before anyone can call it something more.
The prison instrument measures the ownership powers exercised on one held body. The badges instrument measures the structure a jurisdiction built around that body and its population. Each proves what the other requires. Their numbers are reported side by side and never added, because a person and a population are different objects. The powers, and the indicia a court reads them by.
The gate asks one question: is this condition a badge of the ownership-powers status? That question is race-neutral. Race enters afterward, as evidence, and only as the State's own count of itself. Where a jurisdiction reports its own racial disparities, those populate the scores as its admission, never as the measure. The theory is colorblind. The State's guilt is in the color it chose to count.
Two questions before anything scores.
A badge everywhere is a badge nowhere. So every candidate condition passes a gate first, drawn from the Thirteenth Amendment scholarship and rebuilt on the status rather than on race.
Was this population subjected to the exercise of the powers of ownership? In a former slave state the link is direct. In a free state it runs to the national status the United States governed, whose residue the state reproduces.
Does this injury connect to that status? The two questions trade on a sliding scale: the weaker the class link, the stronger the injury's tie to the status must be, and the reverse.
A condition that fails the gate scores zero however severe it is on its own terms. The zeros are the instrument's armor. A real, disparate harm with no tie to the status is a wrong of another kind, measured by another instrument.
What is scored, and what it weighs.
Each domain is read twice, 0 to 3: once for the severity and durability of the condition, once for the State's own hand in maintaining it through law, policy, and money. The condition carries most of the weight, because the condition is the object. The State's hand decides the band at the margin. Composites read against the shared bands: a partial violation from 1.0, a structural violation from 1.75.
Exposure to coercive systems
The most direct connection to compulsory service and restricted movement: arrest, incarceration, and supervision rates, the pipeline into the prison instrument's powers.
Property, housing, and contract exclusion
The first badges the courts named: who may own, rent, borrow, and contract, and the state mechanisms, from covenants to lending, that still decide it.
Civic and legal disability
Disenfranchisement, jury exclusion, and the political subordination that follows conviction or precedes it.
Courtroom status degradation and procedural silence
Shackling, sentencing disparity, and the silence at plea about what conviction suspends.
Juvenile status conversion and adult transfer
Children moved into the adult status by transfer and extended jurisdiction, and who those children are.
Collateral and generational reproduction of caste
Income, wealth, and health gaps that carry the status forward a generation. Confirmatory: it scores only what the other five have already shown.
Weights sum to 7.50. Every published number uses one formula. Where a State's own data are not yet in, the row is held conservative and says so.
A free state scores as high as a slave state.
New Jersey scores 2.37, a structural violation, on the State's own record, with its 12.5 to 1 incarceration disparity entered as its admission. Minnesota, which never governed slavery, scores 2.37 as well, on the widest arrest and incarceration gaps in the country, the largest Black homeownership gap of any comparable metro, and extended juvenile jurisdiction sentences that run nine Black children to no white ones. That is not a paradox. It is what the instrument predicts when a state maintains the residue of a status it never had to write into its own code.
Tier one is what courts have held: property, contract, and the core rights the early cases named. Tier two is what Congress could rationally determine: everything the record and the scholarship show beyond that core. Every category carries its tier, so no one can say "that was never held to be a badge" about a category that already says so.
The instrument's findings are audit classifications, not holdings. It is a legislative-predicate instrument: it shows what a Section 2 determination would encompass, in the form a legislature or a court could pick up. Jones v. Mayer (PDF). The Civil Rights Cases (PDF).