The questions we hear. The answers we give.
Short answers, in the status frame. The authorities for each are on the Twelve Statements and Resources pages.
No. A court may sentence a person and the State may confine that person. The locked door is not the question. Slavery begins when the custodian uses the person, manages that use, takes what the person produces, or profits from it. That is what the definition measures, and that is what the audits score.
The Thirteenth Amendment bans slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In a state whose constitution says nothing, that exception governs. Eight states have removed it from their own constitutions since 2018. Most have not.
It has a definition the United States ratified in 1929: "the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." The powers are possession, use, management, profit, transfer, and disposal. No state gets to say the word is vague.
Because "forced labor" is the weaker frame in court and on the ballot. Undefined "involuntary servitude" is read narrowly by the courts, and the international definition of forced labour carries its own exception for prison work. On the ballot, California's Proposition 6 lost in 2024 under a forced-labor title. A voter who hears "work" thinks: if I have to work, they have to work. Nobody says that about being owned.
A statute can be repealed in the next budget. It sits below the constitution that contains the exception and ranks equal to the statutes that command prison labor. Only an amendment reaches the clause.
No. Colorado removed it in 2018, lost its first suit in 2022, lost a money claim on immunity in 2024, and won one order in 2026 with no damages. Alabama got sovereign immunity pleaded against its own amendment. A removal is the beginning of enforcement. The network designs the enforcement before the vote: definitions in the text, a remedy, and the immunity waiver in the constitution.
Wages are a separate fight in a separate bill. A wage in the amendment makes payment the measure of the wrong. And pay is not a defense: compensation, in any amount, does not make labor voluntary.
The Constitutional Abolition Enforcement Standards, the network's measurement system. It audits a jurisdiction's own statutes and regulations against the ratified definition and reports separate findings on a 0 to 3 scale. A score of 1 in any domain triggers grassroots organizing. A score of 2 or above triggers a litigation referral. The instruments.
No. CAES is not a court and its scores are not holdings. No finding invalidates any conviction, plea, or sentence, and CAES does not decide whether any person has a claim.
Their author, Dennis Febo, personally. They are licensed to the network. No entity holds title.
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