Twelve statements for the movement.
From the New Jersey drafting record: six adversarial debates, two mock court rounds, and the research behind them. What this fight is. What it is not. What we have to do. Each statement is followed by the authority for it. The full documents are on the Resources page.
Slavery is a status, not a labor condition. A removal is not enforcement. Wages are a separate bill. The remedy and the waiver go in the constitution. Make the judge answer.
Abolish Slavery National Network, September 2026. Working document for the network.
What this fight is
Removing the exception is not enough.
A bare sentence abolishes nothing a court can enforce. Colorado struck its exception in 2018. The first suit lost in 2022: the court held that lost privileges and low pay are not coercion and that "the voters did not intend to abolish the DOC inmate work program." A suit for money was thrown out on governmental immunity in 2024. It took until February 2026 to win one order, with no damages. Alabama struck its exception in 2022; its first case was met with sovereign immunity at trial and lost on appeal because the penalties alleged were held not to be involuntary servitude.
Lamar v. CDOC (Colo. App. 2022); Fletcher v. Polis (Colo. App. 2024); Mortis v. Polis (Denver Dist. Ct. 2026); Stanley v. Ivey (Ala. Civ. App. Dec. 19, 2025).
Slavery is a legal status, and it has a definition the United States already accepted.
"The status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised." Ratified by the United States in 1929; reaffirmed in 1956. The Guidelines explain the powers: possession, use, management, profit, transfer, disposal. No state gets to say the word is vague. And no court in any removal state has yet been made to say what "slavery" means. Even Mortis, the biggest win in the field, was decided as involuntary servitude.
1926 Slavery Convention, art. 1(1); 1956 Supplementary Convention, art. 7(a); Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines (2012).
The locked door is not the question. What the State does with the person behind it is.
We are not calling incarceration slavery. A court may sentence a person and the State may confine that person. Slavery begins when the custodian uses the person, manages that use, takes what the person produces, or profits from it. The leading federal case says it in the State's favor and proves our point: a prisoner doing required work "is actually engaged in involuntary servitude, not employment," and the State's control comes "from incarceration itself."
Vanskike v. Peters, 974 F.2d 806 (7th Cir. 1992).
What this fight is not
Wages are a separate fight, in a separate bill.
What keeps wage law out of prisons is statutes, not the exception. In California, people who had never been convicted worked without pay in a county jail, sued for minimum wage, and lost unanimously because a statute capping pay was still on the books. In New Jersey the State is not even an "employer" of its own corrections officers under the wage law, and the Commissioner sets prison pay by statute. A wage in the text makes payment the measure of the wrong: pay the rate and the wrong is cured. The law already shows the right design: trafficking statutes define the crime by coercion and mention wages only in the damages section.
Ruelas v. County of Alameda (Cal. 2024); Allen v. Fauver, 167 N.J. 69 (2001); N.J.S.A. 30:4-92; N.J.S.A. 2C:13-8.1(c); 18 U.S.C. 1593.
Pay is not a defense.
"We pay them" is every State's first answer. A federal appeals court approved this instruction in a forced labor case where the workers were paid above minimum wage: labor obtained by prohibited means "is forced, even if he is paid or compensated for the work." Our text says it: compensation, in any amount, does not make labor voluntary.
United States v. Bradley, 390 F.3d 145 (1st Cir. 2004).
"Forced labor" is the wrong frame, in court and on the ballot.
In court, undefined "involuntary servitude" is read through Kozminski, which excludes economic and psychological pressure, and the international definition of "forced labour" carries its own exception for work after a conviction. Banning three undefined words protects less than defining one. On the ballot, California's Proposition 6 lost 46.7 to 53.3 in 2024, and the State's own certified results shortened its title to "Eliminates Forcing Inmates to Work." A voter who hears that question compares the confined person to himself: if I have to work, they have to work. Nobody says that about being owned.
United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931 (1988); ILO Convention No. 29, art. 2(2)(c); California Proposition 6 (2024), certified results.
Never write "legitimate penological purpose" into a bill.
We did, and took it out. It is the courts' own test for deferring to prison officials, New Jersey has adopted it, and punishment itself counts as a penological purpose. A sentence meant to restrain the State would have served it.
Turner v. Safley (U.S. 1987); In re Rules Adoption Regarding Inmate Mail (N.J. 1990); Graham v. Florida (U.S. 2010).
A statute is not an amendment.
A statute can be repealed in the next budget, sits below the constitution that contains the exception, and ranks equal to the statutes that command prison labor. Ruelas is what happens when statutes collide. In New York, damages against the State for a rights violation attach to the Constitution, not to statutes, and even that remedy is lost when any other remedy exists.
Ruelas v. County of Alameda (Cal. 2024); Brown v. State of New York (N.Y. 1996); Martinez v. City of Schenectady (N.Y. 2001).
What we have to do
Put the remedy and the immunity waiver in the constitution.
Alabama pleaded immunity against its own amendment. Colorado dismissed the money claim on immunity. New Jersey's courts hold the State cannot be sued for damages under its own Civil Rights Act, and consent to suit requires "clear and unambiguous legislative expression." Where immunity is a statute, a constitutional clause overrides it. Louisiana waives immunity in its constitution. New York waived it in 1929. A State that does not practice slavery has nothing to fear from the clause.
Brown v. State (N.J. App. Div. 2015); Allen v. Fauver (N.J. 2001); Willis v. Department of Conservation (N.J. 1970); La. Const. art. XII, section 10.
Make the judge answer.
Courts decide the narrowest question that ends the case, and New Jersey law lets a court refuse a declaration it thinks unnecessary. Under an earlier text, every reader we asked could write the two paragraphs in which a judge grants relief for forced labor and declines to say whether it was slavery. The cure: the status must be its own injury with its own remedy, a judgment declaring it and compensatory damages for it.
Randolph Town Center v. County of Morris (N.J. 2006); N.J.S.A. 2A:16-61.
If the amendment depends on it, it goes in the text.
Courts look outside the text only when the text is ambiguous, and then only to official materials, never to a coalition's explainer. The ballot statement is part of this. A court will throw out a statement that does not tell voters what the amendment does and write its own. We write it, in our frame, or a judge writes it in theirs.
Cambria v. Soaries (N.J. 2001); Kimmelman v. Burgio (N.J. App. Div. 1985); N.J.S.A. 19:3-6.
Every state has the same four statutes. Find yours.
The rule that punishes refusing to work. The law that pays for labor in liberty. The law that lets the custodian set the pay. The immunity law. These are the record of how the ownership powers are exercised, and they are what the amendment has to reach. In New Jersey: prohibited act .254, up to 120 days in restrictive housing and 180 days of lost time; one day off a sentence for every five days worked. When freedom is the wage, refusing is not free.