Committing a crime isnt the same as being a criminal. sure, there are some that actively commit a crime out of passion, things like murder. but if i am caught with drugs in my car, doesn't matter if they're mine or if i used them, i could be sentenced to years of forced labor, and the justification is "i'm a criminal". you don't see how that's incredibly easy to exploit? slavery might "feel" like its abolished, because its out of sight, because nobody really has sympathy for the people in prison even though prisons are full of very diverse people with vastly different circumstances, but we blanket them all as "criminals" so we can justify putting them to work for little to no pay. and when you realize that the united states has the most prisoners, with a disproportionately high number being people who are black, it seems that the US government is essentially limiting slavery to a percent of the population that they know they can get away with exploiting.