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The Ever-Turning Wheel of Servitude: Community Supervision and the Next Iteration of Carceral Economic Exploitation

The Ever-Turning Wheel of Servitude: Community Supervision and the Next Iteration of Carceral Economic Exploitation

Christina Bartzokis

Volume 173 Issue 5
Comment Criminal Law;

In 2022, more than twice as many Americans were under the control of probation and parole than were serving time behind bars.1 Those 3,668,000 people2 were under the direct control of the carceral state3 and constituted a huge swath of the population as a whole, as one in seventy-one Americans was on probation or parole in 2022.4 Together, probation and parole make up a system of community supervision which has attracted less scrutiny than its role merits.5 As a result, the exploitative realities and potentials of probation and parole have not yet been fully considered.

The connection between the criminal legal system and racial oppression in America has been amply and ably traced by a number of scholars. Robust scholarship has traced the development of legal systems enforcing racial caste from slavery and slave patrols, to Jim Crow and vagrancy laws, to the War on Drugs and mass incarceration.6 An intertwined thread of scholarship explores the economic motivations underlying the development and perpetuation those systems. As attorney and professor Dr. Elizabeth Jones writes, “[t]he criminal justice system, in its initiation on American soil and operating into the present, is predicated on an ideological framework that normalizes the incentivization of exploiting black bodies.”7 The trajectory of racism’s economic expression flows from the same starting point—slavery—through specific forms of what I will refer to as “carceral economic exploitation”: convict leasing, debt peonage, chain gangs, and modern prison labor.

This body of scholarship posits that systemic racism, in its carceral and corollary economic forms, has adapted to survive attempts at reform. Professor Reva Siegel has called this adaption “preservation-through-transformation,”8 an idea that Jones summarizes: “as hierarchical status relations are challenged and contested, legal frameworks change to limit the scope of subjugation while simultaneously maintaining the same hierarchical relationship.”9 The continuity of racial oppression has been so thoroughly explored that it has crossed over from scholarship to pop culture. In the Netflix documentary 13th, for example, Angela Davis observes that “[h]istorically, when one looks at efforts to create reforms, they inevitably lead to more repression.”10 A shared understanding of the durability of racism and exploitation has led both scholars11 and pundits12 to warn that as opposition to mass incarceration and prison labor gathers momentum, those systems will be replaced by new iterations of the same discrimination and exploitation within the carceral state.

I argue in this Comment that community supervision, as it exists today, may emerge as one such iteration of state control and economic coercion of Black Americans. Although the architecture for that development is deeply embedded in the existing structure of supervision, it is by no means certain that it will be harnessed in the way I predict. And community supervision is just one avenue for continued racial oppression. The purpose of this Comment is therefore to prompt creative thought about emergent forms of systemic racism and to suggest ways to foreclose its expression within this particular arena. I begin in Part I by summarizing scholarship on the historical trajectory of carceral economic exploitation and on indications that the hegemony of its most recent expression, mass incarceration and prison labor, may be diminishing. In Part II, I turn to community supervision as a possible successor or supplement to prison-based economic exploitation, focusing on the employment condition and its coercive applications. Finally, in Part III, I will examine existing probation reform efforts, assess their implications for the issue of coerced labor, and propose additional options for intervention that may decrease the vulnerability of people under community supervision to carceral economic exploitation.

  1. Danielle Kaeble, Bureau of Just. Stat., NCJ 308575, Probation and Parole in the United States, 2022 1 (2024) (estimating that 3,668,000 adults were under community supervision at the end of 2022); E. Ann Carson & Rich Kluckow, Bureau of Just. Stat., NCJ 307149, Prisoners in 2022—Statistical Tables 1 (2024) (estimating that 1,230,100 people were in state or federal prison at the end of 2022). ↩︎
  2. Kaeble, supra note 1, at 1. ↩︎
  3. Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics 1-3 (2015) (coining the term “carceral state” to refer to the range of penal punishment encompassing both incarceration and other forms of state control and supervision). ↩︎
  4. Kaeble, supra note 1, at 4. ↩︎
  5. See Michelle S. Phelps, The Paradox of Probation: Community Supervision in the Age of Mass Incarceration, 35 Law & Pol’y 51, 52 (2013) (“As mass incarceration boomed, scholars largely lost interest in probation . . . rarely engaging with it seriously as an important institution.”); Fiona Doherty, Obey All Laws and Be Good: Probation and the Meaning of Recidivism, 104 Geo. L.J. 291, 292 (2016) (“The law of probation has not received attention commensurate with its enormous role in the criminal justice system.”). ↩︎
  6. See generally Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (rev. ed. 2012); Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (2017); David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (1999). ↩︎
  7. Elizabeth Jones, The Profitability of Racism: Discriminatory Design in the Carceral State, 57 U. Louisville L. Rev. 61, 61 (2018). ↩︎
  8. Reva Siegel, Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-Enforcing State Action, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 1111, 1119 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted). ↩︎
  9. Jones, supra note 7, at 76. ↩︎
  10. 13th at 1:19:40-1:19:48 (Netflix 2016). ↩︎
  11. See Carl Takei, From Mass Incarceration to Mass Control, and Back Again: How Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform May Lead to a For-Profit Nightmare, 20 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 125, 153 (2017) (arguing that private probation will displace private prisons as opposition to mass incarceration leads to decarceration). ↩︎
  12. 13th, supra note 10, at 1:22:30-1:22:40 (“We don’t know what the next iteration of this will be, but it will be. It will be. And we will have to be vigilant.”). ↩︎

Articles Editor, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Volume 173; J.D. Candidate, 2025, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; M.S.W. Candidate, 2025, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice. My deepest gratitude to Professor David Rudovsky for his expertise and guidance on this Comment. Thank you to Law Review editors Danielle Moors and Akila Shanmugham for their meticulous work during the editing process. Thank you also to Abigail Kasdin, Charlie Ferguson, Isabel Gendler, Jo Moley, Ethan Karnes, and John Lopez for providing the emotional support and intellectual engagement that allowed this piece to be written and published. The title quote, “ever-turning wheel of servitude,” is from United States v. Reynolds, 235 U.S. 133, 146-47 (1914), in a passage describing the debt peonage system.

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  1. Danielle Kaeble, Bureau of Just. Stat., NCJ 308575, Probation and Parole in the United States, 2022 1 (2024) (estimating that 3,668,000 adults were under community supervision at the end of 2022); E. Ann Carson & Rich Kluckow, Bureau of Just. Stat., NCJ 307149, Prisoners in 2022—Statistical Tables 1 (2024) (estimating that 1,230,100 people were in state or federal prison at the end of 2022). ↩︎
  2. Kaeble, supra note 1, at 1. ↩︎
  3. Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics 1-3 (2015) (coining the term “carceral state” to refer to the range of penal punishment encompassing both incarceration and other forms of state control and supervision). ↩︎
  4. Kaeble, supra note 1, at 4. ↩︎
  5. See Michelle S. Phelps, The Paradox of Probation: Community Supervision in the Age of Mass Incarceration, 35 Law & Pol’y 51, 52 (2013) (“As mass incarceration boomed, scholars largely lost interest in probation . . . rarely engaging with it seriously as an important institution.”); Fiona Doherty, Obey All Laws and Be Good: Probation and the Meaning of Recidivism, 104 Geo. L.J. 291, 292 (2016) (“The law of probation has not received attention commensurate with its enormous role in the criminal justice system.”). ↩︎
  6. See generally Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (rev. ed. 2012); Paul Butler, Chokehold: Policing Black Men (2017); David Cole, No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (1999). ↩︎
  7. Elizabeth Jones, The Profitability of Racism: Discriminatory Design in the Carceral State, 57 U. Louisville L. Rev. 61, 61 (2018). ↩︎
  8. Reva Siegel, Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-Enforcing State Action, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 1111, 1119 (1997) (internal quotation marks omitted). ↩︎
  9. Jones, supra note 7, at 76. ↩︎
  10. 13th at 1:19:40-1:19:48 (Netflix 2016). ↩︎
  11. See Carl Takei, From Mass Incarceration to Mass Control, and Back Again: How Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform May Lead to a For-Profit Nightmare, 20 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 125, 153 (2017) (arguing that private probation will displace private prisons as opposition to mass incarceration leads to decarceration). ↩︎
  12. 13th, supra note 10, at 1:22:30-1:22:40 (“We don’t know what the next iteration of this will be, but it will be. It will be. And we will have to be vigilant.”). ↩︎