You can be jailed for not paying your fines. They will at minimum pay interest and payments towards principal for life and could at maximum be incarcerated and enslaved in fact whilest incurring additional fines.
I see what you're saying, all I'm saying is that a society with debtors prisons and issues with their penal system is bad - very bad - but doesn't constitute the conditions or nearly in much in common with slavery as you're making it out. Invoking "slavery" like this and making it seem like you mean this "literally" always seems ineffective and inflammatory to me.
When they ended slavery they explicitly carved out an exemption for prisoners who could still legally be enslaved. These prisoners are by and large majority minority and are often used by the state to enrich themselves. EG its a huge cost to the country but a given county where a prison is situated gets a lot of the money so spent, prison guard unions earn money from their members, everyone working in the industry makes money, companies are able to make money from cheap labor, in some cases private prison companies are directly enriched.
In response to this said parties lobby heavily for more enslavement. This is often accomplished by over policing minorities especially for drug related offenses, turning the penal system deliberately into slide into interested parties pockets instead of a ladder up, setting policy with an eye to increasing costs as opposed to benefiting society.
In at least a few cases judges were literally caught selling children into slavery. In exchange for kickbacks from a private prison company they were sentencing offenders to maximum sentences.
The bad thing is that were someone unjustly enslaved merely for the color of their skin we should all rush to break their chains. Someone enslaved by a system which shook them down in hopes of finding drugs and then ruined their lives there is no sympathy because they are the villain. America never ended slavery they just found a way to justify it.
I can understand all of that, empathize with it, and still believe it's a massive stress to claim it's "[literally] slavery" when its more related or connected to the history of slavery.
The amendment that ended slavery was careful to carve out an exemption for enslaving prisoners. We have and private and public prisons who rent prisoners to private businesses wherein the companies pay nothing or a token amount to the prisoners themselves and the lions share of the remunerations to the prisoners owners. We still have slavery as it would have been understood to exist for thousands of years.
Would you agree that one difference between modern penal mandatory labor (modern slavery as you would say) is that for most prisoners, their bondage ends at the end of their prison sentence? And that they are not legally owned as property like in chattel slavery?
Historically there have been many definitions. Being sublet without your own permission and worked for your owners benefit would be recognized as slavery the world over for thousands of years. Even the drafters of the 14th agreed.
