Peonage

Peonage is a form of wage labor or coerced economic arrangement in which a worker, the peon, has little or no control over the terms of employment and is compelled to work off a debt or obligation with little practical ability to leave. In the United States the practice was expressly outlawed by the Peonage Act of 1867, passed by Congress in response to forced labor systems then operating in the New Mexico Territory, declaring peonage abolished and forever prohibited and voiding any law used to enforce it; the prohibition is now codified at 42 U.S.C. section 1994. The Thirteenth Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, reinforces the prohibition, and federal law makes it a crime, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, to use state law to subject a person to peonage.