Washington Water Jet Workers Ass'n v. Yarbrough

Washington Constitution article II, section 29 provides:

After the first day of January eighteen hundred and ninety the labor of convicts of this state shall not be let out by contract to any person, copartnership, company or corporation, and the legislature shall by law provide for the working of convicts for the benefit of the state.

We must determine whether this language prohibits all private employment of prisoners or whether it prohibits only the now-unused eighteenth and nineteenth century “contract system of labor.” Under the contract system, the State leased the involuntary labor of…