Recently, while watching the news in Korea, I came across the term "confinement sentence."

Having lived in the U.S. for a long time, I momentarily thought, "Confinement? Are they putting a safe inside the prison?"

This isn't a dad joke; I genuinely got confused for a second.

So, I looked it up. What is confinement, and why doesn't the U.S. have such a category?

It turns out this isn't just a simple difference in legal terminology; it's a matter of differing constitutional structures.

Korean criminal law divides imprisonment into three categories: imprisonment, confinement, and detention. These three are all different.

Imprisonment is what we commonly understand. You go to prison, and labor is mandatory. If you don't, there are penalties.
Confinement means you go to prison but are not required to work. You can choose to work voluntarily, but it's not compulsory.
Detention is short-term confinement of up to 30 days. You can think of it as a minor offense.

In other words, a confinement sentence is a punishment that says, "You are confined, but you won't be made to work." The duration can be either fixed confinement (1 month to 30 years) or indefinite confinement, but it is said that actual cases of indefinite confinement are rare.

So, who receives a confinement sentence? Generally, it applies to negligent crimes like vehicular manslaughter, low-violence economic crimes, and in the past, certain political or conscientious objector cases. From a judge's perspective, it is a category used when they determine that "isolation from society is necessary, but it's not appropriate to make them work like regular criminals."

For reference, if they want, they can voluntarily be assigned to a work detail. If they accumulate enough work points, their sentence can be reduced, so confinement inmates who want to get out "a little faster" often volunteer to work.

In the U.S., there is no such category.

Looking into the U.S. criminal law system, there is no system that fits the definition of 'confinement.'

The U.S. simply lumps it all together as "incarceration," leaving the specific conditions to the regulations of correctional institutions. A judge just says, "X months of incarceration," and that's it. Whether or not to require labor is not specified in the judgment but is determined by the Bureau of Prisons.

Why is this the case? This is where the 13th Amendment (1865) comes into play.

To summarize this constitutional provision: "Slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited. However, there is an exception for punishment for crimes." This clause was created after the Civil War when slavery was abolished, and this single exception has determined the DNA of the U.S. prison system.

Thanks to — or because of — this clause, prisoner labor is legally permitted in the U.S. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and many state correctional departments require inmates to work a certain number of hours. What happens if they refuse? They may be assigned to punitive housing, face disadvantages in parole, or lose points that could reduce their sentence. There are real consequences.

So, in the U.S., going to prison means labor is the default setting.

What kind of work do inmates do in U.S. prisons? The range is broader than you might think. Basic tasks include food service, laundry, and facility maintenance, and in states like California, inmates are deployed for wildfire fighting. There are also tasks like highway cleanup and public facility management.

What is more controversial is subcontracting to private companies. In some U.S. prisons, inmates work on production lines for companies, receiving only a fraction of the market wage. This has led to criticism that it is a form of modern forced labor exploiting the exception clause of the 13th Amendment. This criticism is not unfounded.

Recently, six states, including Colorado, Alabama, and Oregon, have removed the 'exception for punishment' clause from their state constitutions. However, many point out that while the wording has been removed, the actual correctional rules have not changed much. The system does not change that easily.

Returning to Korea, the existence of the confinement category means that lawmakers have viewed "requiring labor as an element of punishment" from the beginning. Thus, they created a separate category for non-labor confinement.

The U.S. does not have that distinction. Labor is simply part of the incarceration experience, and it is controlled by correctional institutions rather than the courts. The fundamental design of the system is different.

It is difficult to definitively say which is better.

However, it is hard to deny that the exception clause of the 13th Amendment continues to cast a significant shadow over American society.

While some view the Korean criminal law's confinement category as outdated, at least it provides transparency in that it explicitly treats labor as part of the punishment. I think there is a clearer aspect to it compared to the structure in the U.S., where it is not mentioned in the judgment but is effectively enforced by correctional regulations.