In slavery, you don't have a choice. If you break the law, get caught and convicted, you're not "enslaved" - you're incarcerated. Nobody wants you there (except perhaps the victims of your crime) and there is no advantage to the state/nation for keeping you there. Not slavery. And to equate the two is insulting to true slaves who are victims and NOT perpetrators of crime.
You're assuming all laws are just. I don't agree that violating laws of segregation makes one an immoral person, or a 'true' criminal, their 'crime' has no victims.
But I believed the Thread is discussing the Slavery that I described... so all other forms pf slavery are redundant in this specific case even if applicable in some forms. If the worst is the norm and practiced well into the twentieth century...
I think we're veering from the main course of the discussion.
I think it's relevant.
Without a Civil War, how long does slavery continue?
If we're just talking about the peculiar slavery of the Antebellum South, what I would call chattel slavery, there is one answer. If we're talking about all the ways free (un-free) labour can be extracted from people, all the ways it has historically been extracted from black Americans, all the ways it may be extracted from them in ATL, it has a different, more complicated answer.
There's a curious trend to describe all unfree workers as slaves these days, I suspect because the emotional baggage of the word makes campaigning against it easier. The key feature of slavery is that the unfree worker is legally considered property. Debt bondage, indenture, penal labour, corvée labour and military conscription are all unfree labour and objectionable to a greater or lesser extent, but in none of these cases is an individual considered to be owned by another person.
The property definition is not sufficient. If one is forced to work and can't legally or physically leave, that's enough for me to call one a slave, it would be enough to consider myself a slave. Slavery where you are transferable property is one kind of slavery.
What happens in your examples of un-free labour when the labourer walks away to do something else with their life? Does the law return them to their 'owners', as though they were missing property, or does the law ignore them?