Yes, but for fixed periods of (for example) six months or 1 or 2 years rather than for life. This section of the 13th Amendment, ratified on the 6th of December, 1865, was controversial from the outset. Slavery Under the Thirteenth Amendment: Race and the Law of Crime and Punishment in the PostCivil
War South by Peter Wallenstein in the Louisiana Law Review (vol 77, No. 1) has this example from Maryland of the punishment of slavery being imposed:
On December 8, 1866, in Annapolis, Maryland, a crowd gathered at the
county courthouse for an auction. A recent advertisement in the
Annapolis Gazette had called the public’s attention to the upcoming
event with the language “Public Sale . . . a Negro man named Richard
Harris, for six months, convicted at the October term, 1866 of the
Anne Arundel County Circuit Court for larceny and sentenced by the
court to be sold as a slave. Terms of sale—cash.”
Public domain, from unpublished congressional digest. Source: The inseparability of capitalism, racism, and imprisonment: an interview with Dennis Childs
Other examples mentioned (all black, unsurprisingly):
Continuing after ratification, a series of announcements later that
month called for sales of other people, among them “a negro man named
John Johnson . . . sentenced to be sold” for one year; “a negro man .
. . named Gassaway Price . . . to be sold for a term of one year”; “a
negro woman . . . named Harriet Purdy . . . to be sold for a term of
one year”; and “a negro woman . . . named Dilly Harris . . . to be
sold for a term of two years.” The charge originally brought against
each of these five people— called “larceny” in the advertisement
although it was actually “petit larceny”—specified the theft of a hog,
for example, or of a bushel and a half of wheat. For the services of
Harriet Purdy for a year, for her alleged theft of a pair of boots, a
white man named Elijah Rockhold paid $34
The sentence was not for life but rather for a number of years.
Whether before or after the “end” of slavery, these “slaves” were not
to be held in perpetuity, but for a period of years. Even after all
black Marylanders had moved into the category of free people, the
statute lost none of its ferocity, nor did it shed its racial
specificity. These circumstances could exist because the Thirteenth
Amendment expressly allowed state actions such as those taken by
Maryland authorities.
Abuses appear to have been widespread, with Republicans at the time protesting that, although the letter of law was clear, the spirit of the law abolishing slavery was being "avoided and got around by these cunning rebels."
In 1866, many Republicans complained that former Confederates were
abusing the crime exception to impose slavery even for minor
crimes....Representative Henry Deming complained, “[U]nder the
exceptional clause (‘except as a punishment for crime’) reconstructed
North Carolina is now selling black men into slavery for petty larceny
. . . .”
