Slavery Is Still Legal (For Cops)
The 13th Amendment PROTECTS slavery...
ABOLITIONPOLICEPRISONBLMHISTORY
TDD
7/13/202215 min read
Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight… we’re talking slavery. If you read the title of this video, you know exactly where this is going: slavery is still legal in the United States of America and is part of the landscape of modern US law enforcement. And not in a roundabout abstract way, I mean slavery is protected by the US constitution and enforced statutorily by both Democrat and Republican-controlled state governments.
So I guess what I’m saying is… tonight is going to be a light, fun discussion full of smiles and good vibes. Yeah no seriously, content warning for discussions of slavery, abuse of prisoners, state violence, all that stuff.
Anyway, let’s get to it.
SLAVERY EMERGES
To start, I want to give a very brief overview of slavery in the United States. I won’t be able to do justice to the full complexity and the full horror of the topic, but there’s some context here that’s going to be important later.
The history of enslaved people in the United States goes way, WAY back to at least 1508 when Spanish colonizers invaded what would later become Puerto Rico and used the indigenous Taino people for forced labor on their farms and in their mines. While this wasn’t precisely chattel slavery, the forced labor was so cruel (and European diseases so rampant) that by 1513, just five years later, the Taino population had been badly depleted and the Spanish settlement began importing enslaved people from Africa.
In 1526, the first people kidnapped from Africa arrived in what is now South Carolina. It does bring me pleasure to inform you that this colony collapsed from infighting pretty much immediately, leading to a revolt by the enslaved population and their eventual successful escape. Anybody telling you that “people in the past didn’t know any better” is either extremely ignorant, a disgusting liar, or in the case of everyone involved with the Federalist Society, both!
During the colonial period and after the American Revolution, the entire agricultural economy of the southern states became dependent on forced labor to make money from rice, tobacco, and later cotton crops. These commodity crops were extremely labor-intensive and could only build wealth by exploiting the bodies of enslaved people. This is in contrast to, say, people who settled in the Appalachian region for example; they became subsistence farmers and rarely relied on forced labor. Slavery was not a technology for feeding and clothing individual families, it was primarily a technology for creating generational white wealth.
After Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, a little kerfuffle broke out the next year. Nothing much to say about it, but when the spat was over, the southern states that had relied on enslaved labor were brought to heel and in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, finally getting rid of slavery forever!
SLAVERY EVOLVES
Y’know, let me just take a big drink of southern sweet tea and actually read the text of the 13th Amendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude <> shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
<”except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” flies into the middle of the text>
<spit take>
That’s right folks. Slavery is not abolished in the constitution, it is specifically protected as a legal punishment for a crime. Now you might be saying that’s not a fair characterization because it really did abolish chattel slavery which was the dominant model at the time and the source of so many atrocities, but I would counter that if you’re in favor of a little bit of slavery, you’re pro-slavery, my guy.
This isn’t just me being an intractible left-wing scold: that punishment clause allowed the white supremacy and wealth hoarding motive fueling the original slave trade to simply don a new disguise and continue unabaited.
See, plantation owners had a problem: all that cheap labor they used to “own” no longer belonged to them. What’s a poor southern boy to do? The answer? Black Codes. Modeled after the Slave Codes prior to the war, the Black Codes were a way for white legislatures to control the newly free Black population. It prevented them from owning land, it prevented them from conducting business, and it criminalized a brand new social evil white people had just discovered: vagrancy!
In the post-war south, it was suddenly illegal to be out of work, or to work a job that white people didn’t consider a real job, or to change jobs without your employer’s approval, or to be unhoused. Being arrested and convicted of vagrancy meant that you could legally be sentenced to… forced labor. And holy fucking shit, would you believe it, there were a bunch of plantation owners who would be happy to help the state carry out that sentence by paying a small amount of cash for some helping hands. In 1898, 73% of Alabama’s state revenue came from selling enslaved labor to white “job creators.” When Tennessee ended its convict lease program in 1894 (due to a year long labor action by miners), it simply built the new Brushy Mountain prison on top of a new mining site and forced the Black prisoners to labor in it, reaping massive profits. That mine operated until 1966!
https://aaregistry.org/story/the-american-convict-leasing-program-a-story/
Companies from railroads to logging outfits to factories making turpentine made massive profits using prison labor during the Reconstruction Era. Oh and lest you think this was just those backwards southerners being nasty racists, many of the businesses profiting from forced Black prison labor were subsidieries funneling profits back to Northern entrepreneurs.
By enshrining the right to extract cheap, forced labor from incarcerated people, the 13th Amendment gave a perverse incentive to a white society who believed non-whites were inferior: make it a crime not to be white. In some cases, white legislatures could say the quiet part loud, in other cases, it was more of an unspoken motivation, but the numbers tell the story:
In Tennessee, for example, Black people went from 33% of the prison population in 1865 to 67% in 1877. In 1888 in Baton Rouge, Black people made up 77% of prisoners. In 1875 in North Carolina, it was 88%. (Shelden, 2005) According to researcher C.R. Adamson, at certain times during Reconstruction, approximately 95% of people in criminal custody among all southern states were Black.(Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery,” 1983, 558-6)
Not only were Black proportions of prisoners on the rise, total prison populations themselves rose sharply in the decades following the Civil War. In Mississippi, the prison population quadrupled between 1871 and 1879; in Alabama, it increased 6 and a half times by 1919. During this same time period in Florida, it increased 8 and a half times; and In Georgia and North Carolina, it increased tenfold. (Shelden, 2005)
Adamson finishes his paper this way:
The convict lease system was an economic substitute for slavery, but also a political replacement, insofar as it helped to redefine the boundaries of the South on the basis of color…. the Redeemer governments systematically deprived the freedmen of economic opportunities, and through vagrancy laws, sharecropping arrangements, and disenfranchisement, enforced a new kind of class rule on what was, after all, a problem population. The convict lease system was an ultimate but very effective mechanism for keeping blacks politically and economically subservient. (Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery,” 1983, 558-6)
If you want to put it on a bumper sticker though, he says it like this: “Crime control and economic oppression were one and the same thing in the South.”
SLAVERY ENDURES
Now, Phil, you might be saying: this is all very tragic, but the convict-lease system was dead and buried like 90 years ago. As a society we’ve progressed past all tha-
<laughing montage>
Absolutely not. This is still happening. The United States imprisons more of its people than any other country on earth, both in terms of raw numbers AND percentage of population. It seems to me there’s only two explanations for that: either Americans are uniquely culturally prone to antisocial behaviors orrrr the system of racial and economic control that exploded the prison population during Reconstruction never stopped working.
In the 1970s, Richard Nixon brought new innovation to the Black Codes, instigating the War on Drugs. His advisor, John Erlichman, later admitted that the war on drugs was specifically designed to criminalize the antiwar left and Black people in the United States, giving state security forces a pretext to arrest leaders and break up organizations. And it worked: prior to the War on Drugs, the US prison population was 300,000 people. In the decades following, it reached a high of 2.3 million.
https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/
And just like the United States used newly criminalized Black people for cheap labor via Convict-Lease programs, it again greedily swallowed up a brand new exploitable labor pool provided by the War on Drugs.
Right now, labor is being extracted from incarcerated people in a few different ways. In-house prison labor such as kitchen duty, cleaning, groundskeeping, or even farming is pretty common. And it’s not just something they can volunteer for to alleviate boredom: incarcerated people can be punished and sometimes even sent to solitary confinement for refusing to work or for taking a sick day. (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/)
While this labor is unpaid in eight states, even the gracious states that pay incarcerated people pay them pennies. Literally. The average rates for in-house labor range from 14 to 63 cents per hour and that’s the gross pay: many incarcerated people have their wages garnished to pay for everything from court fees to victim’s restitution. (Hoffer, 2022)
Even IF incarcerated people manage to keep the pittance they’re paid, that money is quickly gobbled up by price-gouging at the prison commissary, the new iteration of the mining town company store. $5 for one small bag of chips, $5 for two tampons… in one story, an incarcerated person paid their entire day’s wages for one stick of deodorant. Prison commissaries don’t give bulk discounts to incarcerated people even when forcing them to buy in bulk, so a 24 pack of ramen noodles costs $16.80. At Walmart, that same order would cost $4. And in a country of 50 states, somehow my beautiful Kentucky managed to rank 51st in affordability for a 15-minute phone call: $5.70.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/jan/22/claims-about-prison-price-gouging-decry-17-soup-18/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/884989263
https://www.prisonphonejustice.org/state/KY/
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds, potentially thousands of US businesses are exploiting the labor of incarcerated people to rake in huge profits thanks to depressed wages and not providing benefits. McDonald’s and Wendy’s use prison slave labor for processing and packaging food products. Starbucks exploits them to package coffee. JC Penney sells jeans made by incarcerated people. Victoria’s Secret sells clothing sewn by incarcerated people. Sprint and Verizon and American Airlines and Avis use incarcerated people in call centers. And of course Walmart is on this list, exploiting incarcerated people to manufacture all kinds of products and repackage returned goods.
https://www.careeraddict.com/prison-labour-companies
Due to intentional supply chain obfuscation, it’s difficult to know just how many companies are exploiting incarcerated people to reduce costs and increase their profitability. However, we can get a small glimpse into the sheer scale of this thanks to the federally-funded Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program or PICEP for short. While this is only a fraction of companies using incarcerated workers, it gives you an idea of just how much stuff being sold in America relies on prison slave labor. Incarcerated workers involved with PICEP’s corporate partners made, among other things:
Cargo trailers, electronics cables, wire harnesses, evaporator coils, circuit boards, processd potatoes, agricultural equipment, cloth bags, sports gear, wood doors, pet products, transportation seating, wading boots, golf shirts, brass valves, boat docks, miniature lamps, scrapbooking supplies, and party balloons.
In order to qualify for PICEP certification, prisons must promise that incarcerated people will be paid “prevailing wages” but this is almost universally ignored (PICEP is overseen by the same prison administrators profiting from the program). For example, in Florida, workers produce these products during so-called “training courses” for depressed wages and after “graduating” to be paid fair value for their labor, they then have their pay docked up to 80% for taxes, room and board, and restitution.
And of course, companies aren’t just exploiting incarcerated people for cheap labor, they’re using that labor pool to close down businesses that employ people who aren’t incarcerated. For example, in Texas in the 90s, Lockhart Technologies shifted electronic component manufacturing to the Wackenhut Prison and then shut down its Austin facility, firing 150 free workers. In 2006, a Texas company called DTEC used incarcerated workers to reduce costs and undercut the local union shops. This resulted in 90 union workers being relocated and 60 being fired. In Washington State, Omega Pacific fired 30 free workers and moved their manufacturing operation to a nearby corrections center.
This continues into the 2020s. COVID caused over one million American deaths and led to massive labor shortages, which in turn sparked renewed vigor among labor organizers. Rather than raise wages and suffer the indignities of treating employees like human beings, many companies are trying to use incarcerated people to fill in the gaps, including restaurants in Michigan, Texas, Ohio, and Delaware, candy factories in Kansas, construction companies in New York, and good ol’ 3M up in Minnesota, dontcha know.
And, like a cat hearing the tell-tale crack of a freshly penetrated can of tuna, our entire political establishment came running to get a taste of all these delicious profits yum yum! At the federal level, Republicans and a few democrats get the usual direct bribes from lobbyists and political action commitees. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/recips.php?cycle=2018&ind=G7000
It’s even more corrupt at the state level because budgets can be much tighter and the profitable relationship between prisons and corporations can be very attractive to state officials. Arkansas’ republican Governor Asa Hutchinson has a loving relationship with Simmons Foods, a chicken processing company that has been exploiting incarcerated workers, injuring and maiming them on the job, and paying them nothing at all. https://governor.arkansas.gov/news-media/press-releases/gov-hutchinson-joins-simmons-prepared-foods-to-announce-new-chicken-operat
https://revealnews.org/blog/third-lawsuit-this-month-filed-over-forced-labor-at-chicken-plants/
In Florida in 2011, private prison company GEO bought off politicians to help pass a law requiring the privatization of prisons in Florida. Guess what state GEO is headquartered in?
In Maine that same year, republican governor Paul LePage received $25,000 from CCA (now CoreCivic) and then appointed a CCA warden as Commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections.
Back to Arkansas, remember how Bill and Hillary Clinton used incarcerated people as unpaid servants to “cut down costs” when they lived in the governor’s mansion? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/06/the-clintons-had-slaves
Speaking of powerful democrats, remember when Kamala Harris openly defied orders by the supreme court to reduce the prison population in California because she needed incarcerated people to risk their lives as fire fighters making $4-$7 an hour battling deadly wildfires caused in part by PG&E’s profit motivated refusal to maintain powerlines? https://gizmodo.com/the-climate-danger-of-kamala-harris-prison-labor-legac-1844712734
The racial and economic legacy of slavery in this country lives on in our current prison system, reinforced and upheld by both Democrats and Republicans because at their core, both serve the same master: capitalism. As long as the profit motive exists, there will be an incentive to criminalize certain communities, incarcerate them, and exploit them when they are at their most vulnerable. The invisible hand demands it.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
In closing, I want to address a couple points of criticism I anticipate receiving. The first is this: no, I am not saying that modern prison slave labor is identical to the chattel slavery practiced during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Obviously those are different things. That said, I do believe that prison slave labor’s horrors and indignities have roots in the chattel slavery system that built the United States and it’s important to analyze that DNA, both to understand how and why we got here, and to understand the ideology fueling this system
Also, during this video, I’ve talked a lot about how Blackness is criminalized and about how Black people are disproportionately forced into the prison system. I want to acknowledge that this system of criminalization affects other populations too.
When I was a police officer, the city I patrolled was 90% first and second generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico, but also Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many of those immigrants lacked documentation. Thus, California had a whole host of laws that had a disparate impact on that community. Many of these people could not get driver’s licenses or car insurance, so getting pulled over on their way to work could result in fines that would become arrests that would become jail or prison terms.
Many of these immigrants were paid depressed wages under the table by unscrupulous business owners and their documentation status was used against them to force long hours, to dissuade them from reporting injuries on the job, and to prevent them from organizing. Immigrants who weren’t submissive enough might suddenly be the subject of an anonymous tip to La Migra.
People’s immigrant status was used to keep them poor and poverty itself is criminalized in the United States, using many of the same vagrancy laws we saw during Reconstruction. My city also had ordinances allowing us to arrest panhandlers, people collecting recycling, people selling snacks from a cart, and even the neighborhood elote man!
It also needs to be said: approximately half of all incarcerated people have some form of mental illness. In the United States, mental illness is treated like a personal moral failing rather than a medical ailment deserving of care, and thus, in a variety of ways, we have criminalized disability and we use the prison system to hide disabled people out of sight.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration
Lastly, I know some of you are going to tell me that some people really do commit bad crimes and some people really do deserve prison and the existence of racist policies in history or in modern times doesn’t de facto mean we shouldn’t lock some people away. You’re probably also going to tell me that incarcerated people shouldn’t get to keep a lot of money because feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them comes from the taxes paid by good, hard-working, honest people who follow the rules. Perhaps you yourself have been the victim of a crime and you’re picturing your abuser as I wax sympathetic about incarcerated people.
And I’ll say this: I’m not here to call you a monster for having that anxiety, especially if you’ve been the victim of a crime. I know prison abolition is a really big leap of faith and you’re not evil if you can’t make it right now.
But I also want to tell you, the system we have now is the system we’ve had for over a century and if you’re worried about crime or if you’ve been the victim of crime, then it means the system we have now failed you. The priorities of our society today failed you. The way we treat poor people, Black people, disabled people, immigrants, any other community on the margins, and yes, the way we treat incarcerated people has failed you.
We’ve tried the dehumanization. We’ve tried the isolation. We’ve tried the torture. We’ve tried the prison slavery. We’ve tried all of that for a long time and it’s not working. It’s not making people better. It’s not reducing antisocial responses to desperate circumstances. It’s not providing coping strategies for mental illness. It’s not making you safer. If anything, the current system is training an entire generation of desperate people that they have no stake in society and no reason to participate nicely. If anything, the way we do things now makes you and your family much less safe.
To close us out, the other reason I wanted to make this video and the reason I spent so much time earlier on the history of slavery is because I want us to see the interconnection between capitalism, racism, and ableism. A lot of times we want to treat these as separate little islands, but it’s all one big country.
Capitalism’s inherent hunger for wealth accumulation incentivized colonizers to seek out faraway lands where they slaughtered the indigenous populations and stole their resources. White supremacy taught many Europeans to see lands belonging to non-white people as resources wasted on savages who didn’t know how to capitalize on them. Ableism informed the sensibilities of centuries of racists, telling them they were civilizing the backwards, primitive races by using them as unpaid labor and pocketing the value created by that labor. The profit motive has no use for workers that need extra accomodations or whose bodies cannot provide labor, so the politicians who gorge themselves on corporate cash use the same legal philosophies that caged away the “inconvenient” free Black population during Reconstruction against the inconvenient disabled population.
In fact, in 1837, Senator John C. Calhoun very succinctly shows the relationship between all three in a speech defending slavery : “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good… there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other… There is and always has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict.”
https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/texts/slavery-a-positive-good
What this means is that if you want to combat ableism, you have to be in solidarity with the fight against racism and colonialism. And if you want to combat racism, you have to be in solidarity with the fight against capitalism. And if you want to combat capitalism, you damn sure better be listening to your Black and Brown and Asian and Indigenous and Immigrant and Disabled comrades. This is all one fight and we either win together or not at all.
So, whaddya think? Did you already know about this or did you learn something new? If you’ve been incarcerated before, what do you want people to know about it? How can people help?
Oh, and I’m cognizant of the fact that I’m a white ex-cop who just spent a long time talking about slavery and incarceration, so if I said something clumsy or hurtful, feel free to let me know.
Anyway, thank you for spending time with me tonight. If you got something out of this, please Like the video, subscribe if you like my vibe, and most importantly, please share this video with someone that you think ought to hear it.
Either way, keep fightin’ the good fight out there, stay safe but stay rowdy, and I hope to see you on the next one. Goodniiiight!
Transcript
Further Reading:
Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault
Blood in my Eye by George Jackson
Learn More From:
Why the Justice System is Broken by FD Signifier
Alabama Generates Billions from Prisoners by More Perfect Union
Working In Captivity by Represent Justice
