The History Of Mass Incarceration, Part Two
Excerpts from:
Slavery and Prison - Understanding the Connections
by Kim Gilmore
With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century.
Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery.
From the vantage point of post-slavery emancipation, it seemed like the possibility of genuine freedom and democracy for freed slaves was a reality in the making. Although the roots of 19th-century abolitionism were varied, the popular understanding is that it was a middle-class movement led by whites and a few ex-slaves. In reality, much of the scholarship on abolitionism conflicts with this limited conception of the coalitions that powered the move to end slavery (Aptheker, 1941; Robinson, 1997). Whether rushing over Union lines to fight against the Confederacy, planning slave revolts, or resisting slavery through countless individual acts, freed blacks and slaves challenged the foundations of a labor and social system based on racialized slavery. Anti-slavery efforts spearheaded by slaves pushed emancipation as they refused to accept the terms of gradual emancipation. African-American slaves and anti-slavery activists sought not only the abolition of slavery as a labor form, but also a broader realization of slaves' dreams of freedom, alive despite hundreds of years of violence and coerced labor (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1988; McKelvey, 1935). These visions of freedom rarely conformed to the narrowly articulated parameters defined in the Constitution; yet to make their ideas plausible to the state, freed slaves often had to frame their arguments for freedom in the language and categories constructed by the formal state. Although the creation of African-American free communities and institutions during Reconstruction were almost immediately threatened by new configurations of white power and supremacy, freed slaves continued to exercise their right to vote and hold office in order to enact their own plans for education, land ownership, and self-determination. This incomplete transformation was cut short by vigilante justice and racialized violence, as well as by the state-sponsored criminalization of African Americans.
In the past decade, several influential studies of this period have revealed the relationship between emancipation, the 13th Amendment, and the convict lease program (Lichtenstein, 1996a; Mancini, 1996; Davis, 1999). Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished "except as a punishment for crime." This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use "unfree" labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the South's infrastructure. During this period, white "Redeemers" -- white planters, small farmers, and political leaders -- set out to rebuild the pre-emancipation racial order by enacting laws that restricted black access to political representation and by creating Black Codes that, among other things, increased the penalties for crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness (Davis, 2000). As African Americans continued the process of building schools, churches, and social organizations, and vigorously fought for political participation, a broad coalition of Redeemers used informal and state-sponsored forms of violence and repression to roll back the gains made during Reconstruction. Thus, mass imprisonment was employed as a means of coercing resistant freed slaves into becoming wage laborers.
Convict labor became increasingly racialized: it was assumed that blacks were more suitable for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and on corporate railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1996b). Contrary to popular representations of chain gang labor, not only black men, but also black women were forced to work on the lines and on hard labor projects, revealing how the slave order was being mirrored in the emerging punishment system. This mimicking of the slave system structure in the post-emancipation prison system, particularly in the South, suggested a belief that the performance of antebellum culture could bring the slave system back to life (Jackson, 1999). In Northern prisons, which had historically been structured around industrial rather than agricultural labor, racially based divisions were sharpened after emancipation as well. African Americans were criminalized for committing Black Code-type crimes and often were subject to tougher sentences than those imposed upon whites convicted of similar crimes (Du Bois, 1935).
Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in "free markets" in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a "state-use" system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn, 1993). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project, conducted a massive study of prison labor in all 50 states and concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Citing overcrowding and inadequate facilities, the PIRA recommended the expansion of the prison system and the construction of new prisons in almost every state</b> (Fraser and Gerstle, 1989). No clear statistics demonstrate that "crime," particularly violent crime, had increased during this period. Moreover, many of those who ended up in prison were criminalized for crimes stemming from unemployment, suggesting that if the state had had a handle on unemployment, there may not have been a need for more prisons. Thus, the PIRA embodied one of the many contradictions embedded in the "New Deal state" -- its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with its overabundance of labor. Thus, the PIRA, together with a racialized labor system that had roots in the slave system, cleared the path for the prison-industrial complex that has flourished in the post-World War II period.
The echoes of slavery still reverberate throughout the prison state; earlier this year, the Wackenhut corporation announced a new contract to build a federal prison on the site of a former slave plantation in North Carolina. This brings us back to the question of the feasibility of anti-incarceration movements. In the age of Proposition 21, the Super-Max, the rapid reinvigoration of the death penalty, globalization, and the convergence of the two political parties in the U.S. around punishment as a corrective to unemployment and race problems, can prison abolitionism be heard? The answer is "yes," for the very starkness of this moment breathes new life into abolitionism as a counter to reforms that accept the terms of human destruction and devastation inherent in contemporary prisons. Throughout the U.S., and increasingly throughout the world, prison abolitionism is finding new life as local movements against prison construction, mandatory minimum sentences, and the criminalization of youth are created out of the very communities they decimate. This year, as Western European nations and corporations finally have been forced to accept their complicity in the use of slave labor under Nazism, perhaps the issue of reparations for slavery in the U.S. will at last gain legitimacy in a country that has institutionalized new forms of slavery rather than vanquish bondage completely.
Source & Additional Reading.
The actual source and additional reading are very long, and I don't think it would all fit in one LJ entry so I decided to pull out the most important parts. I would absolutely suggest that you read the entire thing, especially if you're commenting with a dissenting opinion. It may very well be answered elsewhere in the essay, it just didn't happen to make it into this entry. TL;DR, the Prison Industrial Complex is eerily similar to American slavery and you should have more to cite than your feelings if you find that to be incorrect/an exaggeration.
Again, I would like to reiterate that this is not the entire essay (it is linked) and that the additional reading delves further into a lot of the points raised here.
Previously this month: Day One, Day Two, Day Three
Excerpts from:
Slavery and Prison - Understanding the Connections
by Kim Gilmore
With longer sentences being imposed for nonviolent drug offenses, with aggressive campaigns aimed at criminalizing young people, and with the growing number of children left orphaned by the criminal justice system, the carceral reach of the state and private corporations resonates with the history of slavery and marks a level of human bondage unparalleled in the 20th century.
Scholars and activists have plunged into an examination of the historical origins of racialized slavery as a coercive labor form and social system in an attempt to explain the huge increase in mass incarceration in the U.S. since the end of World War II. Drawing these links has been important in explaining the relationship between racism and criminalization after emancipation, and in connecting the rise of industrial and mechanized labor to the destructive effects of deindustrialization and globalization. The point of retracing this history is not to argue that prisons have been a direct outgrowth of slavery, but to interrogate the persistent connections between racism and the global economy. Mass imprisonment on the level seen in the U.S. in the 20th century occupies a phase along the spectrum of unfree labor related to, yet distinct from, chattel slavery.
From the vantage point of post-slavery emancipation, it seemed like the possibility of genuine freedom and democracy for freed slaves was a reality in the making. Although the roots of 19th-century abolitionism were varied, the popular understanding is that it was a middle-class movement led by whites and a few ex-slaves. In reality, much of the scholarship on abolitionism conflicts with this limited conception of the coalitions that powered the move to end slavery (Aptheker, 1941; Robinson, 1997). Whether rushing over Union lines to fight against the Confederacy, planning slave revolts, or resisting slavery through countless individual acts, freed blacks and slaves challenged the foundations of a labor and social system based on racialized slavery. Anti-slavery efforts spearheaded by slaves pushed emancipation as they refused to accept the terms of gradual emancipation. African-American slaves and anti-slavery activists sought not only the abolition of slavery as a labor form, but also a broader realization of slaves' dreams of freedom, alive despite hundreds of years of violence and coerced labor (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1988; McKelvey, 1935). These visions of freedom rarely conformed to the narrowly articulated parameters defined in the Constitution; yet to make their ideas plausible to the state, freed slaves often had to frame their arguments for freedom in the language and categories constructed by the formal state. Although the creation of African-American free communities and institutions during Reconstruction were almost immediately threatened by new configurations of white power and supremacy, freed slaves continued to exercise their right to vote and hold office in order to enact their own plans for education, land ownership, and self-determination. This incomplete transformation was cut short by vigilante justice and racialized violence, as well as by the state-sponsored criminalization of African Americans.
In the past decade, several influential studies of this period have revealed the relationship between emancipation, the 13th Amendment, and the convict lease program (Lichtenstein, 1996a; Mancini, 1996; Davis, 1999). Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished "except as a punishment for crime." This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use "unfree" labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the South's infrastructure. During this period, white "Redeemers" -- white planters, small farmers, and political leaders -- set out to rebuild the pre-emancipation racial order by enacting laws that restricted black access to political representation and by creating Black Codes that, among other things, increased the penalties for crimes such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness (Davis, 2000). As African Americans continued the process of building schools, churches, and social organizations, and vigorously fought for political participation, a broad coalition of Redeemers used informal and state-sponsored forms of violence and repression to roll back the gains made during Reconstruction. Thus, mass imprisonment was employed as a means of coercing resistant freed slaves into becoming wage laborers.
Convict labor became increasingly racialized: it was assumed that blacks were more suitable for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and on corporate railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1996b). Contrary to popular representations of chain gang labor, not only black men, but also black women were forced to work on the lines and on hard labor projects, revealing how the slave order was being mirrored in the emerging punishment system. This mimicking of the slave system structure in the post-emancipation prison system, particularly in the South, suggested a belief that the performance of antebellum culture could bring the slave system back to life (Jackson, 1999). In Northern prisons, which had historically been structured around industrial rather than agricultural labor, racially based divisions were sharpened after emancipation as well. African Americans were criminalized for committing Black Code-type crimes and often were subject to tougher sentences than those imposed upon whites convicted of similar crimes (Du Bois, 1935).
Labor unions, which had always been skeptical about prison labor, aggressively lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. Throughout the Depression years, unionists made it clear that an expanded use of prison labor would further imperil an already overfull work force and intervene in "free markets" in ways that threatened the stability of capitalism and laid bare its most excessive failures. Slowly, prisons and jails solved this problem by developing a "state-use" system in which prison labor was used solely for state projects. This solution eliminated the competition between convict labor and union labor, while still enabling convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn, 1993). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project, conducted a massive study of prison labor in all 50 states and concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Citing overcrowding and inadequate facilities, the PIRA recommended the expansion of the prison system and the construction of new prisons in almost every state</b> (Fraser and Gerstle, 1989). No clear statistics demonstrate that "crime," particularly violent crime, had increased during this period. Moreover, many of those who ended up in prison were criminalized for crimes stemming from unemployment, suggesting that if the state had had a handle on unemployment, there may not have been a need for more prisons. Thus, the PIRA embodied one of the many contradictions embedded in the "New Deal state" -- its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with its overabundance of labor. Thus, the PIRA, together with a racialized labor system that had roots in the slave system, cleared the path for the prison-industrial complex that has flourished in the post-World War II period.
The echoes of slavery still reverberate throughout the prison state; earlier this year, the Wackenhut corporation announced a new contract to build a federal prison on the site of a former slave plantation in North Carolina. This brings us back to the question of the feasibility of anti-incarceration movements. In the age of Proposition 21, the Super-Max, the rapid reinvigoration of the death penalty, globalization, and the convergence of the two political parties in the U.S. around punishment as a corrective to unemployment and race problems, can prison abolitionism be heard? The answer is "yes," for the very starkness of this moment breathes new life into abolitionism as a counter to reforms that accept the terms of human destruction and devastation inherent in contemporary prisons. Throughout the U.S., and increasingly throughout the world, prison abolitionism is finding new life as local movements against prison construction, mandatory minimum sentences, and the criminalization of youth are created out of the very communities they decimate. This year, as Western European nations and corporations finally have been forced to accept their complicity in the use of slave labor under Nazism, perhaps the issue of reparations for slavery in the U.S. will at last gain legitimacy in a country that has institutionalized new forms of slavery rather than vanquish bondage completely.
Source & Additional Reading.
The actual source and additional reading are very long, and I don't think it would all fit in one LJ entry so I decided to pull out the most important parts. I would absolutely suggest that you read the entire thing, especially if you're commenting with a dissenting opinion. It may very well be answered elsewhere in the essay, it just didn't happen to make it into this entry. TL;DR, the Prison Industrial Complex is eerily similar to American slavery and you should have more to cite than your feelings if you find that to be incorrect/an exaggeration.
Again, I would like to reiterate that this is not the entire essay (it is linked) and that the additional reading delves further into a lot of the points raised here.
Previously this month: Day One, Day Two, Day Three
Also, suggestion. I don't know how good of a suggestion this even is since it's probably been done before (and I wasn't here last year), or is something that may always come up as a topic of discussion, but were you planning a music history post? As a Music Major, that would make me so happy. I apologize if this is a bad suggestion, or overdone.I would also like to direct you to the site of the National Radio Project as they have an ongoing series of podcasts looking at the US prison system. The stories are heartbreaking but amazing to listen to. You can find them here: http://www.radioproject.org/topics/pris
OMG someone said that to me once when they asked me to do something and I refused. My response was, "The field niggas, you idiot. Don't you see me? Clearly my family was bred for fuckin."
Sometimes the only way I can combat racism without killing people is to fire it right back at them by saying something even more outrageous. Usually they get the point.