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The New American Slavery: Capitalism and the Ghettoization of
American Prisons as a Profitable Corporate Business
David A. Liburd
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

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THE NEW AMERICAN SLAVERY:
CAPITALISM AND THE GHETTOIZATION OF AMERICAN PRISONS AS A
PROFITABLE CORPORATE BUSINESS

by

DAVID LIBURD

A master’s thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, The City University of New York
2017

© 2017
DAVID LIBURD
All Rights Reserved

ii

The New American Slavery:
Capitalism and the Ghettoization of American Prisons as a Profitable Corporate Business
by
David Liburd
This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies in
satisfaction of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts

Date

David Humphries
Thesis Advisor

Date

Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Executive Officer

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

iii

ABSTRACT

The New American Slavery:
Capitalism and the Ghettoization of American Prisons as a Profitable Corporate Business
by
David Liburd

Advisor: David Humphries

The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial
America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While
the two have never been completely tied together, capitalism and modern day slavery have been
linked with one another. Some analysis sees slavery as a remote form of capitalism, a substitute,
to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world.
Slave plantations adopted a new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E.
DuBois as a change "from a family institution to an industrial system."1 This outlook shows
either a brutal mental display or operational conceit. That is to say, both “slavery” and
"capitalism" are abstracted in exacting traditional and historically intangible terms, or slavery
and capitalism are distinguished as a separate social, and consequently political, structures. In
each case, the relationship between slavery and capitalism is considered to be an "external,"

iv

unintegrated relation. While slave labor signified a new interpretation as planters procured slaves
not so much for social status, but more as commodity- producing labor. Slave labor developed
into a great resource for value production.
One explanation for the disproportionate number of Blacks incarcerated in the American
penal system is the continuation of laws that have long since been eradicated but are still active
through new means of legislation. These pieces of legislation like the laws of the past, Jim crow
Slavery parallel and embody the same outcome, the management to deprive and humiliate. This
paper presents a connection of how previously abandoned historical sequences have been
maintained and manifested into a new form of repression and containment of Blacks. The ever
increasing incarceration of individuals of color Latino men and most prominently Black men, is
a direct result of governmental legislations in the guise of wars on drugs and ghettos deemed to
be out of control. These actions have continued to deny equal educational and employment
opportunities to people of color while destabilizing cultural identities. The idea to imprison so
many Blacks and to make the neighborhoods they live in as intolerable, only serves to publicize
and affirm the association of the two. This association helps to maintain the socioeconomic
differences that have been in place since slavery.
1. Dubois, W. E. B. The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of
America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 152.

v

Acknowledgements
It has been a stop start journey to get to this juncture. Many years in the making and I dedicate
this effort to my Mum, Mrs. Violet Liburd and my late Dad, William and my family, friends and
all the people who supported me, allowing me to get to this place. Appreciation to my advisor
David Humphries and my good friend Leonard Robertson for all your advice and patience.
To all who have suffered and who continue to suffer in anguish due to the colour of their skin
because of those who decided one ethnicity was superior to another.
Special thanks to Helen. Life is better with you.

vi

Table of contents

Title page

i

Copyright

ii

Approval

iii

Abstract

iv

Acknowledgments

vi

Epigraph and Introduction

1

The Civil War and Slavery

11

Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment

18

Colorblind Criminal Justice System

21

History of Prisons

31

Private Prison, Profits and the War on Drugs

37

The 13th Amendment and U.S Incarceration

54

Conclusion

60

Notes

62

Appendix I, Figure 1

63

References

64

vii

“The old plantation was a prison. The new prison is a plantation” (Wacquant, 2001.)
The labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial
America, with the American plantation being the epicenter for all that was to be produced. While
the two have never been completely tied together, slavery and modern day capitalism have been
linked with one another. Some analyses see capitalism as a remote form of slavery, a substitute,
to an antiquated form of labor in the modern world (Mandle, 1972). Slave plantations adopted a
new concentration in size and management, referred to by W.E. DuBois as a change “from a
family institution to an industrial system” (Du Bois, 1969). This outlook shows either a brutal
mental display or operational conceit. That is to say, either slavery or capitalism are conflated
using historically inaccurate terms, or they are distinguished as separate social, and consequently
political structures. In each case, the relationship between slavery and capitalism is considered to
be an “external,” unintegrated relation (McMichael, Evans, Rueschemeyer & Stephens, 1985).
Planters procured slaves not so much for social status, but more as a commodity producing labor,
developing slave labor into a great resource for value production.
This paper presents a connection of how previously abandoned historical sequences are
being maintained and manifested into a new form of repression and containment of Blacks. The
2.3 million people behind bars in America, amounts to a fifth of the world’s prison population.
This practice is carried out at an annual cost to taxpayers that amounts to more than $75 billion a
year. The harsh penalties were intended to lower crime, but instead they have made way to an
unprecedented change in priorities that move away from policing (Tierney, 2013). Lawrence W.
Sherman, an American criminologist on the faculty of the University of Maryland and
Cambridge University in Britain has said, “The United States today is the only country I know of
that spends more on prisons than police. In England and Wales, the spending on police is twice

as high as on corrections. In Australia, it is more than three times higher. In Japan, it is seven
times higher. Only in the United States is it lower, and only in our recent history” (Sherman,
1990). Prior to mass incarceration which began to take hold in the 1980s, local policing
accounted for more than 40 percent of the criminal justice budget and 25 percent went to prisons
and parole programs. Yet since 1990, almost 35 percent has been directed to the prison system,
while the criminal justice budget for local policing has decreased to just about 30 percent
(Tierney, 2013). The idea to imprison so many Blacks and to make the neighborhoods they live
in as intolerable, only serves to publicize and affirm the association of the two.
Slavery has been one of the most permeating of human institutions and has endured in many
places. It has existed in societies subjugated by all major religions and varied beliefs, it legally
lasted in some places into the twentieth century, and it endures more informally in places until
this day. Although there are important differences from one economic and legal condition to the
next, certain characteristics regarding who could be enslaved or who could be bought and sold
are similar across conditions, and the study of these differences and similarities provides a useful
basis for understanding human behavior and social institutions (Engerman, 1999).
The most exacting definition of one kind of slavery, “chattel slavery,” will be subject to
consideration. “A slave is a human being who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another
human being under the religious, social and legal conventions of the society in which he or she
lives.” Being “the property of” indicates that an owner, limited only by the relationships within
his society, can buy, sell, free, adopt, ill-treat or kill his slave whose children also belong to their
owner, and who can expect to receive the same consideration. A slave has no freedom or
personal rights and can become a slave voluntarily, by a legal decision or by force (Kelly, 1996).
Slavery, chattel slavery was allowed by the Holy Quran and further defined in the Hadith - the
2

traditions of the Prophet Mohammed's lifespan. Chattel slavery was developed and organized in
the sacred Shari’a decree codes overseen by members of the Ulama - those learned in its
interpretation. Overall, its model of slavery developed from Roman Empire slavery procedures
and its predecessors in Western Asia. The first example of slave trading and slave labor
established in the New World involved, ethnically, not the Negro but the Indian, to be discussed
later. Slavery in the Caribbean has been consistently identified with the Negro, putting a racial
twist on what is an economic experience. Slavery was never a racist practice; racism was the
consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow;
Catholic, Protestant and pagan. The chief distinction was that in one of the divisions of the world
in Islam, the Dar el Islam, Christianity and Judaism were accepted as admissible if incomplete
religions. Believers in them, if they made their secular submission to Islamic rulers, paid the
necessary taxes and accepted Shari’a law, were citizens or Dhimi and were not subjected to
chattel slavery, the exception being if they were sentenced to it due to crimes punished under
Shari’a law in the same manner as Muslims were (Snowden, 1970). Later in this paper, the
differences of how slavery exists today in our incarceration systems will be documented.
As this example suggests, in fact slavery is one of the oldest social institutions in human
society. Original archaeological manuscripts document that in the Mediterranean basin, the
Middle East, China, and other places slavery existed. Ancient civilizations in Egypt, Babylonia,
Persia, Greece, and Rome were economically greatly reliant on slaves. Slavery thrived after the
fall of the Roman Empire, and continued into medieval and early modern times. Five hundred
years prior to Columbus sailing to the New World, the Vikings and the Arabs were foremost
slave traders. Exploration by the Portuguese to Africa in the 1450s and 1460s, ended up with
cargoes of slaves procured in the ports they visited. Many years before Columbus reached the

3

Americas the Inca, Aztec, and Maya all had existing complex slave constructs. Moreover, even
in the area that became the United States, numerous Native American peoples held slaves and
more often than not, those slaves tended to be captured neighbors. The island of Hawaii had a
slave system before Europeans landed. In China, India, and in East Asia slaves were owned and
traded. The founding of the New World helped in the expansion of slavery moving it from a
family institution to an industrial system as stated by DuBois earlier. The enslavement of
indigenous populaces predominantly by the Spanish and early 17th century by the English, led to
approximately between 12 and 13 million Africans kidnapped and relocated to the New World
(Fogel & Engerman, 1995).
“Slavery” has been used so loosely in European languages and in Christian societies that
only by cautious definition can it be used in examining human relationships throughout the
world. If slavery is considered to be an exclusive method of controlling individuals, this would
appear to make all non-slavery look like freedom and, so thought to be a tolerant and desired
progressive undertaking. After the American Civil War, wherever slavery was prohibited a man
was considered to be free and no longer held in servitude. There needs to be a distinction drawn
between slavery in relation to non-slavery, and in an American context, in the post-civil war
when slavery was prohibited, between “legal” slavery and the use of slavery representing any
form of human poverty and control. Any specific definition of slavery has legal, social, political,
and economic facets. At times, it is difficult knowing, what exactly are its limitations among
labor institutions. If on the other hand, slavery were considered just one portion, or one end, of a
spectrum of controls, then some would debate that this makes slavery seem less evil and more
benevolent than it was, compared to other forms of social control (Karras, 1998). A correct
classification of the word’s relationship with terms in other languages and other historical

4

periods is crucial, especially when archaeologists attempt to identify slavery by research of
material remains. It is problematic in Africa where Christian and Islamic concepts of slavery,
both defined in alternative and convoluted legal systems with outside enforcement on large
regions of the continent, combined with diverse indigenous African concepts communicated only
by oral traditions before Arabic or European visitors added new sources. The interaction of
Islamic and indigenous concepts culminated in a limited order of integration more easily
documented from literary than material cultural evidence. The present-day ineffectiveness of
archaeologists to identify slavery and its effect on cultures without using literary evidence is still
one of the last “major field” problems involving the discipline (Insoll, 1998). It is crucial that
investment into areas of interest that focus on revealing and discovering original evidence is
undertaken sooner than later, as the preservation of any material tangible or living may be lost.
In certain parts of the world, slavery was an ill-conceived part of society until the middle of
the 18th century. In ancient times, Plato supported slavery in his Republic. Aristotle understood
some people were born to be slaves, and Thomas More imagined slaves in his Utopia. Popes
divined slavery as a way to convert heathens, as did Protestant ministers. Some prophets opposed
slavery like, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, the Mennonites who settled in
Germantown, Pennsylvania, and the Puritan lawyer Samuel Sewall (Richards, 2003). Not until
the mid-18th century Quakers headed by John Woolman along with Methodists like John
Wesley, did any move to abolish slavery gain traction. Towards the end of the century,
abolitionists in England began measures to stop the African slave trade. For the duration of the
American Revolution, and after, the northern states sought to end slavery and some slave owners
in the south voluntarily freed their slaves. In Haiti, a successful rebellion led to slaves deposing
French rule to end slavery there. Throughout the New World until the 1830s when England put

5

an end to slavery in its American colonies, slavery continued to be an active enterprise. This
enterprise endured in America until 1865 and in Brazil and Cuba until the 1880s. (Richards,
2003).
As mentioned previously, slavery did not spawn racism: racism was the direct result of
slavery. The following classification shows that slavery was deemed functional for economic
gains. The definition of international slavery is defined as follows: “Slavery is the status or
condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are
exercised.” To this was added “practices similar to slavery”, including debt bondage, serfdom,
compulsory marital arrangements and sale of children into labor. The U.N agency, International
Labor Organization (ILO) defines debt bondage as, the status or condition arising from a pledge
by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a
debt. If the value of these services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the liquidation
of the debt of the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited and defined
(Labour, 2005). Any description of slavery has the slave beholden and in servitude. According to
Loic Wacquant, “The single greatest political transformation of the post-civil rights era in
America, is how America reverted back to the paltry social state that was once in vogue, and the
authorization to create an enormous penal state that have re-created the country’s stratification,
cities, and civic culture, and are recasting the very character of ‘blackness’ itself.” Jointly, these
two coexisting and confluent drives have successfully redrawn the boundary, objectives, and
processes of action of public authority when it comes to organization of the disadvantaged and
stigmatized populations that remain at the bottom of the class, ethnic, and urban hierarchy. The
parallel reduction of the welfare division and the increase of the criminal justice division of the
American state have not been driven by new developments in poverty and crime, but have been

6

powered by a politics of hatred toward classes considered to be unworthy and noncompliant
(Wacquant, 2010). Serfdom is the condition or status of a tenant who is by law, custom or
agreement bound to live and labor on land belonging to another person. They are to render some
type of determinate service to such other person, whether for reward or not, and is not free to
change his or her status (Labour, 2005). The ILO is accountable for overseeing international
labor standards. The ILO states that forced labor as work or service “exacted from any person
under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself
voluntarily.” Strictly speaking, forced labor is comprised of unwilling entry to the labor relation,
and coercion to persist within it. This is the internationally, legally accepted definition of forced
labor, as sited by international (ILO) conventions. Numerous categories of forced labor,
including slavery, serfdom and debt bondage are incorporated (Labour, 2005; Hammer, 2005).
The first instance of slave trading and slave labor developed in the New World, racially
involved the Indian not the Negro. Poor whites came before the Negro as the successor to the
Indian. Poor whites were servants; some were indentured servants, so called because they were
able to sign an agreement before parting from their homeland. These agreements or contracts
were indented by law, with an obligation to service for a specified amount of time as a
supplement for their voyage. “Redemptioners,” made prior arrangements with the captain, and
offered to pay for their passage once they docked or within an agreed time after. If they
defaulted, the captain then sold the passenger, to the highest bidder. Convicts were also sent by
the government to serve a stated time (Williams, 1944). Native Americans and Black people in
the U.S. are two marginalized groups that face discrimination in opposing ways, reflecting their
adverse roles in the founding of U.S. society. Native Americans were not slaughtered or
banished from their land, glamorized, integrated, marshaled, bred White, or eradicated as the

7

genuine owners of the land, but as Indians. They were victims, murdered for where they are and
victims murdered for who they are (Smith, 1987). To become a victim of settler colonization, all
the native needed to do was remain at home (Rose, 1981). Disease and an incomplete diet saw
the Indians precipitous demise, as they were unable to withstand the rigorous workload. The
failure to adapt to the new way of life was also a key factor. “To subject the Indian to the mines,
to their monotonous, insane and severe labor, without tribal sense, without religious ritual ... was
like taking away from him the meaning of his life ... It was to enslave not only his muscles but
also his collective spirit” (Williams, 1944).
The enslavement of Black people produced a comprehensive taxonomy that
spontaneously enslaved the children of a slave and any other parent. In the midst of slavery, this
taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule”; this is to say that any quantity of
African lineage, no matter how remote, and irrespective of physical and structural composition,
makes a person Black. For Native Americans, non-Indian lineage allowed their nativity,
producing “half-breeds,” a rule that continues in the practice of blood quantum regulations. In
contrast to enslaved people, whose procreation increased their owner’s wealth, indigenous
people hindered settler’s access to land, so their augmentation was determined dysfunctional.
This in turn lead to the limiting racial classification of Native Americans and cleared the way for
genocide. Although it cannot be said that the colonialism or extermination directed towards any
one specific race – as race – can be taken for granted, there is an argument that it is controlled
and completed through instructive management (Gellately & Kiernan, 2003).
In the colonies of New England, Indian slavery was unprofitable. Much of any form of
slavery was unprofitable because the diversification of agriculture was not suited to all enslaved
peoples. The Spaniards determined that one Negro was equivalent to four Indians. One
8

prominent figure in Hispaniola (the original name for the capital of the Dominican Republic,
Ciudad Trujillo) demanded in 1518, that “permission be given to bring Negroes, a race robust for
labor, instead of natives, so weak that they can only be employed in tasks requiring little
endurance, such as taking care of maize fields or farms.” The prospective New World staples,
sugar and cotton, required strength which the Indian lacked, the robust “cotton nigger” was what
was required: “When compared with sums paid for Negroes at the same time and place the prices
of Indian slaves are found to have been considerably lower” (Williams, 1944).
In 1827 America, supporters of southern industrialism praised the principles of black slave
labor in textile mills. They reasoned that black slaves were more efficient, costing less
maintenance than white laborers and that their market value increased as they honed more
industrial and mechanical skills, adding that the industrial services of very young and very old
slaves, who were borderline employable field work, made for an otherwise “idle” population.
The American Farmer reported that it “would be a real mercy to the slaves-for the labor in a
cotton factory is infinitely easier than in a cotton field” (The American Farmer, 1827, 235).
The economic benefits of slavery, researched in conventional studies towards the end of
slavery, focused on market forces with reference to Adam Smith. In The Wealth of Nations,
Smith writes that slaves can have no interest but “to eat as much as possible and to labor as little
as possible” and that completed work done by slaves is certainly the “dearest of any” (that is,
totally ineffective) and are destined to fade away if market forces are permitted to perform
(Smith, 1937). Smith was certain, “that economic causes explained the abolition of bondage in
Western Europe. Landowners simply came to realize that their profits would increase by giving
labor a share of the produce” (Davis, 1966). If slave labor was determined to be comparatively
unproductive, what was the reason for its emergence in supposedly modern industrial systems?
9

Smith explained this abnormality for his theory with a somewhat adlibbed revision. He claimed
that slave owners engaged in the control of inferiors “out of a love of power, even to the
detriment of their economic self-interest” (Davis, 1966).
Marxist critics are usually more rationally reliable. Slavery appears and disappears, in their
view, because of market forces. Slavery must have been “rational” or else the system would not
have been established, just as when it disappears, it is because the rationalistic formula has run
its course and a new approach to production has materialized and become more efficient. Eric
Williams, a well renowned contemporary analyst and author on the subject of the disappearance
of slavery in the Western hemisphere, writes in his book Capitalism and Slavery, that the focus is
on the history of slavery in the British West Indies. Williams’ thesis is direct: “When British
capitalism depended on the West Indies, they ignored or defended it. When British capitalism
found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery as a first step in
the destruction of the West Indian monopoly” (Williams, 1944).
The thesis most clearly in contrast to the “economistic” opinions of Williams and others
underscores the significance of moral progress in the progression that ended slavery in the
Western hemisphere. Crane Brinton, in A History of Western Morals, succinctly describes the
heart of this debate;
“The prize exhibit of those who can still believe in moral progress is the Western
achievement of abolishing chattel slavery ... The Marxists, and not only the Marxists,
never tire of insisting that slavery has always prevailed where it was economically
profitable and has only been abolished after it has been demonstrated to at least most
slave-owners ... that slavery is unprofitable ... The honest materialist would have to admit
that the completeness of abolition can be explained only by the fact that the
10

overwhelming majority of Westerners came in a few generations to feel that slavery is
wrong.” (Williams, 1944).
There have been many atrocities in history, horrific in nature, which have caused irreparable
harm to many ethnicities and cultures. The Holocaust, as an example, was an act of evil on a
massive scale. An economic perspective saw that the marginal benefits and marginal costs
associated with that atrocity saw that the victims were offered compensation and that offer of
compensation continues to this day. There are many moral perspectives that have been taught
and discussed throughout history, each with strong and weak arguments. Moral actions therefore
are considered according to the reasoning behind them and not their consequences or outcomes.
These actions are not based on one’s own needs, desires of feelings. This moral perspective is
one that seems to be subjective in nature. At the end of slavery and during debates on how to
abolish it, slave owners sought compensation for losing the slaves that they owned. If there were
to be consistency within international framework, a division created that oversaw “matching”
claims of reparations for past injustices that division would need to assess the importance and
decide the form. Such a body would need to be set up under an international charter, with greater
authority if under the patronages of the UN, as in War Crimes. One claim has estimated the
figure for reparations for slavery at $777 trillion. If we remember that slavery lasted for three
centuries, this is not excessive (Shaw, 2004).
Many historians see the U.S. Civil War as the decisive turning point in the history of the
America. Yet it was even more meaningful. The Civil War generated volatility that altered the
global trade in cotton and its production bringing about a global transformation of capitalism.
The global cotton empire was regulated by various dominant states and their colonies and
worked by non-slave labor. The cotton trade was one of the world's largest industries at
11

midcentury, sourcing the work force conceivably of 20 million laborers. Prior to 1861 before
slaves on plantations in the American South became the main workforce for cotton production,
most of the world supply of raw cotton. Sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and peasants, often
beholden to local merchants, produced most of the global cotton, a major division of which was
cultivated outside of the American South, in places like India, Egypt, West Africa,
Turkmenistan, and Brazil. Raw cotton had previously been manufactured and produced by textile
workers in Lancashire, in the North of England.
The American Civil War was central in these transformations. Close to four million slaves
were freed in the subjugated land of world cotton production, leading to worries among
merchants and manufacturers that the disturbance could damage the “deep relationship between
slavery and cotton production and destroy one of the essential conditions of the mass production”
of cotton textiles (Beckert, 2004). By destroying worldwide confidence in the organization of
one of the world’s foremost trades, the war inspired a new collection of bureaucrats and
capitalists in cotton-consuming countries to procure supplies of the “white gold” from
sharecroppers, tenants, and peasants, decisively shifting the balance between free and coerced
labor. The war between 1861 and 1865 forced manufacturers to find new merchants for their
crucial raw material, as it eliminated several million bales of cotton from global markets. New
labor practices were put in place, the envelopment of wealth and capitalists within colonial
nation states, and the swift expansion of capitalist social relations were the foundations of a new
political economy that dominated global concerns through to World War I (Isaacman & Roberts,
1995). The rapidity and reaction with which merchants, manufacturers, and agricultural
producers answered the crisis exposed their flexibility and their capacity for reordering new,
indirect, but sweeping forms of state power in place of direct possession of human beings to

12

secure an ample amount of labor. Perhaps the most important chapters in the history of global
capital and labor were written on the battlefields of rural America. Slavery was the dominant
cause of the Civil War. The war was fought over state’s rights and the limits of federal power in
a union of states, in order to illustrate state sovereignty versus federal authority. The potential
threat to state autonomy became pragmatic over the explicit dispute over slavery. The argument
as to whether slavery should subsist was not the focal point; the focal point was who had the
final say on the existence of slavery. The eleven southern states that seceded from the Union
objected to federal legislation that restricted the advancement of slavery, due to the North’s
assessments on slavery. The South contended to defend and preserve the institution of slavery to
protect their immoral economic system and way of life. The goal of President Lincoln was to
conserve the Union, and he did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, 1863,
more than one and a half years after the war started. The issuance of emancipation was made to
encourage his objective; slavery was not his first priority. If the North succeeded in their
demands it posed a serious threat to the economic value of slaves if the North. The South wanted
to defend slavery and their cotton economy. As it is today, the U.S. economy and financial
standing are paramount. The U.S. justice system of today with its incarceration procedures
profoundly stimulates the economy. CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corp. of
America) and Geo Group the two biggest owners of private prison’s stocks have more than
doubled since Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The business of prison privatization and its
involvement in the economy will be discussed later in this paper.
The American Civil War has long been a debated issue in the historiography of the United
States. As a result, there seems to be many more accounts of previously suggested explanations
adding to various reasons, such as slavery, sectionalism, and political ineptitude, a slave-power

13

conspiracy, economic conflicts and abolitionist activism (Stampp, 1965). These explanations,
and more have been carefully considered, prepared, and then cross-examined, yet still remain
inconclusive. The following cause is certain: slaves were profitable investments to southern
owners; that is to say, their rate of monetary return was very high as opposed to other types of
investment. It is possible to explain slavery overall by its monetary return without reference to
other objectives that may have encouraged slave ownership. Slavery was a practical business. If
not for emancipation and the Civil War, it would have been economically profitable for the
foreseeable future. One study assessed without the introduction of emancipation an average slave
in 1890 would have produced his owner a net marginal product 52 percent greater than in 1860
and the market price for his ownership would have risen accordingly (Fogel & Engerman, 1995).
Some say that the conflict between the North and the South was because the land in the North
was not fertile enough or conducive enough to profit from slavery, as it was in the South, not
because it was morally wrong. Perhaps Lincoln’s decision on ending slavery was a way to
balance the U.S. economically by reducing the possibility that the South would become too
financially powerful.
The primary role of slavery was to facilitate the division of labor services, and the efforts of
labor in America, rationally guided, have always been somewhat productive. In addition, the
typical productivity of American labor has improved over time where the laborer in the case of a
slave, procured higher rewards for his owner. Slavery was also a very lucrative investment and
was projected to continue to be of huge vested interest when recognized in its ownership. This is
analogous to today where factories, real estate and common stock are connected with wealth and
the proceeds expected to be produced from it; antebellum southerners had amassed a
considerable number of assets in slaves (Goldin, 1973). Slavery was an uncompromising

14

decision. With the exception of the beginning of the nineteenth century, that concern had been
balanced by a “local option,” although the federal government ratified a series of compromises
separating the emergent western regions into slave and free regions. Nevertheless, those borders
commonly paralleled the dividing line, which would have resulted from independent
regionalized alternatives, and they did not create a significant problem in local affairs. Until the
1840’s, slavery was an issue to be decided by the individual states. When President Lincoln later
said that the nation could no longer continue as “half slave and half free,” he was conveying a
mood that had only recently become popular. The nation had already been “half slave half free”
for quite a while leading up to 1860; in fact, the majority of the world up to the nineteenth
century lived under “half slave half free” conditions. Before the election of 1860, the situation
governing slavery had been successfully transferred. The decisions formerly given to the states
the federal government now appropriated and the institution of slavery, which before
experienced the comparative tranquility of local consensus was now thrown into turmoil and
interregional divisiveness. Northern elements, who believed that slavery was wrong and must
eventually be eliminated, advocated legislation such as prohibition of slavery from the western
territories. Southerners countered by insisting there be a “slave code,” a guarantee that the
federal government would safeguard chattel slaves wherever they may be relocated, within the
country. This was going to be a very difficult proposition to accommodate. Slave codes were
U.S. laws that governed slave status, pronounced by the colonies or states that allowed slavery,
where slaves were considered property and not people:
•

Slaves had few legal rights in court.

•

A slave’s testimony was barred in cases relating to whites.

•

Slaves could not hold or make any contract or own any property.
15

•

Slaves could not assault a white person, even if one assaulted them.

•

Slaves were not allowed to be absent from their owner's premises without permission.

•

Slaves were not allowed to gather in groups unless a white person was present.

•

Slaves were not allowed to be educated.

•

Slaves were not allowed to marry.

•

Any slave deemed to be in violation of any of these codes was subject to severe
punishment that included whipping, branding, imprisonment, and death.

The Deep South understood that the luxury of owning slaves had become too costly in late
1860 when the Republican party, clearly hostile to slavery, gained control of the federal
government. If this property right were to become reliant on national (and now hostile) support,
the value of a slave would respectively be reduced. The South decided to abandon this national
institutional framework. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 designated the latitude, 36 degrees
30 minutes, as being a dividing line. It declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of
latitude 36°30’; slavery was allowed below the line, but not above. The Dred Scott decision,
officially known as Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, was a legal case in which Scott a free
slave, attempted to sue for his right to freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857,
ruled 7 - 2 against Scott who at the time, was located in a Free State and territory where slavery
was illegal, and so he was not thereby entitled to his freedom. The ruling also supposed that
African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States. Constitutional
scholars believe that Scott v. Sandford is broadly considered the worst decision ever adjudicated
by the Supreme Court. The decision created the sectional controversy, which moved the country
closer to civil war (Wright & Wright, 1983). The South attempted to secede from the North in an

16

effort to alter the political climate, and they considered that they had too much stake in the
institution of slavery to see it dissolve (Gunderson, 1974).
Slavery was so deeply ingrained in the self-professed values of the American nation. Written
into the Declaration of Independence were the words “created equal”; all are entitled to “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, the owner of those words also owned
approximately 150 slaves. Jefferson’s part in preparing the Declaration exemplifies the hypocrisy
that still exists in the United States. Claiming to be a nation committed to liberty and equality,
the United States had slavery dictate its politics and its culture, leaving no doubt that these
written words were not for all. All but five U.S presidents between 1788 and 1860 were slave
owners (Richards, 2003). Many justices on the Supreme Court between the same periods also
owned slaves, as did many who led Congress, while top military men, Andrew Jackson, Zachary
Taylor, and Winfield Scott also took part in the practice. Antebellum America was a
slaveholder’s domain. Political angst was two-fold; slaves and southerners, blacks, and whites
were affected. Self-expressive free speech was non-existent in the South for those who opposed
slavery or racism. Defenders of slavery embraced the challenges presented by Abolitionists.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, both black and white abolitionists conducted an
assault against slavery in which their endeavors proved to be an enormous success. The
abolitionists focused their attention on slavery, bringing it to the fore, which made it difficult to
ignore. They amplified the split that had endangered the union of the nation this all took place
close to the time of the Constitutional Convention. Early objectors to the slave trade were
Quakers even though some Quakers were slaveholders, some objected to the African slave trade
and the continuous bondage of those kidnapped. They opposed the system of dividing enslaved
family members by sale to different masters. This continued into the nineteenth century, where
17

together many abolitionists formed many antislavery societies. These groups petitioned
Congress, held abolition meetings and conferences, boycotted products made with slave labor,
printed stacks of literature, and gave countless speeches. Some abolitionists violently protested
as a means for ending slavery. Even though black and white abolitionists worked as a team, by
the 1840s there was a divergence in values and methods. The white abolitionists continued to
emphasize slavery alone, while the black American abolitionists incorporated anti-slavery
activities and rhetoric with mandates for racial equality and justice. Those who opposed slavery
used economics, history, religion, legality, social good and even humanitarianism, in order to
promote their arguments.
Those who wanted slavery to continue also voiced concern regarding the economy, saying
that if slavery were to be abolished then the economy would be in turmoil, especially in the
South where slave labor constituted the majority of their economy. They appealed that the cotton
and tobacco industries would collapse (McMichael et al., 1985). They were also concerned of
what the outcome would be if slaves were freed. The argument was that there would be sweeping
unemployment with widespread disorder, leading to rebellions, carnage, and lawlessness. The
French Revolution was specified as an example of what might transpire and they argued that
slavery should remain, so that the slave masters they could maintain their lifestyle, which in turn
created stability for the slaveholding peers and for all free people who enjoyed the remuneration
of the slave society.
In 1865, American slavery was ceremoniously abolished. In 1863 President Lincoln, had
issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring, “All persons held as slaves within any State, or
designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States,
shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Nonetheless, the Emancipation Proclamation did
18

not end slavery in the nation. In addition, the Confederate States of America did not observe the
laws and policies generated in Washington. In 1863, the Civil War had yet to reach its
conclusion. Lincoln recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation would have to be followed
by a constitutional amendment in order to guarantee the abolishment of slavery. This amendment
had been preceded by a federal restriction on the importation of slaves in 1808, by the
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and by legislative bans against slavery in many of the states
prior to 1865. However, the 13th Amendment was the first unconditional constitutional action to
end the institution of slavery and the first of the amendments to protect the equal status of black
people (the others are the 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments). The 38th Congress, proposed the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to the legislatures of the several states on
January 31, 1865. The Secretary of State declared, in a proclamation on December 18, 1865, to
have been ratified by the legislatures of 27 of the 36 states. [1] Legislation introduced in the
United States Senate and passed on April 8, 1864. The following year the same bill entered into
the United States Congress and it passed on January 31, 1865. The same bill later, that same year
was ratified on December 6, 1865. That bill was the 13th Amendment and it was legislation
written in order to abolish slavery in the United States.
The 13th amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War before the Southern states had
been restored to the Union and should have easily passed the Congress. Although the Senate
passed it in April 1864, the House did not. At that point, President Abraham Lincoln took an
active role to ensure the bill’s passage through Congress. Lincoln insisted the supplementary
passage of the 13th Amendment to the Republican Party platform at the upcoming Presidential
elections. His efforts met with success when the House passed the bill in January 1865 with a
vote of 119 - 56. President Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress, submitting the

19

proposed amendment to the state legislatures. The required number of states (the vote was 27 out
of 36) ratified it by December 6, 1865. The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution
stipulates that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, nor any
place subject to their jurisdiction” (Maltz, 1990). With the adoption of the 13th Amendment, the
United States found a final constitutional solution to the issue of slavery. The 13th Amendment,
along with the 14th and 15th, is one of the trio of Civil War amendments that greatly expanded the
civil rights of Americans (Maltz, 1990).
However, the wording, a clause of the 13th Amendment, “as a punishment for crimes” has
permitted a form of slavery to continue well into the 21st century. This amendment gave
Congress the authority to implement this article by legislation. The 13th amendment became law
as a legal document in order to abolish slavery yet; African Americans remained unprotected to
discrimination with little to no rights. This had, and continues to have, a considerable social and
political affect. After the abolishment of slavery segregation remained until the Civil Rights
Movement in the 1960s, paving the way for African Americans to attain equal rights. As
previously stated, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, with the exception of convicts. The
U.S prison system with its disproportionate mass incarceration, allows slavery to continue under
a different guise. A few 20th century abolitionist movements have attached themselves explicitly
while using the same practices that the 19th century abolitionists and antislavery advocates used.
“Abolitionism as defined here is the conglomerate of many local movements that express
abolitionist aims indirectly through challenging the fundamental methods of the prison-industrial
complex - mandatory minimum sentences, harsh penalties for nonviolent drug offenses, and the
continuous construction of prisons that goes on regardless of crime rates” (Davis, 1996).

20

Black Lives Matter was created in 2012 after 17-year-old African American teenager
Trayvon Martin was gunned down by white vigilante George Zimmerman, who was later
acquitted. Black Lives Matter appeals for action in response to the infectious anti-Black racism
that infuses society in the U.S. Embedded in the experiences of Black people in this country who
have continued to resist the dehumanization of their culture and ethnicity. Black Lives Matter
(BLM) goes beyond the “extrajudicial” killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. The
BLM movement was born out of necessity. The BLM needed to express that black lives are just
as important as white lives, not that black lives are better or more precious. Using the present
time in terms of how the refinements of the Jim Crow have been incorporated into social order,
with the connections between chattel slavery and recent historical periods in regards to the
administrative violence of mass incarceration and the astonishing violence of police murder on
blacks, it is also emblematic of the violence on anti-black cultural organization. BLM looks to
challenge the evident racial ambush of the colorblind era, the racialized conflict over the
injustice of the criminal justice system. BLM aims to give credence due to the historical
association of blackness with criminality and whiteness with innocence, where blacks are
obvious criminals and whites are the earnest victims (Chatelain & Asoka, 2015).
Slaves were punished according to slave codes. Prior to the Civil War, the criminal
justice system only pertained to whites. Even though the abolition of slavery created a number of
essential changes in state criminal justice systems, the permanence of how white and black
offenders were treated and controlled remained. When slavery was abolished, criminal
prosecutions and punishment were modified. Yet considering the damage and pain caused by
“separate but equal” on white and black felons, slavery endured and continued to haunt almost
every feature of social and economic organization in the post-Civil War South.

21

In the U.S., the southern prison system in the early 20th century consisted of three
separate systems: state prison buildings modeled on those in the North, the county chain gang,
and the state prison farm. During the 19th century, the state prison system was comprised of a
number of prison buildings, of which many had been built before the Civil War to accommodate
white offenders, and a varied number of huts or lean-to accommodations within stockades built
on plantations, adjacent to coal mines and pine forests where turpentine was extracted. Rolling
cages were used; these were pushed along the railroad tracks that had been laid by black
prisoners. As well as settlements or camps that were operated by private companies who also
leased state convicts, post-Civil War punishment in the South included a county system of hiring
out vagrants and petty offenders to labor on local farmers (Arnett & Tannenbaum, 1924). Many
historians point to the economic collapse of the southern state governments during
Reconstruction as the mean reason why the convict lease system was such a success (Greene,
2007). Although states on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line had tested leasing out prison
buildings and the labor of prisoners to private contractors, most embraced a variation on the
contract system whereby prisoners worked for outside employers and worked under the
supervision of outside supervisors whilst still under the disciplinary control of a warden and
guards. The leasing of state prisoners to private companies and surrendering any accountability
for supervising and disciplining was quickly institutionalized in the South after the Civil War,
and became a widely-used practice. Many prisons built prior to the war were devastated because
of the conflict, but the economy was in too bad of a shape to build new ones, and so leasing was
adopted. This arrangement had quite a significant economic attraction, as state governments were
paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the companies that leased convicts (Carter, 1964).

22

Below are two different accounts of arrests made, mandating the clause in the 13th
Amendment, and the way in which African American lives can be impacted, and changed
forever under the U.S criminal justice system and its policies. The accounts are just two of many
common occurrences people of color face when they encounter U.S law enforcement and
criminal justice system:
…Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African-American
mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas. All but one of
those people arrested were African-American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you
have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your courtappointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the
prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence.
Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to
your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to
ten years’ probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation
costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps;
you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve
years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your
children will be taken away from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses
all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the
entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the
prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain
custody of your children.

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…Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African-American victim
of the Hearne drug bust. You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of
your eighteen month old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up
and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter
before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed
to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any
drug transaction; you don't know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to
cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the
charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest
and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your
car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on
Drugs. (Alexander, 2010).
Michelle Alexander makes three claims in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an
Age of Colorblindness; (1) that our society is recapitulating the atrocities of the original Jim
Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation on the false premise of “separate but equal,” (2)
that we have a systemic problem of rising mass incarceration in this country, and (3) that our
alleged “colorblind” age prevents many people from seeing or admitting that that there are racist
implications behind our high rates of mass incarceration. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and
activist, is author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he originated the term conscientização
in Portuguese, translated from the original Portuguese as conscientization to mean
“consciousness raising” or “critical consciousness.” The term concerns “learning to perceive
social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements
of reality,” according to Freire. In view of the disciplinary nature of silence, Freire argues that

24

“human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true
words, with which men [sic] transform the world” (Freire, 1970). Freire’s effort is to reconstruct
the “culture of silence,” and especially to unpack and disclose the “the multiple forms of public
silencing” that have contributed to sustaining oppressive cultural institutions and practices. Freire
recognizes silence as both a consequence of and a form of resistance to oppression. He goes
beyond explaining the structuring of silence, and dedication to reclaiming the silenced voices.
The fundamental belief is that silenced people have the right to speak out and to be heard.
Conscientization strives to raise mindfulness of social systems that propagate imbalances in
order to assign longstanding forms discrimination.
Similarly, Alexander suggests that the U.S criminal justice system is colorblind.
Although the public are led to believe that within our superior societal laws, justice is distributed
equally with no discrimination to age, sex, class or race, the disproportionate number of people
of color behind bars in the U.S would have us believe otherwise. No other country in the world
imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The War on Drugs and now the War on
Terror increases the prison population exponentially. While “Legal intervention deaths” of
civilians resulting in the death of someone killed by a law-enforcement or other peace officer
while that officer is on duty (or not), and occupational homicides of law-enforcement officers
have gathered growing scrutiny in the U.S, due to recurrent continuous high-profile episodes.
These incidents are not only destructive to the victim’s families as well as having a direct effect
on communities and neighborhoods; these reoccurring incidents corrode the relationship forged
between law-enforcement agencies and the diverse citizens they serve to protect. Although these
killings make up a small percentage of the number of total U.S. homicides, they characterize a

25

major public health burden and can provoke and promote violence leading to unrest and possibly
more fatalities (Buehler, 2017).
The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa
did at the height of its apartheid era (Tierney, 2013). In 1972, there were less than 350,000
people imprisoned nationwide; today there are more than two million. The main reason for this
dramatic increase can be attributed to the War on Drugs: “The percentage of drug arrests that
result in prison sentences (rather than dismissal, community service, or probation) has
quadrupled, resulting in a prison-building boom the likes of which the world has never seen”
(Alexander, 2010). Maintaining the revolving door of incarceration and release, guarantees
greater numbers of young men will experience prison life, and see it as a constant to adulthood.
However, the systematic nature of the U.S criminal justice system is decidedly unbalanced.
African Americans, more than any demographic suffer greatly due to the soaring prison
expansion. African Americans comprise of more than 40 percent of the current prison population
yet only make up 12 percent of the U.S. population. At any given time, roughly 12 percent of all
young black men between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine are behind bars, compared to
less than 2 percent of white men in the same age group. Roughly, one third of those remanded
are under criminal justice supervision. During a lifetime, virtually one in three young black men
and well over half of young black high school dropouts can expect to be locked up. This
continuous trend means that young black men have a greater chance of going to prison than they
do going to college, or serving their country in the armed services, or of any kind of
employment. Prison is no longer seen as a rare possibility or at most, an extreme possibility
among the nation’s most disparaged groups; it is regarded as a huge probability. In addition, for

26

those marginalized groups it is now seen as normal and a projected symbol in the transition to
adulthood.
These statistics seem to support the title of Alexander’s book that the justice system is
indeed colorblind. How the systematic imprisonment of young people of color and the mass
incarceration rate aids the U.S economy will follow later. This paper recognizes the everincreasing confinement rate of individuals of color. Most prominently, Latino men and Black
men, where incarceration is a direct result of governmental legislations in the guise of wars on
drugs and “ghettos” deemed to be out of control, while proposing that the association helps to
maintain the socioeconomic differences that are inherent in capitalism and have been in place
since the abolishment of chattel slavery. These actions have continued to deny equal educational
and employment opportunities to people of color while destabilizing cultural identities.
Acknowledging that all human rights stem from the intrinsic dignity of the human being,
international human rights law demands that the fundamental objective of all penal systems must
tolerate those imprisoned, nurture those imprisoned, and facilitate rehabilitation. Yet, since 1980,
the US prison population has more than quadrupled, an increase driven in principle by severer
penalties for non-violent offenses. Simultaneously, as prison construction costs increase, many
states have had to cut funding for rehabilitation, education and other programs. The United States
is responsible for close to 22 percent of the world’s prison population, while it only has five
percent of the world’s population. Then incarceration total at the end of 2016 was over two
million in U.S. prisons, including local and county jails. It is important to reiterate to underline
the serious damaging effect of this process. One explanation for the disproportionate number of
blacks incarcerated in the American penal system is the continuation of laws that have long since
been eradicated but are still active through new means of legislation. These pieces of legislation

27

like the Jim Crow laws of the past parallel and embody the same outcome, management to
deprive and humiliate.
Even though slavery was born out of an economic requirement, it produced enslavement that
launched a racially based doctrine that imparts analogous aspects with racially devised detention.
Historically, plantations were penal colonies – prison’s that exploited many forms of labor with
conditions that had adverse effects on those persecuted – exploitation of labor in many areas
such as, agricultural, domestic, and industrial labor all physically and psychologically damaging
-- the dehumanization of beings (James, 2005). Prisons of the modern day are the emblem of the
plantation. The antebellum plantation precept of dehumanization was archetypal of slave-masters
that revolved around sexual terror and domination, beatings, regimentation of bodies, exploited
labor, denial of religious and cultural practices, substandard food, health care, and housing
forced migration, isolation in “lockdown” for punishment and control, denial of birth family and
kin. That precept is routinely exercised and reinscribed in contemporary penal sites (James,
2006). Physical, emotional, sexual, and economic exploitation and violence are practiced
regularly on bodies with as much vigor and disregard in sites out of sight from regular public
surveillance. “The old plantation was a prison. The new prison is a plantation” (Wacquant,
2001). Both reconfigure the rural racial landscape, where whites receive and process bodies that
are forcibly transported, mostly from “black” neighborhoods and cultures and frequently
relocated to culturally unaccustomed areas. “In unfamiliar environments, isolated captives
observe and contribute in subjugation and the demeaning of their civil or human rights reducing
them to the rights of slaves” (Wacquant, 2001).
The debate regarding the effects of the current growth in prison construction and inmate
population in the United States has been one of fervor. Some would say that prisons make the
28

public safer and the expansion should continue into the near future and beyond. This argument
suggests that prisons are a great crime reducing tool, making everyone safer by their means of
prevention to prospective criminality and by lessening the chances of an individual to commit or
likely to commit crimes (Zimring & Hawkins, 1988). Some point to the crime rates today,
saying that they are noticeably lower than in the past, as evidence. Perhaps reductions in crime
rates have diminished for all serious felony crimes, with noticeable reductions in the most
serious violent offenses. Additionally, the biggest reductions in victimization rates have occurred
among low-income households and minorities (Minton & Zeng, 2015). The recent surge in
prison population is largely behind these crime statistics, one can argue, and the policy shifts
motivating these upsurges in incarceration rates have created an unmistakable and quite
authenticated dispersal of benefit. Those non-political voices that are in opposition to the
increase of prison expansion do so mainly due to the cost factor. Those non-political groups in
opposition say that the costs far outweigh the likelihood crime is reduced. Research suggests that
crime prevention practices have failed to reduce crime by any significant amount yet the
incarceration rate grows at an unmatched number. With growing evidence surrounding the
exorbitant costs of imprisonment, the unnecessary disproportionate imprisonment of people of
color leads to even fewer opportunities in an already depressed labor market, for ex-offenders.
And while the incarceration of people of color already succeeds in destroying families and
weakening otherwise stable communities, it also lends to, among high-offending demographic
groups and high prison-sending communities, the legal disenfranchisement of ex-inmates in a
number of states, and the acceleration of the spread of infectious diseases such as AIDS among
inmates and their non-incarcerated partners (Western, 2006). Consequently, there are more

29

(generally dark-skinned) people carrying out mandatory prison terms, who are in effect subjected
to unpaid prison labor, harder labor in America today than it was in 1830 (Burrows, 2016).
Earlier the subject of racism and slavery was discussed, how slavery is an economic
condition not based on race. The enslavement and subsequent maltreatment of blacks changed
that. The U.S criminal justice system has always operated in synchronization with other
institutions and social policy, to maintain the racial caste system keeping black people
subservient. Racial bias is not provisional to or even predominantly in the minds of those who
manage the system (Maclin, 1998). Racism is entrenched in the exact structure of the system and
concomitant in its every feature, beginning with how crimes are defined, how suspects are
identified, how charging decisions are made, how trials are conducted, and how punishments are
imposed. A complete harmonious mechanism successfully despoils a group of people by stateimposed mass incarceration, capital punishment, and police terror. These practices are not only
restrictive they serve to disenfranchise a shocking amount of black people, while devastating
communities. The obvious and explicit violence imposed in the Jim Crow era unequivocally to
reestablish blacks as slaves, has been reinvented with today’s criminal codes and processes
which function screened by the colorblind due process, allowing the criminal justice system to
carry out their racist practices covertly, leaving most Americans blind to the realities. Americans
claiming ignorance are also unaware of the disproportionate involvement of blacks, which only
helps to reinforce the stereotype that they are inherently susceptible to crime. This leaves the
general population to believe that this extraordinary amount of brutality is ordinary and essential
for its protection. Recent studies show that whites who are freed from prison have a better
chance of being employed than blacks who have the same exact resumes but without a criminal
conviction (Roberts, 2007). Just 100 years ago, blacks were lynched every four days. These open

30

displays of violence—sometimes pre-advertised —were performed in order to terrorize blacks
and keep them subordinate. Wealthy black boroughs like Rosewood, Florida, or lynch mobs who
resented their wealth burned the “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa. Nowadays, blacks are killed by
the police close to the same rate as lynching’s occurred 100 years prior (Wilkerson, 2014).
Racism is conducted through structures, as well as individual attitudes. Today’s social structures
encourage whites’ continuous “investment” in their whiteness. The mass incarceration system of
today is more of a social structure operating on racial indifference and fear, one that turns whites
against blacks. Du Bois noted exactly how permitting working-class whites to police blacks was
one component of the wage of whiteness (Arnold, 1991).
Two institutions were in existence during the colonial period, and the combination of these
two institutes formed the basis of the modern prison. These two institutions were jails and the
workhouses. The jails were mostly used for detaining those accused of a crime awaiting trial and
for the remanding of the aforementioned debtors and religious and political offenders. They were
seldom used for imprisonment. During court a “gaol delivery” was made, and almost all of those
being held were delivered to the court; meanwhile the jail was restocked with others awaiting to
see the judge. Only those who were arrested because of political and religious offenses, debtors,
and the rare criminal who received a penalty of imprisonment, stayed in jail longer the time inbetween court session (Wines, 1910).
Workhouses emerged around the middle of the sixteenth century, reaching their highest
development in Holland. Workhouses were used in many countries in Europe, in Australia, the
West Indies and in the United States. More than two hundred years after the inception of
workhouses, they eventually became housing for less hardened criminals. In Europe, workhouses
had many different usages, they mainly served the mentally ill and became known for being
31

psychiatric institutions. The early usage for the workhouses in the United States was to reduce
vagrancy and beggars, not for real criminals. The West Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers
advancement of the modern penitentiary produced the binary accomplishment of replacing
imprisonment for corporal punishment in the management of criminals and of combining the
prison and the workhouse. The West Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers created imprisonment as
the archetypal form of punishment for criminals, and the philosophy for this approach called
imprisonment “should not be in idleness but at hard labor the priority of their accomplishment in
this regard there can be no doubt.” A century later the rule “that imprisonment at hard labor
should be in cellular separation” was added, and so the modern prison system was born (Barnes,
1918).
Records do not give an accurate start date for when imprisonment became the punishment
for when someone committed a crime. All that is known with any amount of truth is that at the
beginning of the 18th century imprisonment was uncommon, except for incidences related to
political and religious offenders and debtors. The 18th century is when corporal punishment
transitioned to imprisonment; the process began to take shape in the 1700s moving more quickly
after 1775 (Wines, 1910). Imprisonment is now the program of punishment for most crimes
committed in the prison systems of today, although this is quite a recent form of punishment.
Punishment theory has attempted to resolve questions, such as what is a just penalty for crime?
How severely should society punish criminals? Moreover, what are the nature and causes of
criminal behavior? More recently, the focus has been fixed on the moral and practical
implications of prison privatization and the use of privately owned and operated companies that
produce, manage, and allocate prison services. Theories of punishment have a philosophical
duality, utilitarian and retributive. The intent of the utilitarian theory of punishment is to punish

32

offenders as discouragement, or as a “deterrent.” With retributive theory of punishment,
offenders are punished consequentially, because they deserve to be punished. The deterrence
theory of punishment can be traced back to the early works of classical philosophers Thomas
Hobbes (1588–1678), Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). These
theorists remonstrated against the legal policies that had governed European thinking for over a
thousand years, and against the spiritualistic justifications of crime on which they were
formulated. In addition, these social contract theorists supplied the substance for modern
deterrence theory in criminology (Hobbes, 1968).
The U.S. concept of punishment synthesizes both utilitarian and retributive theories. The
most commonly accepted rationale for punishment in the United States is retribution. When a
person is convicted, and sentenced, the sentence given is always, for the most part, a form of
retribution. Prior to prison privatization the prison crime rates were low, and there is no concrete
reason as to why crime rates fell in the U.S for many decades. One reason could be that the
increased bureaucratizing, industrializing, and centralizing of countries changed socialization
patterns which in consequence directed people to conformity (Lane, 1992). Recent debate by
economists and moral theorists recognize that the privatization of prisons has both
consequentialist and deontological components. Ethical theorists, who mostly come from an
economist background, see incarceration as a public good. The services of law and order,
imprisonment being one key component, produce positive externalities to non-payers. The logic
is similar for incarceration. The inevitability of punishment from committing a crime, merely
means making sure that some sort of retribution takes place. Classical theorists believe that if
those who have committed crimes and know that their negative acts will be disciplined, they will
stop from any further criminality in the future. Moreover, the punishment they receive needs to

33

be instant in order to discourage crime. The quicker the punishment is administered to the time
of the offense, the greater the prospect of offenders understanding that crime does not pay.
Deterrence theorists understand that with harsh, guaranteed, and immediate punishment a cogent
individual will weigh the pros and cons before participating in crime and will be discouraged
from breaking the law if the loss is greater than the gain. Classical philosophers believe that a
guarantee is more effective in counteracting crimes than the harshness of punishment. Classical
philosophers reject torture as a means of obtaining confessions, and the death penalty as an
effective means of admonishing murderers and criminals of other serious crimes (Gibbs, 1968).
Torture would be a deterrent for other, would-be criminals in the hope that out of fear, they
would refrain from criminal activity (Ehrlich, 1975). When a third party is involved and benefits
from punishment services, and where they are not subject to any reward it is deemed a “nonexcludable” good. Non-excludable goods are an “under-provided” commodity by voluntary
markets. “Nobody pays and nobody gets, even though the good [in this case, additional units of
incarceration services] is worth more than it would cost to produce” (Friedman, 1996). Capital
punishment is beyond the just powers of the state. Typically, state subsidies can and should
resolve the problems associated with sub-optimal output. However, new research in the theory of
public goods show that it is not absolute that government administration will be more efficient
than the allegedly inefficient market (Holcombe, 1997).
One true objective of our society is to achieve the optimal mix of output that best fulfills
society’s needs. The optimal mix of output is the most desirable combination of output attainable
with existing resources, technology, and social values. Inspection into the morality of
incarceration concludes that like consequentialist analysis; that is to say, that prison services
should not be harmonious to private markets, but that a different outcome is reached using an

34

alternate methodology. Criminal justice institutions are said to possess exceptional conceptual
qualities; they are comprised of pivotal matters of justice that involve restricting the freedom and
removing an individual’s independence (Sparks, 1994).
The introduction of privatized prisons can be traced back to early American history; the
expansion of the U.S. prison privatization is a somewhat recent development. In the eighteenth
century, local governments, in the Midwest of the U.S., would compensate private jailers who
held criminals who awaited trial. In order to guarantee that a criminal would remain behind bars
and to provide jail services in the future, the jail keeper would receive compensation. The jailers
charged the state inflated rates to hold prisoners. This private enterprise of contracting was a
result of criminal justice policies, that at the time focused on fines and public humiliation; these
included being placed in stockades and branding. This private-public relationship was
transformed with the creation of the first publicly run prison in 1790 and, with the notable
exception of the aforementioned convict leasing for forced labor, the next century saw private
business involvement in corrections limited to providing contracted services, such as food
preparation, medical care, and transportation.
The history of convict leasing as a part of the prison system is better understood for the
construct being a part of a complex social system of racial debilitation previously guaranteed by
the constitution of slavery. Namely, that the convict lease system was a component of a larger
web of law and custom that efficiently protected the South’s racial order. Because of these
authoritative measures, the inhumaneness of convict leasing corresponds to a more
comprehensive blueprint of terrorization and cruelty. Those who leased convicts also controlled
how they were treated. Convict leasing can then be judged to be of a more deep-rooted part of
that system rather than an anomaly. As well as having social usefulness, convict leasing had
35

various and very evident economic benefits. The practice diverted the care and expense of
thousands of prisoners away from that of the state and delivered a substantial pool of
exceptionally cheap labor. This order of natural resource was allowed to be exploited, aiding in
the attraction of capital interest from the North, feeding the obsession that consumed business
leaders in the post-bellum South. In 1880, Enoch Cobb Wines, a prison reformist, reported that
excluding the states where convict leasing was proficient, about one-half of the costs of penal
administration came from prison income. That is to say, in other states most of the taxpayers
were responsible for the cost of incarceration (Wines, 1879). The states that took part in convict
leasing saw proceeds constituted 372 percent of costs on average (Mancini, 1978). Convict
leasing aided the state by saving money and created a healthy economy, as it became a viable
profit-making venture. The savings for each state government were only for expenses. African
Americans were criminalized for committing “Black Code-type” crimes and were subjected to
harsher sentences than those given to whites (Du Bois, 1935). These were evident in the U.S.
Southern states between 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War Black Code laws were established.
The notable difference between the slave code and the black code seems to be timing. Black
codes were put in place post emancipation. These laws restricted the freedom of African
Americans, forcing them to work in a labor economy that offered only low wages or plunged
them into debt. A few examples of Black Code-type offenses were:
•

Race was by blood; the presence of any amount of black blood made one black.

•

Employment was required of all freedmen; violators faced vagrancy charges.

•

Freedmen could not assemble without the presence of a white person.

36

•

Freedmen were assumed agricultural workers and their duties and hours were tightly
regulated.

•

Freedmen were not taught to read or write.

•

Public facilities were segregated.

•

Violators of these laws were subject to being whipped or branded.

These items do not tell the complete account of the exploitation of the prisoners. Mine owners,
railroad builders, lumber merchants, and other capitalists in the impoverished South accrued
huge profits collectively. Convict leasing was not only advantageous whereby Southern states
with dwindling treasuries were able to escape costly expenses. This practice afforded some of the
South's leading businessmen and politician’s their primary source of personal capital.
Systematically convict leasing served to support those in control, both economically and socially.
For nearly half a century, they combined to stave off repeated attempts of abolition (Carelton,
1969). Nongovernmental organizations were also greatly involved in maintaining juvenile
detention facilities, albeit they were not for profit (Harding, 2001).
Most of the criminal justice institutions in the U.S. and almost the entire developed countries
are owned and operated by governments or under their authority. Fifty years ago, prison guards
did not have a labor union. Nowadays in every state, the prison guard’s union is a leading
financial donor to electoral campaigns and an active lobbyist for certain penal policies (Zimring
& Hawkins, 1988). Private-sector analysts frequently talk of stakeholders in private businesses
and managers, employees, customers, including on occasion the general public. Around 25 years
ago, the business of prisons had stakeholders who were primarily public officials and employees,
prisoners, and there was a lack of interest from the general public. Today those stakeholders are
37

inclined to be all of the above with the addition of voters, labor unions, private for-profit
corporations, communities housing prisons, and the politicians, lobbyists, and political
organizations that represent all these interests (Zimring & Hawkins, 1988).
In 2010, private prisons housed 128,195 of the 1.6 million state and federal prisoners in the
United States, and this accounted for eight percent of the total population. Between, 1999-2010,
the number of inmates in private prisons swelled 80 percent, compared to an18 percent increae in
the overall prison population. Whereas both federal and state governments more and more relied
on privatization, the federal prison system’s devotion to privatization became more intense. The
number of federal prisoners held in private prisons rose from 3,828 to 33,830, an increase of 784
percent in comparison the number of state prisoners incarcerated privately, which grew by 40
percent, from 67,380 to 94,365. Today, 30 states continue a certain level of privatization, with
seven states housing more than a quarter of their prison populations privately (Guerino, Harrison
& Sabol, 2011). Reasons for this dramatic upsurge in prison population can be attributed to
changes in policies, which left adverse social affects towards certain groups, the main policy
changes having to do with the war on drugs.
Drugs have been a long-standing issue in the U.S. The Nixon administration began to
recognize drugs as a national problem during and after the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan saw
drugs being problematic when Crack Cocaine began to be distributed and sold in the streets,
Reagan began a zero-tolerance policy, as taking back the streets, and his war on drugs rhetoric is
arguably, what won him the presidency. The outcome of this policy saw increased sentences for
individuals caught in the possession of crack cocaine. First time offenders were given severe
sentences, and then came the three strikes and you are out policy, meaning with any third
offense, no matter the crime, you were given a mandatory life sentence. The escalation in the
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criminal justice system in recent decades has corresponded with a multitude of economic
conditions and changes in social policy that have had overwhelming consequences on income
distribution, employment and family structure. Since the 1970s, many metropolitan
neighborhoods have seen the deterioration of manufacturing, the increase in low-wage service
industries and a decline in a substantial part of the middle-class tax base. Real incomes have
declined for most Americans during this time, with the gap between rich and poor stemming
from the 1980s. For many black male high school dropouts in their twenties, annual incomes
dropped by 50 percent (Sawicki, 1995). Social service assistance, such as mental health services
and the like have systematically declined and the social issues that they address have worsened.
The effect of these changes on the African American community has created an
intersection of race and class effects. Since African Americans are disproportionately represented
in low-income urban communities, the effects of these social problems are exaggerated. The
continuation of housing segregation aggravates the problematic life circumstances within these
communities, causing exceptionally high rates of unemployment, low performance education,
and excessive crime rates (Body-Gendrot, Massey, & Denton, 1994). Public policies adopted
during the 1970s and 1980s expedited an increase in prison privatization. During the Reagan
administration, the War on Drugs introduced punitive sentencing policies, including mandatory
minimum sentences, and this gave way to a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population.
The result led to a heavy burden on the public sector; guided by private corporations, the 1970s
saw a resurrection in halfway house operations. A decade late in coordination with the Reagan
administration, by way of contracting with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS),
they detained undocumented immigrants. These forms of privatization on the lower end of the
correctional spectrum were followed by the reappearance of for-profit prison privatizations in

39

1983. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) laid claim to have the ability to build and
operate state and federal prisons with the same quality of service provided in publicly operated
prisons, but more cost effective. One year later, CCA was awarded a contract to build a facility
in Hamilton County, Tennessee, the very first example of the public sector contracting
management of a prison to a private company. Soon after in 1985, CCA aimed to control and
manage the entire Tennessee prison system. That bid was unsuccessful. It was rejected by the
state legislature after facing strong opposition after CCA’s operating costs were noted, as well as
inmate escapes. Although CCA was being scrutinized, the company was able to secure more
contracts in Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky by the end of 1987. More corporations got into the
business of prison privatization, including Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, (now known as
the GEO Group, Inc) (Minton & Zeng 2015). During the last few decades, many researchers
have studied the degree to which racial disparity within the criminal justice system can be
explained by higher crime rates among blacks or other pertinent circumstances. Historically,
there can be little reservation about the noticeable part race plays in the administering of criminal
justice, understanding the history of lynching in the South, the development of chain gangs, and
the well-documented relationship race has played in promotion of the death penalty.
Recent research on these issues is mixed, based on newly found evidence. While a few
studies document detailed cases where race was a determining factor in unwarranted outcomes,
much research has determined that, with one significant exception, race plays a minimal part in
disciplining and imprisonment. One review, concludes that “for nearly a decade there has been a
near consensus among scholars and policy analysts that most of the black punishment
disproportions result not from racial bias or discrimination within the system but from patterns of
black offending and of blacks’ criminal records” (Tonry, 1995). Another study determines that

40

76 percent of the racial disparity in prison populations is explained by higher rates of offending
among blacks for serious offenses (Blumstein, 1993). Yet it has been well documented that
“Drug law enforcement is the conspicuous exception. Blacks are arrested and confined in
numbers grossly out of line with their use or sale of drugs” (Tonry, 1995). For drug offenses, half
of the racial disproportions in prison unexplainable by higher arrest rates. While the evidence is
mixed and there may be only one exception where race plays a factor, it is a very significant
exception.
With five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s, prison population,
the United States houses the most people incarcerated in prisons in the world. No other society in
history has imprisoned more of its own citizens. The U.S. has incarcerated half a million more
prisoners than China, which has five times the population. Approximately 1 in 100 adults in
America were incarcerated in 2014. Out of an adult population of 245 million that year, there
were 2.4 million people in prison, jail or some form of detention center, most of whom have been
imprisoned for non-violent, victimless crimes, the bulk of them drug-related, an estimated 86
percent (Burrows, 2016). The racially motivated War on Drugs has led to devastated urban
communities and incredible distrust between citizens of color and law enforcement (Porter,
2012). Reagan’s war on drugs adopted new laws in order to better serve and protect, and it
brought with it the issue of racial profiling. Racial profiling became and still is at the heart of
law enforcement procedures when fighting certain aspects of crime. Studies show that the
practice of racial profiling is very much linked to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The
DEA utilized profiling of drug couriers during the mid-1980s in an attempt to eradicate interstate
drug trafficking (Farrell & McDevitt, 2010). This procedure incorporated drug trafficking signs,
such as point-to-point driving patterns, clues as to where contraband might be hidden in vehicles,

41

routes and stops between known drug suppliers and distribution locations, airline tickets paid for
with cash, and particular habits of behavior, plus other characteristics like race, age, and gender
(Pap, 2007). Even seemingly, race and or ethnicity neutral indicators stated in the profile (such as
driving from south to north in a rental car) could in fact inordinately identify members of a
particular racial/ethnic group (Engel & Johnson, 2006). The racial/ethnic profiling practice was
given credence by the official and media discourse, which perpetuated the notion that most
organized crime gangs tend to be ethnically homogenous (Pap, 2007). The profile was included
in the DEA’s training for local and state law enforcement, and approximately 27,000 law
enforcement officers received the training nationwide (Harris, 2003).
The war on drugs is an infection manufactured by the U.S. for many decades, under the
appearance of there being a drug war, heavily encouraged by private prison influence, and until
the recent presidential election results, it seemed to have lost its impetus. Research on the War on
Drugs has proven it an unmitigated failure, by proving many shortcomings, such as a failure to
eradicate drug use or treat drug addiction, an epidemic of overcrowding in federal prisons, and
continued racially motivated investigatory practices. While spending continues, over a trillion
dollars has been spent on the reduction of drug use, (Branson, 2012) studies show (on recent data
collected) that “about forty percent of high school seniors admit to having taken some illegal
drug in the last year -- that is an increase of thirty percent from two decades ago” (Porter, 2012).
In addition, the Global Commission on Drug Policy estimates that, “between 1998 and 2008,
global use of opiates increased by 34.5 percent, cocaine by 27 percent, and cannabis by 8.5
percent” (Lamparello, 2016). In 2011, incarcerated inmates housed in federal prisons for drug
related offenses alone, was over 50 percent. Compare that to four percent for robbery; three
percent for homicide, assault, and kidnapping; and five percent for sex offenses (Lamparello,

42

2016). Sixty-one percent of individuals targeted by Special Weapons and Tactics (“SWAT”)
teams for drug-related crimes are people of color (Lamparello, 2016). These statistics alone are
an indication that the War on Drugs has failed completely and that it is a main underlying reason
as to why there is a “dire” need for private prisons. It is not surprising, therefore, that
corporations such as Correction Corporation of America (CCA) would resist any changes to
federal drug policy; if the War on Drugs ends, the need for profit-driven private prisons is
significantly decreased.
It is a belief in America that the results of these trends extend far beyond the prison walls;
there are widespread assumptions regarding the criminal tendencies where blacks are concerned
that causes far more damage to others than those alleged to have committed a crime. Blacks in
the U.S always been treated as being suspicious and a group to be feared. Yet unlike progressive
trends with opinions on other ethnic groups, connotations between race and crime remain
unyielding. Resulting studies have consistently found blacks to be more predisposed to cause
violence than any other American racial or ethnic group, most commonly categorizing them as
having an aggressive nature with violent tendencies. These classifications for blacks to be seen
as criminals’ stems from a deep-rooted collaboration of white American consciousness,
regardless of level of perception about prejudice or individual views. It would be impossible to
base these details of where these racial stereotypes came from on any one specificity. What has
been to key to the manifestation of the growing disproportionate incarceration rate of young
black men is the U.S criminal justice system, and U.S media coverage which exhibits a more
crooked portrayal of this happening. Experimental studies show that exposure to news coverage
with violent content with a black offender not only strengthens revengeful attitudes where crime
is concerned but adds to any bigoted and negative racial attitudes, particularly to blacks in

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general. Constant coverage depicting images of blacks in custody or imprisoned reinforces the
stereotype that assailants or those with criminal leanings will be black (Pager, 2008).
In the state of Texas, prisoners are required to perform unpaid labor. According to the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice, prisoners begin with a 3:30 a.m. wake-up call, and breakfast is
then served at 4:30 a.m. All physically able-bodied prisoners are to report to for work
assignments by 6 a.m. “Offenders are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a
result of good work habits.” Most prisoners in the prison system work in what are called prison
support jobs. These jobs include cooking, cleaning, laundry, and maintenance. In Texas about
2,500 prisoners that work in the Texas prisons agribusiness system. In this factory-farm system,
there are 10,000 beef cattle, 20,000 pigs and a quarter million egg-laying hens. These prisoners
also produce 74 million pounds of livestock feed per year, 300,000 cases of canned vegetables,
and cotton (it is difficult to get an actual figure where cotton production is concerned). Over 14
million pounds of beef and 10 million pounds of pork per year are processed by prisoners
working the prison meat packaging plant. The prisoner’s unpaid labor reduces prison overheads,
as they produce their own food however the prison system has benefitted from the revenue made
from sales of surplus agricultural production (Burrows, 2016). The inmates who refuse to
perform unpaid labor are placed in solitary confinement. Other states with similar unpaid labor
prison farm systems, where the inmates are forced not only to work in agriculture but perform
logging, quarrying and mining also, include Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado,
Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi and Ohio. Unpaid prison labor distinctly for the
profit of the U.S. government also see inmates farmed out to private enterprises, through what is
known as convict leasing, which is mentioned above. Inmates are sent to work on private

44

agricultural lands or related industries such as fishing and lumbering. The companies that
participate in this form of unpaid labor do so at a huge discount because the labor is free.
These days, CCA and GEO Group jointly manage over half of the contracts in the U.S. They
both generated combined revenues that exceeded $2.9 billion in 2010. CCA, which has the
distinction of being the largest private prison company, manages more than 75,000 inmates and
detainees in 66 facilities. While the GEO Group operates slightly fewer facilities, smaller
companies, including Management & Training Corporation, LCS Correctional Services, and
Emerald Corrections manage multiple prison contracts throughout the United States.
A lot can be gleaned from E.O Wright’s Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Ccass
Analysis, where he surmises that “in the case of labor power, a person can cease to have
economic value in capitalism if it cannot be deployed productively” (Minton & Zeng 2015).
This is the essential condition of people in the ‘underclass’ “... above all [they lack] the
necessary means to acquire the skills needed to make their labor power saleable. As a result, they
are not consistently exploited … the underclass consists of human beings who are largely
expendable from the point of view of the logic of capitalism” (Wright, 1997). Like Native
Americans who became landless underclass in the nineteenth century, repression rather than
incorporation is the central mode of social control directed toward them. Capitalism does not
need the labor power of unemployed inner city. The material interests of the wealthy and
privileged segments of American society would be better served if these people simply
disappeared. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the moral and political forces are such
that direct genocide is no longer a viable strategy. The alternative, then, is to build prisons and
cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass lives (Smith & Hattery, 2008).

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Over the last four decades, the upsurge in the prison population in the U. S. paralleled the
stagnation in the global economy (Browne, 2007). In the early 1970s, the United States and the
G7 nations implemented neoliberal policies, which moved production from the North to the
global South, and this forced complete divisions of workers in the United States out of the
economy. The economic role of the working class in the United States moved from
manufacturing to filling jobs in a rising service industry, African American workers encountered
overwhelming rates of unemployment (Browne, 2007). By the mid-1970s, during the first wave
of “mass incarceration,” the incarceration rate in the United States began to rise, and by the
1980s, it had doubled. This trend continued into the 1990s. In fact, as unemployment numbers
rise, the number of working people actually also increases; the reason for this is that they are
working in prisons. All inmates are employed. Just in California, there are more than 70 factories
in 33 prisons. Prison labor covers a wide variety of jobs, from textile work and construction, to
manufacturing and service work. “Prisoners make shoes, clothing, and detergent; they do dental
lab work, recycling, metal production, and wood production; they operate dairies, farms, and
slaughterhouses. United States Prisons mirror Free Enterprise Zones in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America; the prison is a reflection of the Third World within the United States” (Browne, 2007).
Prisoners have no protection where employment is concerned. Minimum wage laws or any
overtime laws do not protect them, they are explicitly prohibited from any right to action, and
they are not allowed to organize or collectively bargain. The conditions for the overwhelmingly
incarcerated Black and Latino men and women inside the United States prison system are so
comparable to that of workers in the sweatshops of the global South, that in 1995, Oregon
politicians tried persuading Nike to move their production from Indonesia into Oregon prisons.
“We propose that (Nike) take a look at their transportation costs and their labor costs,” Oregon

46

State Representative Kevin Mannix explained in an interview with researcher Reese Erlich, “We
could offer [competitive] prison inmate labor” in Oregon (Browne, 2007).
Considering today’s political and socioeconomic climate, what role should states adopt
when it comes to providing incarceration for its citizens, and paradoxically to what extent should
the market be involved? The following three partnerships have long been associated with the
history of U.S prisons: ownership of the facility in which the prisoners are kept; private use of
prison labor and taking of profits from their labor; and private management of the facility,
including the day-by-day supervision of prisoners (Walker, 1980). Simply put, should prisons be
privatized? And if so at what cost to the public at large? In addition, what of the development in
the theory of public goods, and its relationship on the topic of incarceration? Moreover, what of
the progress, if any, is made concerning the issues of corporations benefitting from unpaid labor
within the privatized prison system? These questions are soon to be answered now that we have a
change in administration. The previous Obama administration began to look at alternatives to
new prison construction and prison privatization. This decision came on the back of a scathing
report 2011 by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Officer of the Inspector General, whose
findings found that overall, privatized prison facilities led to increased security problems and did
not save the government money. The industry had seemed to lose its footing following the DOJ’s
announcement. In August 2016, the US Justice Department under the Obama administration
made plans to phase out use of privately owned prisons, citing safety concerns. Contracts with 13
private prisons were to be reviewed and then expire over the next five years. Then Deputy
Attorney General Sally Yates said, “They do not save substantially on costs and ... they do not
maintain the same level of safety and security.” Stocks of private prison companies trading on
Wall Street saw their shares drop sharply after the announcement. Corrections Corporation of

47

America stock lost almost 50 percent of its value. A report released by the Inspector General
found that private prisons had higher rates of violent incidents and violations of rules compared
with government-run institutions. In 2010 there were 94,365 prisoners being held in private
facilities overseen by states, according to the Sentencing Project group. During the Democratic
presidential primary race, Senator Bernie Sanders made a campaign promise to end the “private,
for-profit prison racket.” Senator Sanders sponsored a bill during his campaign attempting to end
the use of private prisons in September 2015, saying, “…we cannot fix our criminal justice
system if corporations are allowed to profit from mass incarceration.” In a statement after the
decision, Senator Sanders called the move “an important step in the right direction.” Senator
Sanders noted that it is “an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars
than any other country on Earth... due in large part to private prisons” (Burkhardt, 2016), The
U.S. having had many decades of the same criminal justice policies under different
administrations. President Obama had to use executive orders to make sweeping changes
towards criminal justice reforms, due to government gridlock. Because of President Obama’s
executive order use, the incoming president could overturn the changes made.
Thursday November 10, the first Thursday following the 2016, U.S Presidential election,
under the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed the Department of
Justice to reverse the Obama administration’s prior authorization and continue to use private
prisons, a decision that drew heavy criticism from civil rights activists for human rights abuses
and for a lack of public oversight. Why did the Trump administration reverse the previous
decision? Some say, “to just follow the money.” Throughout the career of Jeff Sessions, he has
benefited from large sums of political spending by private prison companies, the private prison
industry also contributed massively by making investments to Donald Trump’s presidential

48

campaign. The GEO Group [2] alone financed the Trump campaign by contributing $100,000,
through a SuperPAC, and added another $250,000 towards his inauguration. Once Sessions
made the announcement, private prison stock prices skyrocketed. The stocks have continued to
increase even more since Sessions reversed the Obama administration’s previous order. At the
same time, Sessions is also fueling Trump’s promised immigration enforcement policy, which
will add many more undocumented people, once arrested, into immigration detention centers,
while increasing the private prison industry’s bottom line and swelling their profit margins.
America’s first three “peculiar institutions,” slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, have this in
common, that they were all tools for the collective extraction of labor and social exclusion of an
outcast group considered extraneous by virtue of the unforgettable triple degradation it
encompasses (Wacquant, 2001). The private prison industry’s lobbyist’s agenda is in complete
contrast to that of the majority of Americans who are in support of criminal justice reform.
Companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America lobby for longer, harsher sentences
that once again benefit all who invest in them increasing their profits. Private prisons are
infamous for cutting corners, human rights abuses, and lack of public accountability (Common
Cause., n. d.). That has all been reversed with the new Trump administration’s plans to build
more prisons, continue, and expand privatization of prisons.
As mentioned, stock prices for the country’s two largest private prison contractors climbed
sharply since GOP nominee Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. The country’s
biggest private prison contractor, CoreCivic (formally known as Corrections Corporation of
America) saw its stock rise more than 58 percent as soon as morning market trading opened.
GEO Group the second largest private prison contractor saw its stock rise by more than 28
percent, during the following hours of trading, and both stocks remain strong. This marked a

49

sharp reversal for an industry that had seen its stocks drastically reduce in price since the Obama
administration’s announcement that it would phase out the use of private contractors for the
Bureau of Prisons facilities. The head of the Department of Homeland Security recommended
that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also review its policies on the use of
private prison contractors - ICE is responsible for about two thirds of immigrant detention beds.
Since Trump won the election, running on a hard-line platform that included cracking down on
undocumented immigrants, the expansion of the controversial practice of stop and frisk,
investors have reignited their faith and support of the private prison industry. They believe now
that instead of a contraction and elimination, the industry will expand and grow. CoreCivic’s
CEO Damon Hininger, before the results of the election were announced, had said that the
company’s future looked promising. Earlier months earnings reports had noted an increase in
arrivals of undocumented immigrants leading to more productivity involving ICE. One of
CoreCivic’s new contracts is to run an immigrant detention center in Cibola County, New
Mexico, formerly a U.S. federal prison. Prominent legislation such as the Comprehensive Crime
Control Act and the Sentencing Reform Act, passed by Congress in 1984, eliminated federal
parole and introduced mandatory minimum sentencing laws for a variety of drug crimes (Coyle,
Campbell & Neufeld, 2003). By removing judge’s discretionary sentencing decisions for
offenses, it is the decision of private prisons to decide the amount of time their potential
“customers” will face. CCA claims in their annual reviews “their growth is dependent on a
number of uncontrollable variables, including sentencing routines in diverse jurisdictions.” The
first privatization of prisons did not occur until 1983 and a systematic study of recidivism rates
has never been conducted. By inspecting the language associated with the contracts and reports
made by private corporations, the motivation behind profit maximization appears clearer.

50

According to the language of their 2008 annual report, “any changes with respect to drugs and
controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested,
convicted, and sentenced.” If the growth of prisoners creates growth of revenue, then it is
reasonable to assume that a company’s objective is to maximize its profit margin as
economically as possible which means more arrests and rearrests (Selman & Leighton, 2010).
Evidence exits that the finances required for rehabilitation and to prevent recidivism has been
reduced systematically by prison firms. Yet studies that examine the effects of decreased
investment in rehabilitation, particularly in private facilities, is limited and their results are often
contradictory (Avio, 152).
It has long been argued that contracted-out incarceration of inmates has moral issues.
Twenty-six contracted-out prisons are said to “profit off the misery and suffering of people.”
Prison activist Paul Wright declares, “at least in public prisons, when prisoners are raped due to
inadequate staffing, no one can say prison officials did so to line their own pockets and
personally profit from the misery of others” (Wright & Herivel, 2013). Activists critical of nongovernmental prisons have attempted to pinpoint characteristics of contracted-out and private
prisons that they see as immoral: The existence of profits. Judith Greene states, “The huge profits
to be made by incarcerating an ever-growing segment of our population serve the system well.
Profits oil the machinery, keep it humming, and speed its growth” (Greene, 2007). Moreover,
Nils Christie adds, “Prison means money. Big money, big in building, big in providing
equipment. And big in running” (Christie, 2016). With bad incentives, tied to close related
profits, there is a growing possibility that prison managers will seek their own interests at the
expense of social welfare: “Corporations with a stake in the expansion of private prisons invested
$3.3 million in candidates for state office and state political parties in forty-four states over the

51

2002-04 election cycle” (Greene, 2007). In theory, these lobbying efforts are seen as a
prevention for reducing crime. Yet, corporations and the private companies indulging in the
prison industry come across as anti-democratic, and they seem to be apathetic to the public will.
They are for profit big businesses that do little if anything at all to benefit of America and its
citizens.
Advocates of prison privatization declare that the private sector benefits by the saving of
resources through greater efficacy. These claims are supported by some reports showing that
private prisons produce cost savings, mainly by hiring no-union staff and paying them a low
wage with poor benefits. They also stated that it would be advantageous for government in the
short term by directing sales of correctional facilities to private companies, as this would save
money when constructing new facilities through public-private initiatives, rather than solely
through government funding. However, studies have shown these benefits to be mostly
erroneous. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) in 1996 looked at four state-funded
studies plus one commissioned one by the federal government. The approaches and results
differed across the studies: Two showed no change in efficiency between private and public
prisons, a third showed that private facilities saved the state a total of seven percent, while the
fourth found the cost of private facilities falling somewhere between that of two similar public
prisons. Another study also found significant cost savings associated with private prisons, but the
GAO criticized the report for using illusory facilities when making comparisons. The authors
noted that they could not definitively conclude that privatization would not save money. Yet they
did establish that, “... these studies do not offer substantial evidence that savings have occurred”
(David Rockefeller Fund and Wallace Global Fund, 2012).

52

In 2009, a meta-analysis produced comparable conclusions. Researchers at the University of
Utah looked at eight cost comparison studies and found a substantial number of different
conclusions. Half of the eight studies found private prisons to be more cost-effective. The other
four were equally divided between public facilities being more cost-effective and both types of
prisons statistically even. This information led the researchers to conclude that, “... prison
privatization provides neither a clear advantage nor disadvantage compared to publicly managed
prisons” and that “... cost savings from privatization are not guaranteed.” This leaves the
question of whether private or public facilities are more cost-effective unanswered. What the
report did determine was that the usefulness of moving toward prison privatization was very
“questionable” (Lundahl, 2007). The GAO’s assessment of the methodologies used in
evaluations is not exclusive. Former Bureau of Prisons Director of Research Gerry Gaes also
made a parallel on reviewing two reports that found conflicting amounts of savings when
evaluating the same three public prisons with a private facility. In a report for the National
Institute of Justice, he found that the study for privatization, heavily favored, did not change the
data on the prisons to scale and failed to account for the correct overhead costs for the private
prison. Gaes noted these cost comparisons deceived and made researching more complicated
(Gaes, 2008). More problems were found and brought to light, when a study found that state-run
prisons are left to take on an unequal number of expensive and high-risk inmates. The study
found that those inmates with minimum or medium levels of security classification made up 90
percent of the private sector’s population, compared with only 69 percent in the public sector
(Blakely & Bumphus, 2004).
Many of these results have been replicated in individual states. Ohio state officials insist that
private facilities often meet or exceed the legal requirement of containing costs and that they are

53

at least five percent below a state-run equivalent. However, a subsequent report by the
nonpartisan Policy Matters Ohio condemned the state’s measurements for relating privately run
prisons to hypothetical public facilities, embellishing overhead and staff costs for public prisons,
and lacking accounting for a higher amount of expensive and high security inmates in public
prisons. Holding these factors to more realistic standards greatly reduced if not completely
diminished the purported advantages of private prisons (Blakely& Bumphus, 2004). The state of
Arizona was also subjected to cost-saving constraints for private prisons. In a 2010 study
conducted by the state’s Department of Corrections, it was found that the state of Arizona did not
save any money by contracting out minimum security beds, and that the state actually spent more
on private medium security beds than that of a publicly operated institution.
The 13th Amendment overwhelmingly restructured the political model along with
emancipation by transferring of power over to the state. The 13th Amendment allowed the state
to regulate affiliations between private individuals; the state also outlined the rules governing
freedom and loss of freedom. With newly assigned power, state jurisdiction had a twofold effect
on legal rights determination for African Americans, and at the same instance, structures of
racism were retained. Convict labor became progressively more racialized. It was agreed that
blacks were more suited for hard physical labor on Southern prison farms and for corporate
railroad and construction company projects (Lichtenstein, 1993). Contrary to prevalent portrayals
of chain gang labor, black women were forced to work on railroad construction, laying lines as
well as other hard labor projects, not just black men. This showed how the slave order was
reflected for the upcoming punishment system. This system of punishment was imitative of the
slave system structure; this mainly Southern post-emancipation prison system suggested support
for antebellum practices and the desire to return to the slave system (Jackson, 1999). Prison

54

systems in the North were originally designed around industrial, not agricultural labor, but
racially based divisions were also refined after emancipation.
Ex-slaves and abolitionists made it impossible to restore and legalize chattel slavery;
however, emancipation came with a price. The wording of the 13th Amendment maintained
“racialized labor” in the form of convict labor. Convict labor developed the post-Civil War
infrastructure throughout the U.S. The struggle became how to determine how “free” unfree
labor would be continued. Labor unions that were cynical about prison labor,\ aggressively
lobbied against the leasing of convicts to private corporations. During the Depression, the unions
made a point that any expansion of prison labor would further endanger an already overfull work
force and interfere with “free markets” in ways that exposed the stability of capitalism. The
prison system resolved this obstacle by creating a “state-use” system where prison labor was
used exclusively for state projects. This resolution removed the competition between convict
labor and union labor, while still permitting convicts to offset their cost to the state (McGinn,
1990). The Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), a New Deal project under
President Roosevelt, performed a comprehensive study of prison labor in all 50 states and
concluded by outlining this new state-use system. Referring to overpopulation and insufficient
facilities, the PIRA was authorized to expand the prison system and the construction of new
prisons in almost every state (Fraser & Gerstle, 1989). There had not been any further statistics
showing that “crime,” especially violent crime, had increased at the time. The majority of those
imprisoned was for being unemployed, leading to the belief that the state had an uncontrollable
unemployment crisis, and prior to the depression there was no need for more prisons. The PIRA
represented one of the many contradictions entrenched in the “New Deal state” showing its
incapacity or reluctance to solve the excess unemployment issue. The PIRA along with a

55

racialized labor system established the slave system. It cleared the path for the prison-industrial
complex that continues to prosper since post-World War II.
Considering the association between the history of slavery and the mass imprisonment of
people of color in the U.S., it might be of benefit to look into how previous prison abolition
movements appear in relation to this history. These groups were usually headed by Quakers or
motivated by Quaker abolitionists. The Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS), operated
in the late 1970s - 1980s, and they believed elimination of mass imprisonment would finalize the
signing of the 13th Amendment emancipation declaration. CAPS collaboratively produced and
co-authored Prison Slavery; they believe that emancipation is incomplete and the 13th
Amendment allowed for penal servitude as punishment for certain crimes, a clause that is
featured in many state constitutions. Prison Slavery cites the significant 1871 court ruling from
Ruffin v. Commonwealth. This landmark Virginia case, noticeably argued using the language of
slavery, set a precedent for state control of inmate bodies and labor:
For the time, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude
to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his
personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time
being a slave of the State. He is civiliter mortus; and his estate, if he has any, is
administered like that of a dead man. (Esposito & Wood, 1982).
CAPS welcomed the abolition of slavery, but saw penal servitude as an embodiment of
slavery. They accused the Quakers for failing to eliminate broader inequalities that were
reflected in the prison system. When Prison Slavery was published in 1982, many states still had
clauses in their constitutions that judged slavery and indentured servitude legal punishments or
had no disclaimer about the legality or illegality of prison enslavement (although some states
56

removed reference to slavery). CAPS proposed a “new abolitionism” to the 13th Amendment
provision and strived to eliminate all clauses from all constitutions. They used education
campaigns that informed the public about prison conditions. They also proposed boycotting
consumer products that were made by prison labor, they championed for alternatives to
imprisonment, and they worked towards an acknowledgement of the class-based exploitation
intrinsic to mass imprisonment. CAPS established coalitions with inmates, ex-offenders and
activists on the outside. They gathered information regarding inhumane treatment of prisoners
and the brutalities that occurred behind prison walls from inmates’ testimonies. Inmates, who
wish to testify, find themselves in a position where they are unable to defend themselves or are
refused the right to give testimony themselves due to the inadequate resources available to them,
or are in fact impeded by criminal justice bureaucracy along with guards who threaten prisoners
with violence for expressing their views while working for change.
Prison labor supports greatly the production of goods and services for almost every big
corporation in America. Here are several of those corporation who participate and profit from
this industrious enterprise; Whole Foods – coffee, chocolate and bananas might be “fair trade,”
but the corporation has been offsetting the “high wages” paid to third-world producers with notso-fair-wages here in America. The Whole Foods Corporation, famous for its animal welfare
rating system, is not so famous for the welfare of the humans working for them in Colorado
prisons. They advertised “sustainable, American family farms”; however, some of its produce is
said to be from were raised by prisoners in Colorado, who get as little as 74 cents a day.
McDonald’s – uniforms are made by prisoners who earn less than the workers of the well-known
franchise earn. Their plastic cutlery and containers also are produced by under paid prison labor.
Wal-Mart – sells third-party prison labor made goods in their entire store, although Wal-Mart

57

claim to have a “no forced labor produced in prison” policy. Victoria’s Secret – In the late 1990s,
in South Carolina two female prisoners were placed in solitary confinement when they divulged
they were made to sew undergarments and casual-wear replacing “Made in Honduras” garment
tags with “Made in USA” tags; AT&T – In 1993, thousands of union member telephone
operators were laid off in order to maximize profits. Since then AT&T has used prison labor to
manage their call centers. AT&T claim to have a policy that advocates against the use of prison
labor. British Petroleum (B.P.) used prison labor to help clean up the 4.2 million barrels of oil
that spilled into the Gulf coast; they almost exclusively used African-American inmates to clean
up the toxic spill. The partial list of companies implicated in exploiting prison labor includes:
Bank of America, Bayer, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, Chrysler, Costco, John Deere, Eli Lilly
and Company, Exxon Mobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson and Johnson, K-Mart, Koch Industries,
McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, ConAgra
Foods, Shell, Starbucks, UPS, Verizon, Wal-Mart, Wendy’s (Burrows, 2016.)
Typical critique of private prisons is that in order to gain moderate savings, private prisons
cut back on staff costs and training. Research proves that privatized prisons offer less salary to
officers; time of training is limited; and there is fewer staff. This has resulted in frequent
employment turnover, along with increased inmate assaults. The pledge of significant savings
falls significantly short. The corporations that build and manage private prisons have a vested
financial interest to continue the progression of mass incarceration. Corrections Corporation of
America and the GEO Group, the two largest corporations involved in the prison business, invest
a great deal in lobbying for punishing criminal justice policies and make huge monetary
contributions to help finance political campaigns that promise to aid the reliance on prisons.
Issues such as these have caused moral philosopher David Boonin’s determination that it is the

58

punishment paradigm itself that is morally flawed (Boonin, 2008). As Buchanan writes, “good
economics is better than no economics . . . [but] applied within a bad or misguided conception of
legal process need not promote the structural, procedural changes that may be urgently required”
(Liebhafsky, 1976). It may not be the existence of profits and incentives, which sully the moral
legitimacy of private incarceration practices, but rather, that profits exaggerate the negative
moral qualities of the presumed institutional environment already set in place by legislative fiat.
Now, the carceral system had already operated as a secondary institution for social order
preservation and labor control in America during an earlier conversion of regimes and racial
control, that of slavery and Jim Crow in the South. On the day after emancipation was
proclaimed, U.S prisons in the south turned black dramatically as “thousands of ex-slaves were
being arrested, tried, and convicted for acts that in the past had been dealt with by the master
alone” (Oshinsky, 1996). Arrests were made for being jobless and for non-compliance of the
condescending rules of racial etiquette. Then came “convict leasing” initiated by formerly
confederate states in reaction to the moral panic of “Negro crime” that offered the twofold
benefit of generating phenomenal resources for the state treasuries, resources that could supply
ample amounts of labor to farm, build, lay railroad tracks, clean, and mine under brutal
conditions. “This is not a figure of speech: the annual mortality rate for convicts reached 16
percent in Mississippi in the 1880s, where not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to
serve a sentence of ten years or more. Hundreds of black children, many as young as six years
old, were leased by the state to the benefit of planters, businessmen and financiers, to toil in
conditions that even some patrician southerners found shameful and a stain upon our manhood”
(Oshinsky, 1996). Prison labor in the guise of convict leasing and later the chain gang,

59

participated in making the New South economically prosperous as it “reconciled modernization
with the continuation of racial domination” (Lichtenstein, 1993).
The difference in today’s racial conciliation of the carceral system is that unlike slavery,
Jim Crow and the ghetto of the mid-century, it does not fulfill a positive economic exercise of
recruitment and disciplining of the workforce. “It serves only to warehouse the precarious and
de-proletarianized fractions of the black working class. Be it that they cannot find employment
owing to a combination of skills deficit, employer discrimination and competition from
immigrants, or that they refuse to submit to the indignity of substandard work in the peripheral
sectors of the service economy - what ghetto residents commonly label ‘slave jobs’” (Wacquant,
1990). There is an undertaking mounting with economic and conceptual pressure, coupled with
political interest, to loosen limitations on penal labor, in order to “(re) introduce” a magnitude of
unskilled work into private enterprises within American prisons.
The echoes of slavery still resonate throughout the prison system. African-American
prisoners have used language and descriptions comparing prison conditions and treatment while
imprisoned to slavery. As the punishment industry turns into the foremost employer and
producer for the U.S. whereby “state,” private prison and “security” corporations jostle for
control and profits of this movement in “human unfreedom,” the comparisons between slavery
and prison are startling (Gilmore, 2000). With the U.S. incarceration rate surging past the many
millions, other jurisdictions of the criminal justice system have others in local jails awaiting trial,
and Immigration Naturalization Service (INS) prisons awaiting deportation. Recent studies on
the disproportion pertaining to mass incarceration describe the persistent disparities in sentencing
where race is a determining factor - the inmate make up continues to be primarily African
American and Latino. Longer sentences are imposed on those arrested and convicted for
60

nonviolent drug offenses. Aggressive campaigns intended to criminalize young people, leave a
growing number of children “orphaned” by the criminal justice system, and the long “carceral”
arms of the state and private corporations are able to extend, resonating with the history of
slavery (Gilmore, 2000). The Wackenhut Corporation contracted to build a federal prison on the
site of a former slave plantation in North Carolina, returns us back to the viability of antiincarceration movements. In the age of Proposition 21, the Super-Max, the swift rebirth of the
death penalty, globalization, and the coming together of the two political parties in the U.S.
surrounding punishment as a cure to unemployment and race problems, can prison abolitionism
be heard? Proposition 21, the law passed in California on March 7, 2000, diminishes
confidentiality for juvenile defendants and delinquents, by preventing the sealing or destroying
of records committed by any minor above and including the age of 14 who has committed a
serious or violent crime. The powerful, documentary “13th” contests ideas about the connection
of race, justice and mass incarceration in the U.S. The documentary centers on the 13th
Amendment, similar to how Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness aims to do. The documentary draws on the ratification in 1865,
whereby the clause in the amendment states in full that; “… Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The abolition of
slavery, gave rise to chain gang labor that replaced it, and saw the ‘legal’ rise of segregation and
the mythology of black criminality, to the War on Crime, the War on Drugs and the War on
Terror, to the rise in mass incarceration and the big business of prisons.

61

Notes.
1 The dates of ratification were: Illinois, February 1, 1865; Rhode Island, February 2, 1865;
Michigan, February 2, 1865; Maryland, February 3, 1865; New York, February 3, 1865;
Pennsylvania, February 3, 1865; West Virginia, February 3, 1865; Missouri, February 6, 1865;
Maine, February 7, 1865; Kansas, February 7, 1865; Massachusetts, February 7, 1865; Virginia,
February 9, 1865; Ohio, February 10, 1865; Indiana, February 13, 1865; Nevada, February 16,
1865; Louisiana, February 17, 1865; Minnesota, February 23, 1865; Wisconsin, February 24,
1865; Vermont, March 9, 1865; Tennessee, April 7, 1865; Arkansas, April 14, 1865;
Connecticut, May 4, 1865; New Hampshire, July 1, 1865; South Carolina, November 13, 1865;
Alabama, December 2, 1865; North Carolina, December 4, 1865; Georgia, December 6, 1865.
Ratification was completed on December 6, 1865. The amendment was next ratified by Oregon,
December 8, 1865; California, December 19, 1865; Florida, December 28, 1865 (Florida again
ratified on June 9, 1868, upon its adoption of a new constitution); Iowa, January 15, 1866; New
Jersey, January 23, 1866 (after having rejected the amendment on March 16, 1865); Texas,
February 18, 1870; Delaware, February 12, 1901 (after having rejected the amendment on
February 8, 1865); Kentucky, March 18, 1976 (after having rejected it on February 24, 1865).
Mississippi rejected the amendment, December 4, 1865.
2 The GEO Group, Inc. is a Florida-based company specializing in corrections, detention and
mental health treatment. It maintains facilities in North America, Australia, South Africa and the
United Kingdom.

62

Appendix I

1000

Incarceration rate of inmates incarcerated under state and federal
Jurisdiction per 100,000 population 1925-2014

C

o ...
.::
.!
:I ...
0.
0
0.

C

700

C

0

0 ...

_...,.

C

...

T'"

_ __,,c.ff111on Rite

- ,.....a.

Cl) $00

0.
Cl)

i... •oo
C
0 300

.:

...
u...
fll
fll

Cl) 200

g 100

-~---------f,n

1930

11:'5

1140

1145

tt50

1855

1HCI

1H5

1170

Year

1t76

1110

1115

1910

tfl-$

2000

2005

2010

Figure 1. Graph showing the incarceration rate of inmates in the United States between 19252014. The numbers show rates of those incarcerated under state and federal jurisdiction per
100,000 population. Adapted from “Jail inmates at midyear 2014,” by T. D. Minton and Z. Zeng,
2015, Bureau of Justice Statistics, p. 7. Copyright 2014. Department of Justice, Office of Justice
Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

63

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