Mass incarceration is a contemporary manifestation of the imprint of slavery in the United States

Author: Shao Sheng (Department of World History, Department of Literature and History, Central Party School [National School of Administration])

In recent years, due to the frequent killing of African-Americans by the violent law enforcement of white police, the issue of human rights in the United States has repeatedly become the focus of international public opinion, especially the phenomenon of mass incarceration involved in it, which has aroused widespread concern in the world. As former U.S. President Barack Obama noted at a NAACP event in 2015, "the United States makes up 5 percent of the world's population but has 25 percent of the world's prisoners," and African-Americans make up a third of those prisoners.

This kind of mass incarceration tramples on the human rights of the American people, especially African Americans, which is attributed to the amendments to the US Constitution and the unreasonable provisions of the criminal justice system, but also rooted in the US capitalist economic system and political system, and is also the evil result of the racist ideas left over from the US slavery, which is essentially a contemporary embodiment of the brand of US slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Origins of Mass Incarceration

At the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865), Congress under the control of radical Republicans introduced the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to eradicate slavery in the United States, which explicitly prohibited slavery and forced labor in the United States; But the amendment also inherited the wording of the Northwest Lands Ordinance of 1787, retaining the provision for forced labor for prisoners, in the hope of punishing and reforming them. Juxtaposing the prohibition of slavery with the permissible labor of prisoners was so common in pre-Civil War Congressional legislation and northern state constitutions that it could even be called a "model" clause that the writers of the Thirteenth Amendment accepted it almost without hesitation, unaware that after the complete abolition of slavery, this stereotype might provide institutional loopholes for former slave owners or racists to imprison and enslave African-Americans, thereby perpetuating the branding of slavery.

Southern whites soon discovered and exploited the vulnerability. From 1865 to early 1866, Southern state legislatures modeled the pre-Civil War Slave Code by enacting a series of discriminatory laws known as the Negro Code, designed to maintain white political rule and economic privilege and ensure that African Americans continued to serve as cheap laborers after slavery was abolished. The Negro Code required all adult men of African descent to sign annual work contracts with white employers or risk arrest and a fine or forced labor. At the same time, it also criminalizes African-American mass gatherings, minor thefts, gun possession, etc., leading to frequent arrests and mass incarcerations.

The Negro Code immediately infuriated public opinion in the North and was repealed or amended with the intervention of the Federal Congress, but the number and proportion of African Americans imprisoned and enslaved increased unabated, and even reached a new peak in the late 19th century with the rise of the Jim Crow Act( the apartheid law). Camille Westmont, a historical archaeologist at West Vaughan Southern University, once pointed to Tennessee as an example, pointing out that African Americans accounted for less than 5% of the state's prison population in 1865, but by 1877 its proportion soared to 52%, and by 1895 it had risen further to 75%.

In the face of the sharp increase in the prison population, the southern state governments, in order to save the consequent regulatory costs, rented out prisoner labor widely to private enterprises such as plantations, mines, and factories under white control for lucrative profits. Alabama, for example, in 1898 had as much as 73 percent of its fiscal revenue coming from prisoner rentals, and African-Americans made up more than 85 percent of those prisoners. Renters, in order to extract as much surplus value from prisoners as possible, often forced them to labor in cruel ways, resulting in the death of large numbers of African-Americans while serving their sentences, even more miserable than their pre-Civil War slaves. According to statistics, the mortality rate of rental prisoners is about 10 times that of non-rental prisoners. Driven by economic interests, governments and businesses have continued to collude to use the criminal justice system and prisoner rental system to turn thousands of African Americans into slaves called prisoners. In fact, the Virginia Supreme Court, in an 1871 ruling, bluntly referred to prisoner laborers as "slaves of the state." Prisoner rental continued into the 20th century, when it was formally abolished in 1941.

Well-known American journalist Douglas Blackmon said that African Americans are the biggest victims of prisoner rental, although their exact number is not available, but he calculates that in the 80 years before 1941, at least 200,000 African Americans in Alabama alone suffered from the system. In his 2008 book Slavery by another Name: Reservience of Black Americans from The Civil War to World War II, Blackmon pointedly argued that prisoner tenancy was not only a substitute for slavery, but also an extension of slavery, a transformative form of slavery.

Mass incarceration developed rapidly after the 1960s

In the 1960s, spurred on by the civil rights movement, the Johnson administration passed a series of legislation to terminate the Jim Crow Act, guarantee the political and legal rights of African Americans, and attempt to lift African Americans out of poverty and crime through a reform program that "declared war on poverty." But because anti-poverty policies failed to touch the racial and structural inequalities left over from slavery, African-Americans were always more likely than whites to fall into unemployment, poverty, and crime.

As a result, in 1965, the Johnson administration launched the "War on Crime" program, gradually shifting the focus of policy from poverty eradication to fighting crime. In her 2016 book From War on Poverty to War on Crime: The Formation of Mass Incarceration in the United States, Yale historian Elizabeth Hinton argues that it was Johnson's "War on Crime" plan that kicked off the mass incarceration in contemporary America. In the more than half a century since 1965, the U.S. federal government has launched several rounds of "war on crime", continuing to invest a lot of money in state and local law enforcement and judicial agencies to strengthen their crime control of urban low-income communities, especially African American communities. This not only squeezed out funds for social welfare programs that were originally used to address the root causes of crime, but also led the U.S. government to gradually make the fight against crime the key to addressing poverty and inequality, leading to the alienation of crime control from end to means.

This alienation manifests itself in two ways. First, the abuse of police and police power in law enforcement has led to a surge in arrest rates. In order to combat violence, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, the U.S. government has increased the number, funding, and equipment of the police, deployed more police forces to patrol the poor neighborhoods of the city, and encouraged police officers to actively arrest anyone they have "reasonable suspicion" and other tactics through tactics such as "preemptive strikes." The consequences are not only that a large number of suspects are sent to the US judicial system, laying the groundwork for mass incarceration, but also that many suspects are killed by violent law enforcement, which seriously threatens the freedom and security of US citizens.

Secondly, the adoption of harsh sentences in the judiciary has led to a sharp increase in the rate of imprisonment. In the process of combating criminal behavior, the US government is increasingly biased toward the punitive and deterrent effect of punishment rather than the function of education and reform, so it has introduced more stringent standards in sentencing and serving, including heavy sentences for misdemeanors and extensions of the actual period of service, setting off a so-called "severe revolution". The "harsh revolution" greatly contributed to the development of mass incarceration after the 1960s and caused a huge setback to the human rights situation in the United States. Under the Johnson administration, the number of incarcerations in the United States was less than 200,000, had grown to more than 600,000 by the late 1980s, and now rises to more than 2 million. The sharp rise in the incarceration population has spurred the U.S. government to fund the construction of a large number of prisons, encourage private prisons to participate in law enforcement, etc., in order to imprison more prisoners – a mutually reinforcing vicious circle with harsh arrests in the police system and harsh sentences in the court system.

Because of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, nearly all contemporary American inmates are forced labor in prison; And because several rounds of the "war on crime" since 1965 have been directed primarily at The African-American community, African-Americans continue to be the biggest victims of mass incarceration and forced labor. According to statistics, African Americans currently account for about 13% of the total population of the United States, but account for more than 35% of the population incarcerated in the United States, and their incarceration rate is almost 6 times that of whites. At the same time, mass incarceration not only deprives a large number of citizens of their political rights on conviction, but also prevents prisoners from being eligible to vote for a long time, even after their release from prison. Research shows that in the 2016 election, more than 6 million voters in the United States were banned from voting for crime, mostly African-Americans.

In her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, American civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander astutely argued that the U.S. criminal justice system and mass incarceration are actually a comprehensive and covert racialized social control system, which is the legacy and variant of American slavery and "Jim Crowe" system, trying to keep African Americans on the fringes and bottoms of American society in a legal form.

Mass incarceration and its human rights issues are the root causes of long-standing intractable problems

As a contemporary embodiment of the brand of slavery in the United States, mass incarceration and its human rights problems are directly caused by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution and unreasonable provisions in the criminal justice system, but their real thrust comes from the various poisons of the history of slavery in the United States. These poisons are still widespread in the US economy, politics and culture, constituting multiple dilemmas and structural obstacles to the development of the human rights cause in the United States, and have also become the root cause of the long-term intractable problem of mass incarceration.

First, Slavery in the United States was a mode of production created by capitalism and played a huge role in the development of capitalism. New research from American academia suggests that there is a close interaction between slavery and capitalism in the United States. As Sven Beckett, a professor of history at Harvard University, points out, "The unparalleled opportunities of liberal capitalism are based on the relentless oppression of movable slavery." This meant that many of the features of slavery were integrated into the capitalist economic system and would not easily disappear with the abolition of slavery or apartheid.

Capitalism is characterized by two basic characteristics: inequality (in labor and distribution) and instability (cyclical economic crises). The nature of inequality gave birth to slavery in the United States, which enslaved and exploited African Americans in labor and labored in distribution without gain. Even after slavery was abolished, white Southerners continued to squeeze African Americans as cheap labor using tools such as the Black Code and prisoner leases. In the context of unequal economic rights, instability puts African-Americans at greater risk of unemployment and is more vulnerable to poverty, crime and incarceration. Beckett asserts that "American slavery necessarily leaves its mark on the DNA of American capitalism," and the economic inequality of African Americans is undoubtedly one of the deepest imprints, and mass incarceration is a vivid manifestation of this imprint.

Second, the political system of decentralization in the United States is also an important factor in the continuation of the legacy of slavery. When the Federal Constitution was enacted in 1787, the Southern slave states actively advocated the state power in vertical decentralization in order to maintain slavery, and expanded the influence of the South in the horizontal three powers of the federal government through the "three-fifths" clause. By the first half of the 19th century, the South not only influenced the presidency of the Federation, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Supreme Court, but also vigorously developed the theory of state power. The influence of the tradition of home rule and the theory of separation of powers was undoubtedly enormous and far-reaching, so much so that during the Civil War, the federal government initially preferred to legislate the abolition of slavery by the Southern states, and it was not until the advent of the "Negro Code" that it was forced to intervene in the political reconstruction of the Southern states.

But even so, the Confederacy did not want to undermine state power too much, so it did not completely liquidate the former slave owners in the South, thus creating the conditions for the resurgence of Southern political power in the 1870s and the use of state power to promote apartheid. After the 1960s, with the revival of conservatism in the United States, white racists represented by the political forces in the South used the rules of checks and balances under the separation of powers to gradually weaken the progress of the civil rights movement by controlling the state power and the branches of the three federal powers, so that racial discrimination such as mass incarceration was sheltered.

Third, the racist ideas left over from slavery provided the cultural fodder for mass incarceration. Racial slavery in the United States inevitably reinforced the Western idea of innate racial differences, and its main function was to provide a "theoretical basis" for racial inequality in American capitalism and to prevent poor whites and enslaved blacks from joining forces against the white ruling elite. However, once racist ideas emerge, they penetrate into the culture, shape people's mindsets, and play a unique social function. Even after slavery was abolished, this ideology and culture would haunt and create variants or alternatives to slavery to preserve its existence.

In fact, the idea that African Americans are "inherently inferior" is prevalent among many whites, even the most enlightened whites, and is a huge obstacle on the road to racial equality. Eric Fontaine, a historian at Columbia University, points out that an important reason the federal government allowed southern states to establish apartheid after the 1870s was that while whites in the North mostly supported the abolition of slavery, they could not accept that African Americans and whites had the same status and rights. Hinton's research also shows that since the 1960s, the focus of U.S. domestic policy has shifted from eradicating poverty to fighting crime because the white elite sees violence and crime as "a pathological culture born of African Americans."

It is precisely because slavery is inextricably linked to the economy, politics, and culture of the United States that the brand of slavery in the United States is so deep that neither the bloody civil war nor the radical civil rights movement can erase it, but instead continues in the form of mass incarceration to this day. Therefore, if the United States is to truly address mass incarceration and its human rights problems, it must reshape its own political, economic, and ideological culture, and simple criminal justice reforms will not help. From this perspective, the cause of human rights in the United States still has a long way to go.

Guangming Daily (2022.08.22. 12th edition)

Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily