Students across the country are taught American slavery ended with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Slavery is a touchy subject: it’s but one major blemish on a proud nation’s history, leaving a twinge of guilt on any American forced to visit the topic. While African-Americans still face oppression, racism, and brutality, we consider them “free”. The notion that all people, regardless of color, are free in the United States is patently untrue, and that fallacy can be found in our own Criminal Justice System.
The Thirteenth Amendment reads, “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”. This amendment seems to be a heroic effort by legislators to change a morally reprehensible system entrenched within the U.S. Constitution, but there is one glaring flaw. Slavery is illegal in all cases save as punishment for a crime, meaning that all slavery is not outlawed. What then does this have to do with African-Americans and the Criminal Justice System?
Restricting African-Americans’ rights are as much a part of our history as the slavery which once bound them. The creation of “Black Codes” in the late 1800s limited the voting rights of freedmen, enacted harsher sentencing, and forced low wage labor for colored individuals. Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. witnessed a mass incarceration of African-Americans at a rapid and devastating pace under Richard Nixon, who criminalized drugs found at a disproportionate rate in African-American communities. Legislation such as three strike laws and mandatory minimums passed during the Reagan administration further accelerated the pace of African-American incarceration. The legal system is fundamentally rigged against African-Americans as they are six times as likely as whites to go to jail for an identical drug charge.
In many states, felons lose fundamental rights such as the right to vote, but the most egregious violation of a prisoner’s freedom is the slavery they are subjected to in the form of prison labor. For-profit prisons, run by corporations, can use the labor of their convicts to work long hours for little to nothing in return. As African-Americans are five times as likely of being incarcerated as whites, they are forced to work in chains on prison-run plantations all too reminiscent of the grim history our nation has tried so hard to overcome.
As long as disproportionally colored prisoners are forced into slavery as sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution’s thirteenth amendment, we should not be considered a free democracy. I call upon legislators at the local, state, and federal level to abolish prison labor and restructure our legal system in order to rectify this blemish on our society.
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