Fixing one of modern America’s most sinister sins could begin

In December 1866, an advertisement appeared in Annapolis Gazette He announced the “public sale” of a 30-year-old woman named Dilly Harris. Dailey was found guilty of petty theft and sentenced to two years of selling. For bystanders who saw it auctioned off courtroom steps this holiday season it was a familiar sight, the only startling element being that the Thirteenth Amendment had passed into law the previous year. While it may seem as if slavery was abolished in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment contains an exception clause.

There is a gap squeezed between two commas: Slavery and involuntary servitude can continue as “punishment for crime”. And it happened, not only in Annapolis, but in places where the labor of the convicts replaced slavery. But next month, five states — Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont — will vote to repeal the provision allowing forced labor for convicted criminals.

Although prisons are a relatively recent phenomenon, prison is not new. The United States is not the first society to use convicted prisoners. Under ancient Roman law a low position known as humiliores—the “poor”, the socially disadvantaged, the emancipated, the enslaved – could be employed in “public works” or in the mines (in the meantime, the rich might receive fines or be sentenced to exile).

The pioneering archaeological work of Matthew Larsen and Mark Lytney, authors ancient mediterranean prison (University of California Press, forthcoming), gives us an idea of ​​what life was like in the Roman mines. Larsen told me, “Most people seemed to be waiting day in and day out at the mortuary facility for months on end waiting for their turn to go into the mines and use a tool to extract metal. This act seemed like swinging an ax into the mine wall over and over again.”

In a recent essay on prisons in Roman North Africa, Larsen explores the narrow, dark spaces of Roman mines. Pliny the Elder wrote that prisoners often did not see the light of day for several months. Strabo tells us that the work was painful and the atmosphere “killer and hard to bear”. Some mines, such as the copper mine at Umm Al-Amad in Amman, Jordan, are only accessible by crawl. In other cases it was possible, with varying degrees of difficulty, to walk upright. But the experience was devastating to the body and the working conditions were terrible. Besides the tattoos, trademarks, head shavings, beatings, and shackles that took place there, the work was excruciating. Mines can leave prisoners with health problems and permanent disfigurement. In what Larsen described as a “painful parallel to the…prison-industrial complex”, some mines, such as the yellow marble mine at Simethos (Chemtou, Tunisia), housed more than 1,000 people, and had a guard lane and tower.

Roman criminals who were not sent to the mines often found themselves working near their homes in mills and bakeries. Pliny mentions that in Campania, Italy, there were wooden mortars run by convicts bound in chains. It is alleged that Calixtus, bishop of Rome in the early 3rd century, was put into a mill for hard labour, before being flogged and sent to the mines of Sardinia. And only after that he returned to Rome and became what we now call the Pope.

While some forced laborers, such as the prisoners employed by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II following his military expansion in 1453, were paid meager wages, most were not. Prisoners housed in the Inquiry Palace in Palermo in the 17th century often received sentences of five years in royal galleys. They were sometimes accompanied by priests to teach them the “true faith”.

In the case of the United States, the racial history of slavery and imprisonment is evident to even the most casual of students. In the aftermath of the Civil War, hiring convicts became the preferred form of punishment in the southern states. convicts worked on municipal, county and state prison farms; Road and railway construction. It was leased to individual contractors. They lived here in the same places, received the same food, and faced the same forms of corporal punishment that the enslaved faced a few years earlier.

The regimen can be fatal, but it is usually limited to people of color only. As David Oshinsky explains in his book worse than slavery, the hire of convicts was deeply racist from the start: In 1882, 126 of the 735 convicts died in the black state. By contrast, only two of the 83 whites died. “Not a single hired convict,” Oshinsky wrote, “lived long enough to serve a prison sentence of 10 years or more.”

Although we tend to think of the convict rent system and the chain gang as places for males, women have also been judged guilty of work. Sarah Haley’s work on women in Georgia reveals that white women are rarely imprisoned and almost always excused from convict rental camps. As Talitha LeFleuria’s work discusses, those women who found themselves in the condemned lease system routinely experienced sexual violence and humiliation.

It is easy to imagine that the problem existed only in the south in those countries that were unwilling to give up slavery. Dennis Childs is Associate Professor of African American Literature at the University of California, San Diego and author of State slaves black prison from chain gang to prison He showed that this is a legend. Childs told me that the lack of “overt re-manufacturing of slavery” in the North “helps promote the idea that the ‘modern’ North prison is progressive, humane, etc.” When we turn to eyewitness reports from elsewhere, we find something else. “The writings of prisoners like Assata Shakur and George Jackson suggest otherwise,” he said. The supposedly progressive Northern order treated “black subjects and other repressed groups” using “scientific talk” or “concentration camp method”. It was a system that swallowed, crushed, and spit people apart. Thus, those that are considered economically disposable have been phased out.

Even as the convict’s rent system and its northern parallels shifted to the modern prison system, it continued to replicate the control mechanisms that had been mastered during the pre-war period of slavery. Despite legislation limiting the ability of guards to practice corporal punishment, the same forms of torture inflicted on enslaved were visited upon prison inmates. Article 1858 from Harper’s Weekly Which responded to the murder of prisoner Charles Plumb depicted prisoners in a cage and a yoke. Prisoners at Sing Sing in New York were hung with single parts as a form of punishment.

Although waterboarding is no longer practiced in New York state prisons, solitary confinement – a form of torture denounced by the United Nations, Amnesty International and Supreme Court justices – is more widely practiced in the US than anywhere else. It causes auditory and visual hallucinations, paranoia, PTSD, uncontrollable anger, self-harm and distortion, diminished impulse control, and distortions of time and perception. These effects are particularly pronounced in young adults and those with pre-existing mental illnesses. There’s a reason that, apart from death, Angela Davis calls her “the worst form of punishment imaginable.” In the last count in 2005, a US Bureau of Justice Statistics count revealed that more than 81,622 people are currently being held in this state. The scant data available shows that African Americans are disproportionately represented in the solitary confinement population (even more than the prison population overall, which is really saying something). Those with mental illness, those who espouse “radical” political views, and transgender people are more likely to end up in solitary confinement to “protect them.”

Although slavery, Davis said, is a form of confinement, confinement and servitude are not identical. Hire was not condemned to heredity and did not depend on reproduction in its labor force. But it shares many features with slavery. There’s a reason W.E.B. DuBois called it a “slavery spawn” and it’s more widely known as “neoslavery.” Childs explains in his book how slavery and imprisonment were closely related to judicial consciousness and language. In a superficial “color blindness” ruling from 1871, Judge J. Christian that “[the felon] As a result of his crime, he not only lost his freedom, but all his personal rights except those which the law grants him in his humanity. He is at present a slave of the state. he is Civil death [civilly dead]; And his property, if he has any, is administered as the property of a dead man.” In the same Roman manner understand She linked imprisonment and slavery when she described some of the sentenced prisoners as “punishment slaves”.

At every turn in history, the line between enslavement and imprisonment is hard to see. Sentencing prisoners in the imperial mines of ancient Italy often worked alongside enslaved workers. The contemporary custom of restraining female prisoners during childbirth is a continuation of the practice of slavery. This isn’t supposed to happen, but the 2020 report by guardian Indicates that it is still a widespread problem. This is an area, as Sarah Haley wrote in No mercy hereIt is difficult to determine the differences between the enslaved past, the condemned yesterday, and the imprisoned present.

It is difficult to claim that these physical practices are related to rehabilitation or protection when the cancerous system is clearly detrimental to people. But there is nothing new in this obvious argument. In 1842, the novelist Charles Dickens described solitary confinement as “incomparably worse than any torture of the body” while Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont noted it as “fatal to the health of criminals” and strikingly ineffective at reforming them. It can be said that the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean knew this too; In the second century AD, the satirist Lucian wrote: “These [prison] The conditions were cruel and unbearable for a man who was not accustomed to such experiences, and had no experience in this brutal way of life.” The ancient novelist Chariton also noted that physical experience “trampled” the “nobles.” What they both understood was that the caste could be trained The world – in their case enslaved people – had to endure the devastating effects of imprisonment while simultaneously using the same system to keep them run over. In other words, they saw it as a form of brutally influential social control.

Throughout history, it is staggering how unfair the administration of justice has been. In both ancient Rome and the United States (from the end of the Civil War to the present) the wealthy face various forms of punishment from the socially disadvantaged. As Larsen told me, Roman imprisonment “was not necessarily about what gets punished but who gets punished.” Even if we think that depriving people of their liberty, destroying families, inflicting psychological and physical harm, and forcing people to work for little or no pay is somehow acceptable and fair, we certainly cannot support a two-tiered system of justice that punishes people for the color of their skin. , non-Christian religion, gender, gender, and their lack of economic and social capital.

As many activists have noted, the prison system is a place where human rights are handed over along with personal belongings. If you think about it, we already knew a lot about this. Even if we go through Ava Duvernay’s powerful documentary Thirteenth On our Netflix accounts, jokes like “don’t drop the soap” are evidence that our culture tacitly acknowledges the horrific sexual violence that exists in the bodily system. And we, for some reason, are fine with that. Removing the exemption clause from the state legislature is just a first step. The solution, Childs told me, is “organise, organize, organize.” He cited groups such as Critical Resistance, All of Us or None, and Youth Justice, a coalition of organizations that are leading the charge and need support. Until the prison system is reformed, the abolitionist movement is not complete.

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