America never fully abolished slavery?

It is one of the great tales of American culture. For over 250 years, from the foundation of Jamestown in 1607 until the Civil War of the 1860s - slavery was both legal and prevalent throughout the United States, until of course the Lincoln administration finally outlawed the practice during the war years. For all the rhetoric of all men being created equal, many of America's founding fathers owned and held slaves at their plantations. Slaves would not be considered citizens of the new nation, but would rather remain the legal property of their masters. The Civil War ended with the abolition of slavery in the South, the remaining stronghold of the institution. Theoretically though, it has been argued that the 13th amendment to the US constitution did not in fact abolish slavery in it's entirety, rather leaving a loophole as far as convicts and prisoners were concerned;


“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.”


Would it be fair to say that America's modern prisons are the plantations of the 21st century and their prisoners slaves in all but name?

Manach

Mod Note
This is a rather vague premise, without referencial evidence and is bordering on politics/current affairs. Even so, this thread can remain open for the moment but will be montiored for off-topic grandstanding.

BalcombeSt4

They instituted systems of oppression & degradation that in some areas were even worse than slavery, during reconstruction with collusion from the North to criminalize black life, vagrancy, looking a white women the wrong way, all horrible ghastly laws built on the back of the industrial revolution wih even worse conditions than slavery.

Peregrinus

This isn't totally off-the-wall. There is a view that the US prison labour system was developed to fill the economic gap left by the abolition of slavery, and that this legacy still heavily marks it today.

During the colonial period, frontier settler societies had a perennial labour problem. The settler society is small enough, and how can you persuade one of its members to stay and work for you for a miserable wage when he is free to leave your service, travel not very far, shoot a few indigenes, occupy their land and become a property-owner?

Slavery is one answer to this problem. Convict labour is another. (This is why Australian settlers never got around to enslaving the Aborigines, people.)

So, yeah. When slavery was abolished in the US south, prison chain gangs took up part of the slack. They didn't just do public works, like building roads; they got hired out to private businesses as cheap unskilled labour. (The same happened with Australian convicts.) And pretty soon you have a sector of the economy that is more or less dependent on this labour model.

Manach

Manach wrote: »

Mod Note
This is a rather vague premise, without referencial evidence and is bordering on politics/current affairs. Even so, this thread can remain open for the moment but will be montiored for off-topic grandstanding.

I tried adding URL links, but got a notice saying I didn't have permission to do so?

Manic Moran

Davydave86 wrote: »

“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.”


Would it be fair to say that America's modern prisons are the plantations of the 21st century and their prisoners slaves in all but name?

No. Slavery and involuntary servitude are two different things. Evidence for this is in the Constitutional amendment you quote, it would be redundant to specify both things if they were the same.

Prisoners are subject to involuntary servitude within the exception listed upon conviction, not slavery.

That's the pedantic/legal response. The practical response depends on a slew of moral and ethical questions which may not be quite so clear-cut depending on the nature of the work, its benefit to the inmate, and the conditions in which they are being done. The mere fact that they are working for well below market rate is hardly surprising nor unique. Consider how much a person working in a typical restaurant or laundry is paid in Ireland, vs how much an Irish prisoner is paid in such positions. (If you're curious, Eur 3.50/week)

Peregrinus

The pedantic answer is also the wrong answer. Slavery and involuntary servitude are not "two different things"; slavery is one form of involuntary servitude. Serfdom, for example, is another. Prison labour is a third. Convict transportation is a fourth. Debt bondage (a system where, if you can't repay your creditor in money or money's worth, you have to clear the debt by working for him) is a fifth. No doubt there are others.

I don't think the intention behind the wordind of the Thirteenth Amenment was simply to substitute prison labour for slavery. The "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" language was an attempt to prevent slavery being reintroduced by another name. The carve-out for prison labour was a recognition of the fact that there was already a prison labour system in operation, in the North as well as in the South, and it wasn't intended to eliminate, change, or disrupt that. At the time imprisonment rates in the US were very low, and the rather limited system of prison labour that they were experimenting with was seen as rehabilitative, and a Good Thing which European nations would be wise to learn from.

But, while it may not have been the intention, the consequence of this carve-out was to create an opportunity to protect those whose interests were imperilled by the abolition of slavery by a massive expansion of the prison labour system, which duly happened. In economic terms, whether you intend to incentivise particular behaviour rarely matters; all that matters is whether you do incentivise it.

Old sins cast long shadows, as the saying goes, and I don't think anyone would disagree that, nearly a hundred and fifty years after abolition, the US is still deeply marked by the experience of slavery. And I think this is one of the ways in which it is marked.

Manach

Davydave86 wrote: »

I tried adding URL links, but got a notice saying I didn't have permission to do so?

To post links, as a site wide policy, you would need to have an account older than 10 days and a post count of over (I think) 60.

Snickers Man

Peregrinus wrote: »

This isn't totally off-the-wall. There is a view that the US prison labour system was developed to fill the economic gap left by the abolition of slavery, and that this legacy still heavily marks it today.

I believe it's the case that many of the states of the former Confederacy didn't bother building prisons in the latter half of the 19th century, preferring to sentence petty criminals to convict leasing schemes rather than locking them up.

It's a system that generated its own economic momentum that made it difficult to stop. There was a constant demand for cheap labour; it could be fulfilled only by a constant supply of petty convicts. The conflict of interest between a state that wanted to reduce the instance of crime while carrying out its public works as cheaply as possible is obvious.

Edgware

If you are posting about slavery just consider the working conditions for Amazon in Alabama, New York etc. Grown men wearing nappies because they are not allowed toilet breaks, van drivers going to the toilet in the van etc.
Having said that the employees voted against having a union

oceanman

Edgware wrote: »

If you are posting about slavery just consider the working conditions for Amazon in Alabama, New York etc. Grown men wearing nappies because they are not allowed toilet breaks, van drivers going to the toilet in the van etc.
Having said that the employees voted against having a union

if they voted against having a union they only have themselves to blame for poor working conditions.

BalcombeSt4

The book Chomsky was on about.

donaghs

Peregrinus wrote: »

This isn't totally off-the-wall. There is a view that the US prison labour system was developed to fill the economic gap left by the abolition of slavery, and that this legacy still heavily marks it today.

During the colonial period, frontier settler societies had a perennial labour problem. The settler society is small enough, and how can you persuade one of its members to stay and work for you for a miserable wage when he is free to leave your service, travel not very far, shoot a few indigenes, occupy their land and become a property-owner?

Slavery is one answer to this problem. Convict labour is another. (This is why Australian settlers never got around to enslaving the Aborigines, people.)

So, yeah. When slavery was abolished in the US south, prison chain gangs took up part of the slack. They didn't just do public works, like building roads; they got hired out to private businesses as cheap unskilled labour. (The same happened with Australian convicts.) And pretty soon you have a sector of the economy that is more or less dependent on this labour model.

There's a touch a PC-hyperbole about this topic. Its not like convict labour replaced slavery. Instead it was Sharecropping - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping.
Lots of sharecroppers went North for a better life in the "great migrations".

But as you maybe saying, penal labour was more to fill "gaps". Not pleasant - but not same same as slavery not being abolished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States#:~:text=History-,Origins,shall%20have%20been%20duly%20convicted.

The nub of the problem is the revived racist southern Democrat party retaking political power in the South after the Reconstruction.

On the OPs point (which people use to say the USA began as a slave state) Maybe nitpicking, but as far as I know, there were no "slaves" or slave laws in Jamestown. There were indentured servants (white & black). Not a nice life, but they got their freedom when their terms was up.
https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/indentured-servants-in-the-us/

In a horribly bizarre precedent, one black servant in Virginia earned his freedom, became wealthy, and won a court case to enslave one of his black servants.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrible-fate-john-casor-180962352/

Also, vagrancy laws could affect whites too. Like Martin Tabert who couldnt produce a train ticket in 1921 in Florida, so was sentenced to forced labour and died soon after, from heat whipping etc. But perhaps his white status generated more outrage than for blacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Tabert

Prisons existed before the civil war also. America’s huge modern prison population only started expanding massively in the 1970s/80s

Edgware

oceanman wrote: »

if they voted against having a union they only have themselves to blame for poor working conditions.

Indeed. I read somewhere that Amazon are building a big distribution centre
In Rathcoole/Saggart area. Interesting to see if they will get employees 50 work under the U.S. conditions

khalessi

Davydave86 wrote: »

It is one of the great tales of American culture. For over 250 years, from the foundation of Jamestown in 1607 until the Civil War of the 1860s - slavery was both legal and prevalent throughout the United States, until of course the Lincoln administration finally outlawed the practice during the war years. For all the rhetoric of all men being created equal, many of America's founding fathers owned and held slaves at their plantations. Slaves would not be considered citizens of the new nation, but would rather remain the legal property of their masters. The Civil War ended with the abolition of slavery in the South, the remaining stronghold of the institution. Theoretically though, it has been argued that the 13th amendment to the US constitution did not in fact abolish slavery in it's entirety, rather leaving a loophole as far as convicts and prisoners were concerned;


“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.”


Would it be fair to say that America's modern prisons are the plantations of the 21st century and their prisoners slaves in all but name?

Interesting documentary on Netflix about this very thing a few months ago

Victor

Manic Moran wrote: »

Consider how much a person working in a typical restaurant or laundry is paid in Ireland, vs how much an Irish prisoner is paid in such positions. (If you're curious, Eur 3.50/week)

I hear what you are saying, and the former governor in the article says it is too little, but I think there is a difference between prisoners doing housekeeping duties in prison and the type of conditions that exist in many American prisons.

BalcombeSt4

Interesting interview with Chomsky

"The Reconstruction period. And it was not insignificant, like you had black legislators and so on. After the Reconstruction period, roughly a decade, there was a north-south compact which effectively permitted the former slave states to do essentially what they liked, and what they did was they criminalized black life. So, for example, if a black man was standing on a corner he could be accused of vagrancy and charged some fee which he couldn’t pay, so he went to jail. If he was looking at a white woman the wrong way, somebody claimed attempted rape, you know. A bigger fine. Pretty soon they had a very large part of the black population – black male, mainly – in jail. And they became a slave labor force."

He goes on

" In fact, what’s really happening is this is a superfluous population. A lot of the working class is basically superfluous at a time when multi-national corporations can shift their production operations to northern Mexico or Vietnam or somewhere. And the black population has never escaped the effects of slavery; I mean, the first slaves came to the United States in the early 17th century. By 1620, there were slaves. And the effect of slavery has never been overcome, in all sorts of ways, so the most superfluous population is the black male population. Fine. So we stick them in prison. Get rid of them.

PW: One of the things, too, as you say this, there’s obviously a number of black, racial minority political organizations in this country, and for the most part they’ve all been pretty silent about criminal justice policies over the past 40 years. If you look at a lot of the major organizations like the NAACP, the Urban League, folks like that, they’ve been pretty silent on criminal justice issues, and today we have President Obama, who obviously is black. So is our Attorney General. And, you know, while the Attorney General has made some noises on criminal justice issues, if you look at actual practices, nothing’s really changed. So to an extent it seems that the political black community has largely been silent or supportive of mass incarceration.

NC: Well, yes. They have their own reasons. But there has been progress in civil rights which for the more privileged sector of the black community has meant more rights. And while I don’t like to criticize them – as I said, they have their own reasons – I can see why they might want to try to expand the range of rights that they’ve achieved and not take on issues that would be unacceptable to the ruling groups.

Take a look at what happened to Martin Luther King, for example. It was very striking. When you listen to the oratory on Martin Luther King Day, it typically ends with his “I have a dream” speech in Washington, in 1963. But he didn’t stop there. He went on to the north. He went on to northern racism, to class issues, urban problems in Chicago, then he was assassinated supporting a public workers’ strike. That part of his life has been kind of wiped out. In fact, he lost his northern liberal popularity at that point. As long as he was attacking racist sheriffs in Alabama it was acceptable. When he started talking about racist and class-based oppression in the north, that was beyond the limits.

After all, when he was killed he was on his way to organizing a party of the poor. Not of blacks. Of the poor. And that’s beyond the pale when you do that. So, how much this kind of understanding resonates in the minds of black leadership I don’t know, but they can’t be oblivious to the phenomenon."

donaghs

But in the new race-focussed orthodoxy, class-based issues have to take a back-seat.

Adolph Reed is one voice in the US pushing back against this.

The Marxist Who Antagonizes Liberals and the Left | The New Yorker

The Canceling of Adolph Reed (bard.edu) "Reed grew up in the segregated South and organized poor Black people and war resisters. He has been a leading socialist fighter for the rights and dignity of the poor. And he is an esteemed professor. But Reed’s belief that the root of oppression today is based in poverty rather than race runs afoul of contemporary pieties."

Peregrinus

"But in the new race-focussed orthodoxy, class-based issues have to take a back-seat."

There's nothing new about this. Racism in the US - which is real, and harmful - often serves to eclipse issues of class, or issues that in other societies present as class issues.

donaghs

We are getting off topic with this one! But it is somewhat related to the “slavery never went away” thread. But I do think there is something new happening in the last few years. To sum it up, in the past liberals emphasised our common humanity first, and treating people equally, regardless of their physical or cultural characteristics . Now, there is more focus on your racial characteristics and how this fits into power structures etc. originally this started among activists and certain university departments, but you can now see it deep into mainstream life, e.g. workplace training etc.

To disagree with this does not mean racism is not real.

Adolph Reed lays out some interesting criticism of this new ideology.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118719102#Comment_118719102

"To disagree with this does not mean that racism is not real" but it does risk ignoring racism and doing nothing to address it. The fact is that race can be and often is used as an instrument of class oppression, and class can be and often is used and an instrument of racial oppression. The two things are not opposed; they are intimately entwined. And therefore any attempt to combat one of them which ignores the other is misconceived, and unlikely to make much progress. Hence the reason why "colour-blind" egalitarianism has fallen out of fashion; it doesn't work.

donaghs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118723715#Comment_118723715

Yeh, there's no simple answer. And its still possible to acknowledge class as the major impediment to social/economic progress, while also acknowleging racism as a factor. I think the problem Reed addresses is that the Race issue now so dominant in the US , that it becomes "race essentialism". Potentially leading to new kinds of racism simply because people are being encouraged to identify as their "race", and all the dangers that can lead to - e.g. from recent history even in places with relatively minor differences like Rwanda. Or even people believing that "races" have charateristics and traits.

Another question that comes to mind is, what is the end game? What the expected or hoped for conclusion? Can things get better?

With "colour-blind" egalitarianism, its much clearer. i.e. you can never abolish racism, sectarianism and all other kinds of tribalism, but you can reduce the impact by aiming for this better society where common humanity is the main emphasis.

The modern "anti-racism" or intersectionality, where people's differences are hightlighted, where collections of identities are assigned power and privilege weightings. There are "good intentions" to fix current problems - but whats the long term plan? In the case of an influential writer like Ibrahim Kendi who promotes this side of the argument - he seems to have reached a point of pessimism where "nothing has changed", white people will always be racist, America will always be racist.etc. (The idea that "nothing has really changed" since the Civil War, or since the Civil Rights legislation is simply wrong.)

Although Kendi does propose this possible solution, which has its own issues: "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." This to me is a vision of never ending social strife and division.

Manach

This conversation seems to be a microosm of how the craft of history has become more policised over the years. Where once there was some form of debate about historical events for their own sake, now it is a matter of in effect mine it for reasons to be offended and blame all on past occurances: re the David Starkey controversy.

Mick Tator

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118729053#Comment_118729053

Starkey often was prescient. He said Cameron had no strategy for running the country and that Boris was a despotic buffoon. Not far off the mark on both occasions.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118729053#Comment_118729053

When was history ever "some form of debate about historical events for their own sake"?