There is a curious relationship between incarceration and prison, which is the subject of Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison:
Prologue
Prisoners are the least popular segment of society and prison the most disreputable place. As a result, few think or talk about prisons or prisoners. Most of us never see the inside of a prison or talk with anyone who readily admits to having lived there. Offenders deserve punishment, so why should we care?
The United States now has over 7,300,000 people in its correctional population, an economically and socially debilitating number of convicts and offenders. With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners. If the correctional population were a state, it would be America’s thirteenth largest state by population. Grossly inefficient state slavery, which is what incarceration amounts to, is worse than people think, and is bad for the public, taxpayers, crime victims, prisoners, the economy and the families of the victimized and incarcerated. We can reduce the number of Americans in prison and fight crime at the same time, but our tactics need to change. History and science will reveal a different way of thinking.
Antebellum slavery succeeded in a number of ways and was less gruesome than failed “new age slavery,” a name for mass incarceration or state slavery. The plantation regime did not incarcerate antebellum slaves. Colonial officials disciplined whites with methods other than incarceration, too. Antebellum slaves had more virtue than is recognized today. Slaves were usually non-violent, hard working, polite, sober, spiritual and safe: the opposite of criminals today. Antebellum slaves created and lived in a much better private enterprise world than new age slaves. We should admit our modern failures and pay proper attention to American history.
Because the institution of slavery did not meet American standards of constitutional liberty, and because a racist rationalization pervaded most writings saying anything positive about antebellum slavery, we ignored and repudiated the antebellum methods of promoting work and keeping people out of prison. This book asserts racial equality and proves race and crime are not truly related.
From a strident moral perspective, the absolute condemnation of antebellum slavery holds that antebellum slavery had no humane aspects. You will hear from 400 slaves and ex-slaves, original sources, whose names are in bold. The ex-slaves quoted in this book do not say what politically correct modern experts want them to say, but those who endured slavery are the real experts. After stripping away the multiple and opposing biases, political agendas, contradictions, myths and exaggerations about the subject of antebellum slavery, we can see antebellum life from a new perspective. Isolating the positive aspects of slave life allows us to see methods that will be of value today.
No one can deny the inhumane side of slavery. I do not advocate resurrecting any unjust aspects of antebellum slavery. My burden of proof is low. All I have to prove is that American antebellum slavery was more productive, benign and comfortable than modern mass incarceration – and without question, in most instances, it was. Antebellum slavery was inhumane and humane at the same time, but profoundly unfair. What if we could fairly apply its methods? Instead of applying procedures to oppressed slaves on a racial basis, what if we applied those same methods in a racially neutral way, to those who deserved it? Justice for a change.
Many think we abolished slavery, but it survived in grotesque forms. Antebellum slavery first relapsed into a brutal convict leasing system and much later into what we have today: state slavery through mass incarceration. Numerous modern slaves of the state, prisoners of all races, live horrendous lives compared to white colonial offenders and antebellum slaves. Twenty-first century state slaves fare worse than privately held antebellum slaves did, for the same reasons free enterprise triumphed over communism. Millions of Americans caught up in slavery today need better direction. The United States pays a very steep price for new age slavery and cannot ignore the workable solutions in this book.
By no means is this book an effort to “bring back slavery” – just the opposite. New age slavery is already here – big-time – and it’s growing. Over 2,300,000 Americans are now incarcerated slaves of the state, more prisoners in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our population than any other nation in the world. The number of living Americans in the U.S. correctional population, including those on probation and parole, far exceeds the American slave population in 1860. America’s wasteful penitentiaries subject forgotten prisoners to concealed punishment, an ineffective crime deterrent. This time around, slaves stay inactive, sleep, scheme with their gangs and watch TV more than they work, are isolated from family and friends and cost their slaveholders billions of dollars. In the last five years, California’s budget for corrections shot way ahead of their spending for higher education, and California is still in a crisis while spending 45% more on prisons than universities. After prison, prisoners enter a lower caste of convicted felons and face what some now call a New Jim Crow regime. Most of us do not equate prison life with antebellum slavery, but the words of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery do. The Thirteenth Amendment did not really abolish slavery, but merely restricted “involuntary servitude” to convicted criminals: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I never set out to be an advocate for prison reform. It was the surprising consequence of historical research into colonial and antebellum practices. The reforms suggested in this book would increase public safety, save billions of dollars for government at all levels, compensate crime victims, reduce the prison population, improve the lives of prisoners, weaken gangs and boost the American economy. This book is a way forward to solve the current prison crisis, by keeping younger people out of prison, providing hard labor for prisoners and teaching felons how to work. Only through private enterprise and a work orientation will prison reform achieve political and economic viability. Leaders have issued calls for frank debate about race, mass incarceration, reparations and our criminal justice and prison systems. This book is just such a discussion.
Successful societies over time eventually find economically viable ways to punish their criminals. After over a century of failure, change is coming. What we are doing now does not make sense. We can fundamentally change our criminal justice and penal systems in ways that will help the United States preserve its exceptional place in the world.
Chapter I – New Age Slavery, Mass Incarceration
We humans often delude ourselves with the idea of progress while continuing to make the same mistakes. We developed advanced technology and then fought the most destructive and cruel war in the history of the world, the Second World War. We invented chemicals and drugs, but not always the wisdom to use them. Our species became prosperous and then destroyed its families. People, organizations and societies are often inept at making the best decisions. Our wars, upheavals, environmental problems and financial crises display the persistent follies of the human species. “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”
The longest delusion of the twentieth century grew out of the idealistic desire to stop the exploitation of labor, free oppressed workers and peasants, abolish capitalism, stop wars and create a workers’ paradise while the state and religion gradually withered away. Instead of creating better conditions, the Russian Revolution of 1917 ushered in massive oppression, turmoil and famine. Within 40 years, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin created the largest system of slave labor in history. Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn brilliantly described this state slavery, including the personal selection of naked female slave laborers as bedmates for Soviet Interior Ministry slave buyers and their associates. Slaves of the Soviet state received far worse treatment than did slaves in the Old South. For exposing the tragedy, horror and cruelty of Soviet slave labor camps in books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Slave labor systems arose in other communist nations, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern European communist regimes and Red China. Many millions of Chinese died in forced labor camps under Mao, who numerically surpassed the slave holdings of Stalin and Hitler.
During a 12-year delusion, Nazi Germany created millions of state slaves. Like the Soviets, the Nazis worked “enemies of the people” as slaves and intentionally worked many to death. The Germans executed those unfit to work early in the process. For the Hebrew people, this was at least their third enslavement after two earlier enslavements described in the Bible. Historians know more about the Nazi slave labor system than we do the Soviet counterpart, because the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, physically discovered their work and death camps and learned much from Holocaust survivors, who were then free to speak. While Stalin let up on mass arrests and deportations during the Second World War, Hitler insanely killed more workers during Germany’s acute wartime labor shortage. Soviet and Nazi slave laborers were abused as punishment for political, religious, racial, military and ethnic status, not utilized efficiently or with complete dedication to economic production. The Soviet, Nazi and Red Chinese slave labor systems each enslaved over 10,000,000 people. Twentieth century dictatorships did not value the lives of their state slaves.
Today, China incarcerates with or without trial some three to five million dissidents, slackers and criminals in a vast network of reform-through-labor or Laogai camps. Despite international agreements barring prison-made goods from entering the United States, products made by unpaid forced labor find their way here. Product components made in Laogai camps pass undetected. Many internet sales conducted in English link to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. According to the Laogai Research Foundation, prisons produce large profits for the Chinese government.
The world abolished the international slave trade once and now sees it resurrected under the euphemistic name of “human trafficking.” “Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery. Every year, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders. Millions more are enslaved in their own countries, especially in south Asia. The common denominator in all trafficking scenarios is the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit a person for commercial sex or for subjecting a victim to involuntary servitude, debt bondage or forced labor. The use of force or coercion can be direct and violent or psychological.” The International Labor Organization estimates there are at least 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor and commercial sexual servitude worldwide. By some estimates, there are 27 million enslaved people in the world. E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous, spent four years visiting a dozen countries where this ugly species of modern day slavery flourishes. Skinner contends, “a slave is someone who is forced to work, through fraud or threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.” More U.S. states now specifically prohibit human trafficking. Prosecutions are on the increase in the United States and elsewhere in the world. The U.S. State Department, through its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, now formally “names and shames” other nations who practice and condone the modern day slavery of human trafficking. While the United States points the finger of blame at other nations regarding human trafficking, it keeps a record number of its very own new age slaves.
Slavery dies hard and re-appears in different forms through time. That’s because it’s more than a single institution. Societies develop from the equality of hunter-gatherers to organized social stratification, inequality. Human civilization always results in wealth and power differentials. Disparities in political, legal, financial and military power allow the strong to dominate or enslave the weak through various means and for different reasons.
Slavery and criminal punishment have many things in common. Each keeps people in low social strata. Criminal punishment in various cultures resulted in forms of slavery. In different Western legal systems throughout history, the punishments used to control slaves eventually made their way into criminal laws applicable to everyone. Penal servitude and slavery were in some cultures practically indistinguishable. Chattel slavery was usually milder than galley slavery, penal servitude and convict leasing, because the slaveholder had a direct investment in the life of the slave rather than merely the use of labor for some years.
A delusion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originating as a humanitarian movement, was the idea that people would get better with time if placed in cages or cells. This misconception brought about yet another form of slavery, which is now more prevalent in the United States than in any other country. We have not reached the final chapter of American slavery. We abolished slavery, we thought, and then developed a new form of slavery. Antebellum chattel slavery is gone, but new age American slavery, mass incarceration, is much worse. We are not accustomed to thinking of prisoners as “slaves,” but in all the basic ways, they are state slaves. Although not strictly chattel, prisoners owe absolute obedience, have no physical freedom and little status, enjoy few rights and remain subjugated or abused for many years, in prison and after their release. The United States has gone from an agrarian, paternalistic, personal form of private enterprise slavery to the socialized, impersonal, institutional, mass state slavery through incarceration inside hard surfaces, directed from Washington, D.C. and 50 state capitals. The twisted world of modern mass incarceration, state slavery, is new age slavery. New age slaves deserve their bondage, but do not “work like slaves.”
[footnotes omitted; only part of Chapter I shown].
Prologue
Prisoners are the least popular segment of society and prison the most disreputable place. As a result, few think or talk about prisons or prisoners. Most of us never see the inside of a prison or talk with anyone who readily admits to having lived there. Offenders deserve punishment, so why should we care?
The United States now has over 7,300,000 people in its correctional population, an economically and socially debilitating number of convicts and offenders. With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of its prisoners. If the correctional population were a state, it would be America’s thirteenth largest state by population. Grossly inefficient state slavery, which is what incarceration amounts to, is worse than people think, and is bad for the public, taxpayers, crime victims, prisoners, the economy and the families of the victimized and incarcerated. We can reduce the number of Americans in prison and fight crime at the same time, but our tactics need to change. History and science will reveal a different way of thinking.
Antebellum slavery succeeded in a number of ways and was less gruesome than failed “new age slavery,” a name for mass incarceration or state slavery. The plantation regime did not incarcerate antebellum slaves. Colonial officials disciplined whites with methods other than incarceration, too. Antebellum slaves had more virtue than is recognized today. Slaves were usually non-violent, hard working, polite, sober, spiritual and safe: the opposite of criminals today. Antebellum slaves created and lived in a much better private enterprise world than new age slaves. We should admit our modern failures and pay proper attention to American history.
Because the institution of slavery did not meet American standards of constitutional liberty, and because a racist rationalization pervaded most writings saying anything positive about antebellum slavery, we ignored and repudiated the antebellum methods of promoting work and keeping people out of prison. This book asserts racial equality and proves race and crime are not truly related.
From a strident moral perspective, the absolute condemnation of antebellum slavery holds that antebellum slavery had no humane aspects. You will hear from 400 slaves and ex-slaves, original sources, whose names are in bold. The ex-slaves quoted in this book do not say what politically correct modern experts want them to say, but those who endured slavery are the real experts. After stripping away the multiple and opposing biases, political agendas, contradictions, myths and exaggerations about the subject of antebellum slavery, we can see antebellum life from a new perspective. Isolating the positive aspects of slave life allows us to see methods that will be of value today.
No one can deny the inhumane side of slavery. I do not advocate resurrecting any unjust aspects of antebellum slavery. My burden of proof is low. All I have to prove is that American antebellum slavery was more productive, benign and comfortable than modern mass incarceration – and without question, in most instances, it was. Antebellum slavery was inhumane and humane at the same time, but profoundly unfair. What if we could fairly apply its methods? Instead of applying procedures to oppressed slaves on a racial basis, what if we applied those same methods in a racially neutral way, to those who deserved it? Justice for a change.
Many think we abolished slavery, but it survived in grotesque forms. Antebellum slavery first relapsed into a brutal convict leasing system and much later into what we have today: state slavery through mass incarceration. Numerous modern slaves of the state, prisoners of all races, live horrendous lives compared to white colonial offenders and antebellum slaves. Twenty-first century state slaves fare worse than privately held antebellum slaves did, for the same reasons free enterprise triumphed over communism. Millions of Americans caught up in slavery today need better direction. The United States pays a very steep price for new age slavery and cannot ignore the workable solutions in this book.
By no means is this book an effort to “bring back slavery” – just the opposite. New age slavery is already here – big-time – and it’s growing. Over 2,300,000 Americans are now incarcerated slaves of the state, more prisoners in absolute numbers and as a percentage of our population than any other nation in the world. The number of living Americans in the U.S. correctional population, including those on probation and parole, far exceeds the American slave population in 1860. America’s wasteful penitentiaries subject forgotten prisoners to concealed punishment, an ineffective crime deterrent. This time around, slaves stay inactive, sleep, scheme with their gangs and watch TV more than they work, are isolated from family and friends and cost their slaveholders billions of dollars. In the last five years, California’s budget for corrections shot way ahead of their spending for higher education, and California is still in a crisis while spending 45% more on prisons than universities. After prison, prisoners enter a lower caste of convicted felons and face what some now call a New Jim Crow regime. Most of us do not equate prison life with antebellum slavery, but the words of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery do. The Thirteenth Amendment did not really abolish slavery, but merely restricted “involuntary servitude” to convicted criminals: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I never set out to be an advocate for prison reform. It was the surprising consequence of historical research into colonial and antebellum practices. The reforms suggested in this book would increase public safety, save billions of dollars for government at all levels, compensate crime victims, reduce the prison population, improve the lives of prisoners, weaken gangs and boost the American economy. This book is a way forward to solve the current prison crisis, by keeping younger people out of prison, providing hard labor for prisoners and teaching felons how to work. Only through private enterprise and a work orientation will prison reform achieve political and economic viability. Leaders have issued calls for frank debate about race, mass incarceration, reparations and our criminal justice and prison systems. This book is just such a discussion.
Successful societies over time eventually find economically viable ways to punish their criminals. After over a century of failure, change is coming. What we are doing now does not make sense. We can fundamentally change our criminal justice and penal systems in ways that will help the United States preserve its exceptional place in the world.
Chapter I – New Age Slavery, Mass Incarceration
We humans often delude ourselves with the idea of progress while continuing to make the same mistakes. We developed advanced technology and then fought the most destructive and cruel war in the history of the world, the Second World War. We invented chemicals and drugs, but not always the wisdom to use them. Our species became prosperous and then destroyed its families. People, organizations and societies are often inept at making the best decisions. Our wars, upheavals, environmental problems and financial crises display the persistent follies of the human species. “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”
The longest delusion of the twentieth century grew out of the idealistic desire to stop the exploitation of labor, free oppressed workers and peasants, abolish capitalism, stop wars and create a workers’ paradise while the state and religion gradually withered away. Instead of creating better conditions, the Russian Revolution of 1917 ushered in massive oppression, turmoil and famine. Within 40 years, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin created the largest system of slave labor in history. Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn brilliantly described this state slavery, including the personal selection of naked female slave laborers as bedmates for Soviet Interior Ministry slave buyers and their associates. Slaves of the Soviet state received far worse treatment than did slaves in the Old South. For exposing the tragedy, horror and cruelty of Soviet slave labor camps in books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970. Slave labor systems arose in other communist nations, including Cambodia, Vietnam, Eastern European communist regimes and Red China. Many millions of Chinese died in forced labor camps under Mao, who numerically surpassed the slave holdings of Stalin and Hitler.
During a 12-year delusion, Nazi Germany created millions of state slaves. Like the Soviets, the Nazis worked “enemies of the people” as slaves and intentionally worked many to death. The Germans executed those unfit to work early in the process. For the Hebrew people, this was at least their third enslavement after two earlier enslavements described in the Bible. Historians know more about the Nazi slave labor system than we do the Soviet counterpart, because the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, physically discovered their work and death camps and learned much from Holocaust survivors, who were then free to speak. While Stalin let up on mass arrests and deportations during the Second World War, Hitler insanely killed more workers during Germany’s acute wartime labor shortage. Soviet and Nazi slave laborers were abused as punishment for political, religious, racial, military and ethnic status, not utilized efficiently or with complete dedication to economic production. The Soviet, Nazi and Red Chinese slave labor systems each enslaved over 10,000,000 people. Twentieth century dictatorships did not value the lives of their state slaves.
Today, China incarcerates with or without trial some three to five million dissidents, slackers and criminals in a vast network of reform-through-labor or Laogai camps. Despite international agreements barring prison-made goods from entering the United States, products made by unpaid forced labor find their way here. Product components made in Laogai camps pass undetected. Many internet sales conducted in English link to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. According to the Laogai Research Foundation, prisons produce large profits for the Chinese government.
The world abolished the international slave trade once and now sees it resurrected under the euphemistic name of “human trafficking.” “Trafficking in persons is modern-day slavery. Every year, approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders. Millions more are enslaved in their own countries, especially in south Asia. The common denominator in all trafficking scenarios is the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit a person for commercial sex or for subjecting a victim to involuntary servitude, debt bondage or forced labor. The use of force or coercion can be direct and violent or psychological.” The International Labor Organization estimates there are at least 12.3 million people in forced labor, bonded labor and commercial sexual servitude worldwide. By some estimates, there are 27 million enslaved people in the world. E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous, spent four years visiting a dozen countries where this ugly species of modern day slavery flourishes. Skinner contends, “a slave is someone who is forced to work, through fraud or threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence.” More U.S. states now specifically prohibit human trafficking. Prosecutions are on the increase in the United States and elsewhere in the world. The U.S. State Department, through its Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, now formally “names and shames” other nations who practice and condone the modern day slavery of human trafficking. While the United States points the finger of blame at other nations regarding human trafficking, it keeps a record number of its very own new age slaves.
Slavery dies hard and re-appears in different forms through time. That’s because it’s more than a single institution. Societies develop from the equality of hunter-gatherers to organized social stratification, inequality. Human civilization always results in wealth and power differentials. Disparities in political, legal, financial and military power allow the strong to dominate or enslave the weak through various means and for different reasons.
Slavery and criminal punishment have many things in common. Each keeps people in low social strata. Criminal punishment in various cultures resulted in forms of slavery. In different Western legal systems throughout history, the punishments used to control slaves eventually made their way into criminal laws applicable to everyone. Penal servitude and slavery were in some cultures practically indistinguishable. Chattel slavery was usually milder than galley slavery, penal servitude and convict leasing, because the slaveholder had a direct investment in the life of the slave rather than merely the use of labor for some years.
A delusion of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, originating as a humanitarian movement, was the idea that people would get better with time if placed in cages or cells. This misconception brought about yet another form of slavery, which is now more prevalent in the United States than in any other country. We have not reached the final chapter of American slavery. We abolished slavery, we thought, and then developed a new form of slavery. Antebellum chattel slavery is gone, but new age American slavery, mass incarceration, is much worse. We are not accustomed to thinking of prisoners as “slaves,” but in all the basic ways, they are state slaves. Although not strictly chattel, prisoners owe absolute obedience, have no physical freedom and little status, enjoy few rights and remain subjugated or abused for many years, in prison and after their release. The United States has gone from an agrarian, paternalistic, personal form of private enterprise slavery to the socialized, impersonal, institutional, mass state slavery through incarceration inside hard surfaces, directed from Washington, D.C. and 50 state capitals. The twisted world of modern mass incarceration, state slavery, is new age slavery. New age slaves deserve their bondage, but do not “work like slaves.”
[footnotes omitted; only part of Chapter I shown].