The US Prison Industry: Neo-Slavery, A Book Review.
Ask any historian, activist or scholar about the origins of American prison system, and they will confidently reply, “The Walnut Street Jail in 19th century Philadelphia.” One scholar, Professor of Literature, Dennis Childs, will say “No,” adding, “That isn’t it,” and when you ask for more, he’ll tell you that prisons began in America, all right, but it wasn’t in Philadelphia. It began as slave ships, sailing prisons, for millions of Africans, chained for days and weeks on end in their rancid, stifling holes en route to Philadelphia, Rhode Island, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Jamaica, Charleston and beyond.
What sparked Child’s thinking was an article he read many years ago while a graduate student, written by scholar activist Dr. Angelo Davis, entitled “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition,” in which she noted that the institution of slavery was itself a form of incarceration. That powerful insight has moved Professor Childs to pen a book, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration From the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, in which he examines the deep roots and startling continuities between these two repressive institutions and why they remain so popular in the white American mind.
For slavery, like the prison industrial complex, was a monstrously lucrative business. He illustrates how names have changed over time, but deep realities remain. A prison, he argues, is a slave ship run aground. And prisoners? Neo-slaves. He devotes much of his text to Angola, in Louisiana. The name itself is of an African kingdom from whence many Blacks were captured centuries ago. Today, one of the biggest prisons in America, Angola, a former mass plantation during the slavery era, looks an awful lot like it today: chains, shackles, rifles and repression, where thousands of dark men labor under an unremitting sun.
Childs has written a deeply moving and intricately researched book which weaves novels and memory, the past and the present, ancient artifacts and modern tools of repression to reveal an unwelcome truth about modern day America and the biggest prison system on Earth. Childs shows us how the past isn’t really the past, after all. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
