The United States Constitution Permits Slavery by Kerry Shakaboona Marshall. For the past 150 years, the American government has perpetrated a fraud on its citizens that it abolished slavery of Africans in America by passing of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. While the 13th Amendment abolished the chattel labor form of slavery, it simultaneously legalized slavery as a punishment for a criminal offense conviction. The 13th Amendment states,”Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The 13th Amendment slavery exception clause simply wrote in a new legal form of slavery, penal slavery, that is, the prison slave labor system. The new prison slavery form had freed Black people in mind from the beginning, was established soon after the Civil War and after the passing of the 13th Amendment, with southern states adopting Black Codes: laws specifically designed to re-enslave Black people for violating so called crimes of vagrancy, loitering, debt, being unemployed, changing jobs without permission of previous employers, and more.
Once re-enslaved in prison and forced into the prison work crews or chain gangs, Black prisoner slaves were leased out to private corporations to provide free labor, in what was called the convict leasing system. After the Civil War, through the convict leasing slave system, re-enslaved African people were forced to provide free labor, subjected to the bullwhip, had no rights as a citizen, and most were never released from prison ever again. The slavery exception clause of the 13th Amendment and Black Codes allowed former white southern slave ruling class to re-enslave free African people through the criminal injustice system, by a process of criminalization and mass incarceration of Black people that persists in America to this day.
In the modern era of the 21st Century in America, we now live in a society where forced slave labor has been legalized through the criminal injustice system, where poor, Black, Latino, and white people are forced to provide free labor to private corporations and stripped of all civil rights. America refuses to accept that slavery by any other name is still slavery. I am Kerry Shakaboona Marshall, co-founder and editor of The Movement, human rights magazine, Prison Radio correspondent, and child lifer Prisoner confined at SCI Rockview, Box A, number BE7826, Bellefonte, PA, 16823. Thank you for listening.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
