by Troy T. Thomas, California Health Care Facility
An Enslaved Individual.
The United States is predicated upon permanent disparities and inequities in life expectancy, mortality rates, education gaps, incarceration, economic solvency, and counter-development burdened upon Africans domestically and internationally. Founded in enslavement, these disparities were facilitated by military conquest, and perpetuated through economic, legal,and social stratification with Africans occupying the lowest echelons of the American caste system. Africans have forcefully served as the cash crop of the United States and the so-called “New World,” a permanent source of free and cheap labor in the plantation and prison system; a varying source of free and enslaved soldiers for all major wars fought in North America and the European internecine wars; and an endless source of flesh for medical experimentation in prison, plantation, and military sites. Entire industries were created to dehumanize and master the control of the African population in the United States for profit and superiority. Put simply, the suppression of African culture and life provides the lifeblood of the United States and their allies. This suppression, violent and repressive, permeates the space in which Africans exist and is experienced as power disparities.
In recent decades, United States jail and prison populations have grown exponentially. In 2023, the United States is still the world’s largest incarcerator. Despite comprising only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. holds a quarter (2.4 million) of the U.S. population. African so-called “Americans” constitute over 60% of the prison population. Women of color make up two thirds of incarcerated women. Yet,in the 1990s, during an era of presumably economical and technological advancement, the U.S. experienced its fastest growing incarceration rate since chattel enslavement. Sparked by former Democratic (the so-called “First Black President”) president Bill Clinton, whose 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act gave $9.9 billion for prison construction, the rates of imprisonment have increased dramatically since the 1970s.
People of African ancestry experience incarceration at rates far greater than any other group in the world. In 2004, an estimated 12.6% of all Black males in their late 20s were in jails or prisons, in comparison to Latinos (3.6%) and Caucasians (1. 7%). The current crisis of African imprisonment in the U.S. has caused some authors to call the prison industrial complex “The New Jim Crow”.
Prisons played a vital and necessary function in the colonial world. In fact,the early European imperialist powers sentenced criminals to slavery in distanced colonies as a means of manpower and labor resource. These nations were common for exploiting their criminal population in the acquisition of land, resources and power. Later, once the land was conquered/stolen,whites employed a system called transportation. Thus, “transportation” provided the option of being deported to a colony for the mistreatment of free labor and services or receiving a severe criminal penalty (usually death). Another known system was workhouse incarceration, which served two main purposes: (a) providing free labor to developing capitalist nations and (b) rehabilitating recalcitrant workers back into the capitalist work force. These systems introduced and provided the foundations for the United States prison industrial complex.
Again, under capitalist economic arrangement, the prison industrial complex provided several economically necessary conditions: physical control of the surplus African population, the potential for the production of goods without labor costs, and rehabilitation and resocialization of the marginalized African workers through the use of hard work as part of the penal response.
The continual incarceration of Africans, in the interest and service of whites, has its origins steeped within the fabric of American history. Since the time of enslavement, Africans were seized and exploited for white profit. Even thereafter, despite the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, which supposedly ended slavery, Africans were sanctioned to “involuntary servitude” as punishment for “crimes”. To illustrate, section 1 of the 13th Amendment of the United States’ Constitution: “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”.
According to data from Tennessee’s Main Prison in Nashville, immediately following the Civil War, the incarceration rate for Africans increased significantly, whereas the rate for whites decreased. This trend has persisted throughout the decades, which partially explains the “prison industrial complex” today. To date, prisons represent a $147 billion per year industry.
With the current privatization of prisons, major corporations, such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), are recording astronomical profits through the exploitation of African incarceration and subsequent slave labor. In addition to the prison owners, services and products as food, clothing, construction companies, medical transportation, security, and many other white profiteers have and continue to·benefit from the incarceration of people of African descent. America has not abolished slavery; it has simply transferred it into the prisons.
Prisons are now the epicenter around which many towns have sprung up, reviving the rural comnunities (e.g. Susanville, Sacramento, Stockton, Lancaster, Marin, Pelican Bay, etc.). The local populations compete for these jobs, which are unique in their high wages and pension plans, while requiring minimal thinking ability.
No one can deny the stark increase in incarceration of Black and Brown folks within the past three-plus decades. This increase is largely due to policies and harsh laws which are racially motivated (e.g.,the “Three Strikes Laws and LWOPP Life Without the Possibility of Parole”). One notorious example is the federal guideline that sentences people to 10 years for possession of 5 grams of crack or SQO grams of cocaine, when whites are much more likely to be caught with cocaine. No study has ever proven that crack—cocaine in it’s coagulated form—is more harmful than its powder form. And though this law was modified recently, its purpose has already been served.
Since “the end” of slavery’s role as a profitable enterprise for the U.S. farming industry, the principal question for law officials has been,”what is to be done about the fast growing population of restless young Black and Brown men and women?” Prison has become the genocidal solution to this never ending “problem”. A population that is no longer a significant source of slave labor to be exploited, nor allowed to be junior partners to the imperialists, has no role to play in the “Corporate Oligarchic Police State”. Hence,we have seen the growing slave class behind U.$. prison walls/plantations.
Black and Brown men and women born in America and blessed enough to live past the age of eighteen are psychologically conditioned to accept the inevitability of being sent to a so-called “correctional” facility (modern-day slave plantation). For the vast majority of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of profound humiliations. In other words, the real roots of crime in America are associated with a constellation of suffering so hideous that, as a society, it cannot bear to look it in the face, so it hands its casualties over to a system that will keep us from its sight. Indeed, a people already invisible can be easily made to disappear as this is the primary function of ghettos, barrios, reservations, trailer parks and prisons in America.
In sum, the prison industrial complex is a very deliberate and calculated product of the white power structure in the United States. It reifies the colonial relationship and power disparity between Africans, Latinos, along with other marginalized populations in America. Particularly oppressive for Africans in America, the expansion of prison has resulted in the neo-commoditization of Black bodies in a capitalist system with roots in the original commoditization of the African body, labor. Thus, Black incarceration serves as a deliberate and specific purpose in sustaining white terror, power, and domination. In other words,the relationship between Africans in America and the holders of state power in the United States is similar to that which exists between the colonized and the colonial master. Focusing on the spatially separate African “American” communities of the urban North and the heavy concentrations of Africans in the Southern Black Belt, the colonial model views Americanized Africans as a unit, a part, an internal colony, which is systematically exploited by white society. Blacks are viewed as a separate nation that exports cheap labor and imports finished goods from the broader community.
In the final analysis, African so-called “American” slaves must accept the reality that, for the white American “race”, “Democracy” and racial oppression/slavery are not conflicting ideals. The fact that Black people have been and remain enslaved for over three hundred-plus years by a “Democratic” (largely “Christian” form of government) should be evidence enough. Furthermore, a Democratic government presupposes an inherent equality of races; it does not provide methods of liberation for those who are not equal. Slavery in California along with America in general which is why white America has made it very clear that it has no intention of ever giving up its slaves. California slaves have come to fully understand our position in this state and we know quite well that one of the most tragic beliefs widely shared by Blacks in California/America is that white Americans as a whole want to help Black people prosper and have equal access to society’s resources. Faith continues to prevail in spite of overwhelming evidence which disputes this belief. Black people continue to ignore the irrefutable truth that in a racist social system, all institutions will reflect, protect, and sustain values that are consistent with racism/white supremacy. Slavery is the system that California/America has chosen. To argue otherwise makes no historical sense!
THIS IS WHAT “DEMOCRACY” LOOKS LIKE.
PLEASE VISIT THE FOLLOWING WEBSITES: 1) www.abolishbondagecollectively.org 2) www.endslaveryincalifornia.org 3) Abolish Legal Slavery in Amerika Movement to amendthe13th.org
CONTACT ME AT: Troy T.Thomas, H-01001, E3B-136
C.H.C.F.
P.O. BOX 213040
Stockton,CA 95213
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