Prison Slavery

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

One Example of Arizona Prison Slavery

US Farmers Using Prison Labor --
With Tightening Restrictions on Migrant Workers
Some Farmers are Turning to the Incarcerated
by Nicole Hill
© 2007 The Christian Science Monitor

Picacho, Arizona, USA -- Saturday, August 22, 2007 -- Near this dusty
town in southeastern Arizona, Manuel Reyna pitches watermelons into the
back of a trailer hitched to a tractor. His father was a migrant farm
worker, but growing up, Mr. Reyna never saw himself following his
father's footsteps. Now, as an inmate at the Picacho Prison Unit here,
Reyna works under the blazing desert sun alongside Mexican farmers the way
his father did.

"My dad tried to keep me out of trouble," he says, wearing a bandanna to keep the sweat out of his eyes. "But I always got back into the easy money, because it was faster and a lot more money." He's serving a 6-1/2 year sentence for possession and sale of rock cocaine.

As states increasingly crack down on hiring undocumented workers, western farmers are looking at inmates to harvest their fields. Colorado started sending female inmates to harvest onions, corn, and melons this summer. Iowa is considering a similar program. In Arizona, inmates have been working for private agriculture businesses for almost 20 years. But with legislation signed this summer that would fine employers for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, more farmers are turning to the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) for help.

"We are contacted almost daily by different companies needing labor," says Bruce Farely, manager of the business development unit of Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI). ACI is a state labor program that holds contracts with government and private companies. "Maybe it was labor that was undocumented before, and they don't want to take the risk anymore because of possible consequences, so they are looking to inmate labor as a possible alternative."

Reyna and about 20 other low-risk, nonviolent offenders work at LBJ Farm, a family-owned watermelon farm, as part of ADC's mission to employ every inmate, either behind prison walls or in outside companies. The idea is to help inmates develop job skills and save money for their release. "It helps them really pay their debt back to the folks who have been harmed in society, as well as make adequate preparation for their release back onto the streets." says ADC director Dora Schriro.

If it weren't for a steady flow of inmates year-round, says Jack Dixon, owner of LBJ, one of the largest watermelon farms in the western US, he'd have sold out long ago. Even so, last year 400 acres of his watermelons rotted on the ground -- a $640,000 loss -- because there weren't enough harvesters. Mr. Dixon had applied for 60 H2-A guest worker visas, but only 14 were approved because of previous visa violations.

"We are in desperate need for hand labor," says Dixon, who started working on the farm when he was 9, alongside mostly migrant workers. "It's hard to get migrant workers up here anymore, with all the laws preventing them. It's not what it used to be," Dixon says. "It's dangerous for them with all the coyote wars and smuggling."

Other farmers wonder if inmates could be their solution. Dixon has received calls from a yellow-squash farmer in Texas inquiring about how to set up an inmate labor contract as well as from another watermelon farmer in Colorado seeking advice on how to manage inmate crews.

For labor-rights activists, federal immigration reform is the only viable solution to worker shortages.

Marc Grossman, spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America, says inmate labor undermines what unionized farmworkers have wanted for years: to be paid based on skill and experience. "It's rather insulting that the state [Arizona] would look so poorly on farm workers that they would attempt to use inmates," Grossman says. There is also the food-safety aspect, he says: Experienced workers understand sanitary harvesting.

"Agriculture does not have a reliable workforce, and the answer does not lie with prison labor," says Paul Simonds of the Western Growers Association, a trade association representing California and Arizona. "This just underscores the need for legislation to be passed to provide a legal, stable workforce." A prison lockdown would be disastrous, he points out, with perishable crops awaiting harvest. Other crops, like asparagus and broccoli, require skilled workers.

Although the ADC is considering innovative solutions -- including satellite prisons -- to fulfill companies' requests for inmate labor, prison officials agree that, in the end, the demand is too high. "To go into a state where agriculture is worth $9.2 billion and expect to meet a workforce need is impossible," says Katie Decker, spokeswoman for ADC. At any given time, only about 3,300 prisoners statewide (out of a prison population of about 37,000) are cleared to work outside.

ACI provides inmates to nine private agricultural companies in Arizona, ranging from a hydroponics greenhouse tomato plant to a green chili cannery. Unlike other sectors where federal regulations require that inmate workers be paid a prevailing wage and receive worker compensation, agricultural companies can hire state inmates on a contract basis. They must be paid a minimum of $2 per hour. Thirty percent of their wages go to room and board in prison. The rest goes to court-ordered restitution for victims, any child support, and a mandatory savings account. Private companies are required to pay for transportation from the prison to the work site and for prison guards.

For Reyna, his work on farms over the past couple of years has added $9,000 in his savings account and given him a renewed respect for his Mexican father's lifetime of stoop labor.

At Dixon's farm, it's 103 degrees Fahrenheit. The inmate crews, wearing orange jumpsuits, work in a rhythmic line, calling out the number of the watermelons, and alongside the trailer. Just a few yards away, Mexican workers also work in a line. The inmates will quit at 4 p.m., while the immigrant laborers may work 13-hour days. "We go back, they stay out here," Reyna says. "It really isn't the same."

In the farm's office, watermelons line the counter, and photos of migrant workers hang in dusty frames. When asked why he doesn't sell the farm, Dixon says, "the inmates, the migrants, these people are part of the family -- that's why I keep this darn place."

Dixon says he supports the idea of a reformed, guest-worker program that would employ migrant workers during the harvest and return them to Mexico in the winter. But until that happens, he's willing to fight for the workers he's shared the land with for most of his life.

"People are crossing the border because they are starving to death,"Dixon says. "I don't care what their status is. If they are hungry and thirsty, I am going to feed them."

"I could sell this and quit," he continues. "But I believe in supporting the American farming industry."

Unofficial Fascism vs. Official Fascism

This Alternet article shows the US with 1,200,000 slaughtered Iraqi men, women, and children citizens. It suggests the US rivals Rwanda with it's 900,000 murdered citizens; and with the Cambodian killing fields at 1.7 million human bodies and souls.
So, how many hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Iraqi citizens does it take to qualify the US as "Official Fascists"? What are the slaughter qualifications necessary to become "OfficialFascists"?
The ratio of 3,800 dead American soldiers to 1,200,000 dead Iraqi Citizens is now 1/316 and rapidly growing. Is it this kill ratio that qualifies America out of the "unofficial" and into the "Official Fascist" ranks?

Since Official or Unofficial Fascism exists with this death rate and other significant human, citizenship and labor rights violations, a second question is "How to Stop these violations and deaths?"

Short of open revolution, a National Strike, a National Work and Commerce Strike, combined with the Nationalization of Oil companies might work. Meanwhile, it is suggested to everyone from the top down to us lowly citizens that we must wait until after the National Presidential Election and the new Democratic President is in office before the war is stopped. So, after another 16 additional months the war MIGHT end. That's no guarantee. It's just a "maybe". With this time frame we will have another 1,200 American soldiers killed and another 800,000 Iraqis slaughtered. This will bring the new totals of 5,000 dead American soldiers to 2,000,000 dead Iraqi citizens, for a kill ratio of 1/400. Would that number of dead and that kill ratio qualify as Official or Unofficial Fascist?

Towards Abolition,
Lee

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62728/?page=2Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda

Genocide, CambodianKilling FieldsBy Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 17,2007.

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal.Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years ofthe occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century --the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role inthe debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community"has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air.Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions,there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war theadministration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.

A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade.:

But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage."It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results-- this new research is already being dismissed out ofhand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on severa lstudies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, hashad trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):

[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year,which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.

1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000-- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around.

Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having anillicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraqwar will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Prison Labor by E. Stagg Whitin

Published in Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York, Vol. 2, No. 4,Organization for Social Work. (Jul., 1912), pp. 159-163.

Prison Labor by E. Stagg Whitin
General SecretaryNational Committee on Prison Labor

Christianity has brought no greater change into the world than the overthrow of slavery. The greatest war of modern times had human slavery as its inciting cause, yet behind the dark bastilles we call our prisons, penitentiaries, reformatories, workhouses, and refuges, there still hides the enemy of our social progress, the economically-vicious slave system. The abolition of the evils inherent in this system, comprising as they do the exploitation of the helpless, the perversion of state functions, the gnawing of graft and the corruption of politics, appears no limited task, even to the most light-hearted of reformers; to undertake to work out the reconstruction, the peaceful reformation of this system throughout the length and breadth of this land is at least to grapple with fundamental issues."

Its dealings with the criminal mark, one may say, the zero point in the scale of treatment which society conceives to be the due of its various members. If we raise this point we raise the standard all along the scale. The pauper may justly expect something better than the criminal, the self-supporting poor man or woman more than the pauper. Thus if it is the aim of good civilization to raise the general standard of life, this is a tendency which a savage criminal law will hinder, and a humane one assist.

"Thus speaks Hobhouse. The level of the convict today is, economically considered, slavery. He is the property of the state, and during his incarceration the economic value which is in him may be disposed of by the state to those who desire to lease it, or he may be worked by the state as it sees fit.

The leased convict is always exploited. The state-worked convict may be made to work either to pay for his keep, to sustain his dependents, to reform his ways, or to bring revenue into the state treasury. Work he must, and by the sweat of his brow he must learn that society has rights to be protected, and he duties to perform. The conditions under which this training is given need not debase the state, his disciplinary authority, in the performance of its function. While we raise the level of the convict and force up the level of industrial society, we must force up likewise the moral standard of the master who has charge of the discipline. Negro slavery was more demoralizing to the free man than to the slave; convict slavery today demoralizes the community and the free individual in just the same way. It is an old saying worthy to be believed of all men that a state cannot exist half slave and half free.

The abolition of slavery in our prisons does not mean a jail delivery, nor does it mean even an indiscriminate pardoning by over-enthusiastic governors of large numbers of depraved and diseased men who are now incarcerated. From a slave the convict must become a ward, and as a ward he must be disciplined, corrected, developed, trained through daily chores, through honest work, with ever the hope of the brighter future before him when he can again assume the position of citizen and praise and bless the state that has trained him. Simple was the process of the abolition of slavery as pointed out by Lincoln when he said:

"Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope; the power of hope upon human exertion and happiness is wonderful; the slave master himself has a conception of it, hence the system of tasks among slaves; the slave whom you cannot drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you task him to break a hundred and promise him wage for all over, will break you one hundred and fifty. You have substituted hope for the rod, and yet perhaps it does not occur to you that, to the extent of your gain in the case, you have given up the slave system and adopted the free system of labor.

"The movement which this thought represents is sweeping over the country, finding its expression in many states. It is championed by Wilson in New Jersey, Harmon in Ohio, Mann in Virginia, Hadley in Missouri, Johnson in California. The legislatures are responding, commissions are investigating, governors are conferring. As an outcome of the discussion at the governors' conference at Spring Lake, the southern governors met in May in special conference upon it, and the governors in the West are soon to follow. But what is the actual status? Whither are they leading? To point the movement in a few brief phrases must suffice here. Economically two systems of convict production and two systems of convict-made goods exist: production is either by the state or under individual enterprise; distribution either is limited to the preferred state-use market or is made through the general market. In the light of such classification the convict labor legislation of recent years shows definite tendencies toward the state's assumption of its responsibility for its own use of the prisoners on state lands, in state mines and as operatives in state factories; while in distribution the competition of the open market, with its disastrous effect upon prices, tends to give place to the use of labor and commodities by the state itself in its manifold activities. Improvements like these in the production and distribution of the products mitigates evils, but in no vital way affect the economic injustice always inherent in a slave system. The payment of wage to the convict as a right growing out of the production of valuable commodities is the phase of this legislation which tends to destroy the state of slavery. Such legislation has made its appearance, together with the first suggestion of right to choice allowed to the convict in regard to his occupation. These statutes still waver in an uncertain manner between the conception of the wage as a privilege, common in England and Germany, and the wage as a right as it exists in France. The development of the idea of the right of wage, fused as it is with the movement toward governmental work and workshops, cannot fail to stand out significantly when viewed from the standpoint of the labor movement.

In a word, the economic progress in prison labor shown in recent legislation is toward more efficient production by the elimination of the profits of the lessee; more economical distribution of the products by the substitution of a preferred market, where the profits of the middleman are eliminated, in place of the unfair competition with the products of free labor in the open market; and finally the curtailment of the slave system by the provision for wages and choice of occupation for the man in penal servitude.

In administration the adaptation of these new principles presents many difficulties and points the need of much careful study and detailed application suited to the special locality. Dr. Hart's illustration from the Columbus reformatory finds its counterpart in the horrors that have been perpetrated at the Columbus penitentiary. The pen portraits of Brand Whitlock in his 'Turn of the Balance' exaggerate nothing in their depiction of the horrors of the convicts in the shops, suffering from industrial diseases as horrible as the poisoning of which Dr. Seager has spoken, but forced to work under the brutal contractor till fatigue and anguish break them down -- then the paddle and the water-cure change them from men into brutes. I should hesitate so to testify if the facts were not a matter of court record in a case now pending in that great city of Ohio whence came most of our inspiration at this morning's meeting. This is but a type, however. The convicts in Alabama who tried to become my slaves to avoid the mine-camp can be found if you care to seek them; all along the line the war goes on between brutality and enlightened state control. What Dr. Hart told of Ohio is as true in many other places. You have read of the abominable conditions in Maryland, the contracts in Connecticut which sell their right to grasping contractors to punish the convicts at their pleasure -- but this phase must soon belong to the past.

The National Committee on Prison Labor for two years has been investigating the conditions, advising with state officials, drafting legislation, organizing reform. Armed with a constructive program resulting from its studies and experiments, it will bring to the legislatures which are to be elected this year the encouragement which comes from well-conceived plans based upon actual conditions, and to the administrators whom the new governors shall appoint a synthesis of the available material upon which to work. It is not for support from these men that we need ask; they will be glad and ready to respond -- it is from the public which this association represents, the public of the good citizen, the church-goer, the preacher, the tax-payer, and the educator. Reform is impossible of permanence until these are fully alive to the problem and take personal interest in aiding each community to make that adjustment upon which permanent reform must rest.

What are the conditions in your community? What are you doing to improve them? Do you realize that as a citizen of a state that continues the slavery of its convicts, you join in the responsibility for its existence?

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

220 Years of Convict/Prison Slavery in America, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787

Immediate Press Release/Public Service Announcement

July 13, 1787 to July 13, 2007

220 Years of Convict/Prison Slavery in America, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787

Contents:

p. 1 Northwest Ordinance of 1787
p. 2&3 Prison Slave Territory Expansion
p. 3,4 & 5 Thirteenth Amendment 1865
p. 6, 7 & 8 United Nations Petition to Abolish “slavery…as a punishment for crime…”
p. 9 – 16 Notes:

Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery
Email: prisonslavery@yahoo.com
http://prisonslaveryebook.blogspt.com

1.

Northwest Ordinance 1787

July 13, 2007 marks the 220th Year Anniversary of the Northwest (Territory) Ordinance of 1787, and gives focus to Article 6 as the legislative start of “slavery…in the punishment of crimes” in America (1).

On the 13th of July, 1787, the Congress of the old Confederation, sitting in New York passed "an Ordinance for the Government of the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio," which has passed into history as the "Ordinance of 1787.

“The banning of “chattel” slavery in the territory had the effect of establishing the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This division…between free and slave…states was the basis of a critical political question in American politics in the 19th century until the Civil War.” (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

“The Territory embraced what is now the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.” Over the next 72 years (1787 to 1859) its provisions were “applied to all the Territories of the United States lying north of latitude 36 degree 40', which now comprises the States of Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon. August 7, 1789, the Constitution of the United States having then been adopted, Congress, among its earliest acts, passed the binding force of the Ordinance of 1787, and adapted its provisions to the Federal Constitution. (2)”

Article 6:
- There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, (3)

- OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL
HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED: (emphasis added)

- Provided always: That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully
claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to
the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid. (4)

Article 6, exposes the peculiar institution of slavery’s “infinite capacity for propagation”. It is a classic example of “how” chattel slavery was successfully compromised, blocked, halted, struggled against, and prohibited North of the Ohio River and East of the Mississippi River while simultaneously providing for the expansion of “slavery…in the punishment of crime(s)”. Chattel slavery was blocked; the fugitive slave act has a question of compromise, convict/prison slavery was legislatively born, and convict slave holding territory rapidly expanded throughout the five new states of this territory, and beyond.

2.

Prison Slave Territory Expansion

Article 6 legislatively prohibited and blocked chattel slavery in the Northwest Territory while simultaneously enshrining slavery to punish crime(s) whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Article 6 serves as one classic example, within the history of slavery, where chattel slavery was legislatively blocked and prohibited, while the multi-state expansion of “slavery…as a punishment for crime” began.

Before the Civil War in America (1787 to 1861), convict/prison slave territory expanded across a minimum of eleven (11) new states with their various new state constitutional provisos, including: (5)

1. Ohio 1802,Article 8, Section 2:
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in this state, OTHERWISE THAN FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

2. Indiana 1816/1851, Article 1, Section 37:
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude within the State, OTHERWISE THAN FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

3. Missouri 1818/1819
And provided, also, that the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited, EXCEPT FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED;

4. Illinois 1818 Article 4, Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this State, OTHERWISE THAN FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED…”

5. Michigan 1837/1850 Article 18, Section 11
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, UNLESS FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIME, shall ever be tolerated in this State.

6. Iowa 1846 Article 1, Section 23
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, UNLESS FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, shall ever be tolerated in this State.

7.Wisconsin 1848 Article 1, Declaration of Rights Sec. 2.
There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in this state, OTHERWISE THAN FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIME, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

3.

8. California 1849, Article 1, Section 18
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, UNLESS FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, shall ever be tolerated in this State.

9. Oregon 1857, Article 1, Section 35
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the State, OTHERWISE THAN AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

10. Minnesota 1857-8, Article 1, Section 2
There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the State OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIME, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

11. Kansas 1859 Bill of Rights, Section 6
Slavery prohibited. There shall be no slavery in this State; and no involuntary servitude, EXCEPT FOR THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIME, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

This convict/prison slavery proviso, Article 6 of the Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, was enshrined into legislative and material reality; and convict/prison slavery expanded across new states with OTHERWISE, UNLESS AND EXCEPT provisos.

Thirteenth Amendment 1865
Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (12/18/1865):

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.

Approximately three years before Lincoln was elected president, before the Civil War to abolish all slavery in America, and before proposed wording for the 13th Amendment was being introduced in Congress; before these monumental historic events, eleven new states had already enshrined convict/prison slavery provisos within their various State Constitutions.

Charles Sumner, Abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, and outspoken chairman on the Senate Select Committee on Slavery and the Treatment of Freedmen submitted a joint resolution (S.B. 24) to the Senate to amend the Constitution on February 8, 1864: (6)

“Everywhere within the limits of the United States, and of each state or Territory thereof, all persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave”.6 (note: see footnotes on page 14)

4.

Not only would the passage of Sumner’s proposal have ended all slavery, it would have secured equality for all persons before the law. Its emancipating consequences would have been far-reaching for all people, regardless of race, sex, or previous condition of servitude.

Senator Henderson, from Missouri, had also proposed a joint resolution (S.B. 16) almost one month earlier, on January 11, 1864, for an amendment to abolish slavery.7

Slavery or involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT
FOR CRIME, shall not exist in the United States.8

An avowed slaveholder,9 Senator Henderson’s resolution was modeled on the convict/prison slavery proviso of the constitution with which Missouri entered the Union. Derived from the slavery proviso of the Northwest Ordinance, both the Missouri proviso and Henderson’s proposed Amendment preserved America’s slaveholding heritage.

Sumner stated, “(My) objection to it (the proposition of the committee) is, further, …it seems to me the language is not happy…I understand that it starts with the idea of reproducing the Jeffersonian ordinance. I doubt the expediency of reproducing that ordinance. It performed an excellent work in its day, but there are words in it which are entirely inapplicable to our time. That ordinance I will read. It is as follows:

There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory
OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF THE PARTY
SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

This ordinance, in precisely these words, was reproduced at a later day, in the very important act by which Missouri was admitted into the Union, containing the well-known prohibition which afterwards caused such debate.

There are words here, I have said, which are entirely inapplicable to our time. They are the limitation, “OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.” Now, unless I err, there is an implication from those words that men may be enslaved as a punishment of crimes whereof they shall have been duly convicted. There was a reason, I have said, for that at the time, for I understand that it was the habit in certain parts of the country to convict persons or to doom them as slaves for life as a punishment for crime, and it was not proposed to prohibit this habit. But slavery in our day is something distinct, perfectly well known, requiring no words of distinction outside of itself. Why, therefore, add “nor involuntary servitude otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted?” To my mind they absolutely introduce a doubt.15

Sumner denied any distinction between slavery and involuntary servitude, saying that the essential nature of slavery was by his time clear and recognizable and that the ordinance confused matters by implying that a difference did exist, creating a doubt of their meaning.
5.
On January 31, 1865, the House passed the Thirteenth Amendment with the required two-thirds majority – 119 yeas to 56 nays and 8 abstaining. It was then signed by President Lincoln and submitted to the various states for ratification. On December 6, 1865 25 states returned their ratifications (7), and on December 18, 1865, the Secretary of State certified that the Thirteenth Amendment had become part of the Constitution.

The Senate’s refusal to act on Sumner’s appeal to delete the EXCEPTION for slavery from the final document would victimize and enslave poor citizens and newly emancipated freedmen for more than 142 years, and for 220 years with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. All slavery was not abolished. Chattel slavery was prohibited, prison slave territory expanded to all states, and to “any place subject to their jurisdiction”.

Today, the massive expansion of “slavery…as a punishment” represents a conservatively estimated 14 to 33 million caged and chained prison slaves internationally, with over 2.4 to 7.6 million men, women, and children in the USA at this very hour, not including the prison/war slaves of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, Palestine, Hutto, etal. The abolition of convict/prison slavery in America will advance and accelerate the abolition of all old and modern forms and institutions of international slavery.

6. PETITION -
UNITED NATIONS PETITION TO ABOLISH “SLAVERY…AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME… WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, OR ANY PLACE SUBJECT TO THEIR JURISDICTION”. I hereby sign this United Nations Petition to Abolition Prison Slavery in support of changing the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution so as to remove the offensive exception for “slavery…as a punishment for crime…in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”; with the return of citizenship, labor and human rights for all. Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution (1865) “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”. So as to read:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. ________________________________________________________________________________
1.Print Name _____________________ Street Address, email _____________________________ Phone#_________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
2. Print Name _____________________StreetAddress,email________________________________Phone#__________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
3. Print Name ___________________ Street Address, email __________________________________ Phone#_______
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
4. Print Name_____________________ Street Address, email _____________________________ Phone#__________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
5. Print Name__________________ Street Address, email ________________________________ Phone#__________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
6. Print Name ___________________ Street Address, email __________________________________ Phone#_______
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
7. Print Name _____________________ Street Address, email _____________________________ Phone#__________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
8. Print Name__________________ Street Address, email ________________________________ Phone#__________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
9. Print Name ___________________ Street Address, email __________________________________ Phone#_______
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip___________________
10. Print Name _____________________ Street Address, email _____________________________ Phone#_________
Signature___________________ City________________________State_______________Zip_______________

7.
The three United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights authorities used for this petition include: Article 4: “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”. Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Article 23: Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
The Petition to Abolish Prison Slavery is a joint Congressional/United Nations petition to remove the EXCEPTION for slavery found within the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution specifically within the United States; and within any country, prison, jail, or torture chamber “any place subject to their jurisdiction”.
Three sections of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been chosen to provide international authority for this petition.
Today, the massive expansion of “slavery…as a punishment” represents a conservatively estimated 14 to 33 million caged and chained prison slaves internationally, with over 2.4 to 7.6 million men, women, and children in the USA at this very hour, not including the prison/war slaves of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, Palestine, Hutto, etal.
As with the postbellum Black Codes, today lower offenses are raised to felony status while private prison construction companies, private prison corrections corporations, related prison expansionists and maintenance outsourcing similar to the old convict lease system is now making trillions of dollars world wide. This is to be expected because slavery has always been profitable. Without “profit”, slavery would cease to exist.

8.

In this work to abolish “slavery…as a punishment”, we further seek to encourage and give momentum to the abolition of both economic slavery, and slavery as the spoils of war. CAPS ultimate goal is to gain Universal Emancipation from all slavery. “To do less than this at the present moment, when slavery is still menacing, would be an abandonment of duty”.

This newly revised CAPS Petition to Abolish Prison Slavery will be submitted to the United Nations, to the United States Congress, to the various States, to appropriate International Courts, and to supportative representatives of the various nations.

We seek to give encouragement to readers of this document within the pits of hell or in the halls of Congress. Where ever you might be at this moment, we encourage, challenge and/or provoke your further study, analysis, debate, litigation, grassroots organizing, petitioning and lobbying for the abolition of slavery as a punishment for crime, slavery as a spoils of war, and slavery as an economic class status. Towards Abolition of all slavery.

Respectfully Submitted,
by Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery (CAPS)
Coordinator, Lee Wood
email:prisonslavery@yahoo.com www.books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0910007004

Abolish Prison Slavery, Fascism, War, and Poverty
Abolish Torture, the Death Penalty, Prison Construction, exploited labor, exploited tax payers and return all citizenship, labor, human and economic rights.
Free Mumia, Peltier, and all political and economic prisoners.

9

NOTES:
Jeffersonian Ordinance p. 9
Slavery Abolition by several States p. 9
Possible Compromise p. 9
AAP p. 9
New Prison Slavery State Constitution Amendments & Provisos p.10
Thirteenth Amendment Debates – Congressional Globe p. 10, 11, 12, 13
States Ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment p. 12
Petition p. 13

10.

(1) Thirty three months earlier, “on the 1st of March, 1784, a committee consisting of Mr. (Thomas) Jefferson of Virginia, Mr. Chase of Maryland, and Mr. Howell of Rhode Island, reported an ordinance (referred to as the Jeffersonian Ordinance) for the temporary government of the territory…that any of the States may be admitted into the Union when their number of free inhabitants is as many as any one of the least numerous of the thirteen original States… It proposed, also, five "articles of compact." The fifth article was as follows:
"That after the year 1800 of the Christian era, THERE SHALL BE NEITHER SLAVERY NOR INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE IN ANY OF THE SAID STATES, OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED TO HAVE BEEN PERSONALLY GUILTY."
(2)(African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907)
(3) The slaves enumerated (40,370) in the Northern States were held, subject to the varied provisions under which the several States had abolished slavery, or provided for its ultimate extinction. The time and mode of abolition adopted by the several States was as follows:
-Vermont, 1777; framed constitution fourteen years before she became a member of the Federal Union, whereof the “first” article abolished slavery.
-Pennsylvania, 1780; all persons born in the State after March 1 to be free at the age of twenty-eight.
-Massachusetts, 1780; absolute prohibition.
-New Hampshire, 1783; absolute prohibition.
-Rhode Island, 1784; all born in the State after March, 1784, to be free.
-Connecticut, 1784; gradual abolition.
-New York, 1799; gradual emancipation; in 1817, a further act decreed that there should be no slavery in the State after July 4, 1827.
-New Jersey, 1804; gradual emancipation.
(4) A possible compromise could have existed between Northern anti-slavery and Southern pro-slavery legislators so as to give Southern slave owner class the fugitive slave act allowing recapture of runaway slaves within this Territory; and by prohibiting the growing of tobacco and indigo north of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers so as not to compete with slave states. These potential concessions to antebellum slave holding forces could have been in exchange for both the no chattel slavery statement, and for the institutionalization of “slavery…in the punishment of crimes”. Chattel slavery was blocked; prison slavery was born, and convict/prison slave holding territory rapidly expanded.
“Evolution of the Ordinance of 1787: With an Account of the Earlier Plans for the Government”, Jay Amos Barrett, 9 June, 1891, US4616.11A, pp. 79-80
(5) New Prison Slave State Constitutional Amendments and Provisos: (Prison Slavery, pgs 207 – 221)
(6) Congressional Globe
Nearly one month after Henderson submitted his resolution and only two days after Sumner submitted his, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary announced acceptance of Henderson’s resolution as the basis for the Thirteenth Amendment. In this report to the Senate, Senator Trumbull briefed the Senate on the proposed amendment:

11.
I will state that the amendment, as recommended by the Committee on the Judiciary, provides for submitting to Legislatures of the several States a proposition to amend the Constitution of the United States so that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIME, WHEREOF A PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction; and also that Congress shall have power to enforce this article by proper legislation. I desire to give notice to the Senate that I shall at an early day, call for the consideration of this resolution.10 (note: these footnotes are on page 13)

On April 8, 1864, Senator Charles Sumner made his final appeal to the Senate to change the wording of the ominous amendment and asked that his proposed joint resolution be accepted as a substitute:

Beyond my general desire to see an act of universal emancipation that shall at once and forever settle this great question, so that it may no longer be the occasion of strife between us, there are two other ideas which are ever present to my mind as a practical legislator: first, to strike at slavery wherever I can hit it; and secondly, to clean the statute-book of all existing supports of slavery, so that it may find nothing there to which it may cling for life. To do less than this at the present moment, when slavery is still menacing, would be an abandonment of duty. 11

So long as a single slave continues anywhere beneath the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest. Too well I know the vitality of slavery with its infinite capacity of propagation, and how little slavery it takes to make a slave State with all the cruel pretensions of slavery…12

Sumner then criticized the proposed amendments’ resemblance to Article 6 of the Northwest (Territory) Ordinance of 1787:

There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF
THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED…

Let me say frankly that I should prefer a form of expression different from that which has the sanction of the committee. They have selected what was intended for the old Jeffersonian Ordinance (of 1787), sacred in our history, although, let me add, they have not imitated it closely. But I must be
pardoned if I venture to doubt the expediency of perpetuating in the Constitution language which, if it have any signification, seems to imply “slavery or involuntary servitude” may be provided “for the
punishment of crime.” There was a reason for that language when it was first employed, but that reason no longer exists. If my desires could prevail, I would put aside the ordinance on this occasion, and find
another form. I know nothing better than these words:

All persons are equal before the law so that no person can hold another as a slave; and
the Congress shall have power to make all laws necessary and proper to carry this decision
into effect everywhere within the United States and the jurisdiction thereof.13

12.
…Enough has been said to explain the origin of the words which are now proposed (French Declaration of Rights, 1787). It will be for the Senate to determine if it will adopt them.
Should the Senate not incline to this form, there is still another I would suggest, as follows:

Slavery shall not exist anywhere within the United States or the jurisdiction thereof; and that the Congress shall have power to make all laws necessary and proper to carry this prohibition into effect.14

The Congressional Globe’s report on the Senate debates of April 8, 1864:

MR. SUMNER. Now, Mr. President, the state of the question is this, the Senator from Missouri (Mr. Henderson) offered a proposition in this form:

Art. 1. Slavery or involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT
FOR CRIME, shall not exist in the United States…

I make this comment on the proposition which we have before us, that of the Senator from Missouri, in order to explain why I should be against that in the form in which it stands; I am free to say that in some respects I think it better than the article proposed by the committee. It is as follows:

Slavery or involuntary servitude, EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT
FOR CRIME, shall not exist in the United States.

It is simpler than the proposition of the committee…

(My) objection to it (the proposition of the committee) is, further, …it seems to me the language is not happy…I understand that it starts with the idea of reproducing the Jeffersonian ordinance. I doubt the expediency of reproducing that ordinance. It performed an excellent work in its day, but there are words in it which are entirely inapplicable to our time. That ordinance I will read. It is as follows:

There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.

This ordinance, in precisely these words, was reproduced at a later day, in the very important act by which Missouri was admitted into the Union, containing the well-known prohibition which afterwards caused such debate.

There are words here, I have said, which are entirely inapplicable to our time. They are the limitation, “OTHERWISE THAN IN THE PUNISHMENT OF CRIMES WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.” Now, unless I err, there is an implication from those words that men may be enslaved as a punishment of crimes whereof they shall have been duly convicted. There was a reason, I have said, for that at the time, for I understand that it was the habit in certain parts of the country to
13.
convict persons or to doom them as slaves for life as a punishment for crime, and it was not proposed to prohibit this habit. But slavery in our day is something distinct, perfectly well known, requiring no words of distinction outside of itself. Why, therefore, add “nor involuntary servitude otherwise than in the
punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted?” To my mind they absolutely introduce a doubt.15

Sumner denied any distinction between slavery and involuntary servitude, saying that the essential nature of slavery was by his time clear and recognizable and that the ordinance confused matters by implying that a difference did exist, creating a doubt of their meaning. His concern was well founded because, in 1857, before the Civil War, Iowa made use of the doubt. In an attempt to disguise in its practice of slavery, Iowa changed its constitution to prohibit slavery and permit involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime.

Sumner further argued that:
In placing a new and important text into our Constitution, it seems to me we cannot be too careful in the language we adopt. We should consider well that the language we adopt here in this Chamber today will in all probability be adopted in the other House, and it must be adopted, also, by three fourths of the Legislatures of the States. Once having passed this body, it is substantially beyond correction. Therefore, it seems to me, we have every motive, the strongest inducement in the world, to make that language as perfect as possible.16

Sumner also understood that the real meaning of the proposed Thirteenth Amendment would be camouflaged by it‘s awkward grammar; that the prison slavery proviso of the Thirteenth Amendment as ratified has gone substantially unchallenged and unrecognized, even by constitutional lawyers, for more than a century testifies to Sumner’s foresight:

I say, therefore, that I object to the Jeffersonian ordinance even if it were presented here in its original text. But now I am brought to the point that the proposition of the committee is not the Jeffersonian ordinance, except in its bad features. In other respects, it discards the language of the Jeffersonian ordinance and also its collocation of words. The language of the committee is as follows:

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.

The Senate will observe what to my ear is a discord, the introduction of those two “shalls” so near together, but that is not of great importance.
MR. DOOLITTLE. They are both in the Jeffersonian ordinance.

MR. SUMNER. But they are further apart, and the whole effect is entirely different. As I have said already, the language of the ordinance is entirely different. As I have said already, the language of the ordinance is, “There shall be.” Mark the beginning as compared with that of the committee. The committee say, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,” &c. The ordinance says, “There shall be” – the word of prohibition coming first, at the outset –

14.
“neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”; whereas the committee say,

“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.”17

At this point, Sumner urged that if the Senate intended slavery to stand as a punishment for crime, they should state so clearly or remove the proviso entirely. The Senate did neither:

If Senators desire the Jeffersonian ordinance, I say let us take it in its original form as it appears in that ordinance, and was subsequently reproduced in the Missouri statute; do not let us take it in this modified form, which, while pretending to be the Jeffersonian ordinance, is not the Jeffersonian ordinance except in that feature which I think, if Senators apply their minds to it, they will see is clearly objectionable. I refer to the words, “EXCEPT AS A PUNISHMENT FOR CRIMES, WHEREOF THE PARTY SHALL HAVE BEEN DULY CONVICTED.” I have already said that for myself I should prefer the form which I have sent to the Chair, and on which the question is now to be taken; but I offer it as a suggestion, and if Senators do not incline to it, I have no desire to press it.
--------------------------------------------------------
CONGRESSIONAL Globe, vol.2, p.1313.
Ibid., p. 197.
Ibid., p. 521.
Ames, pp. 214-215.
Congressional Globe, vol. 2, p. 1313.
Ibid, p. 1461, Henderson concludes a long argument in the slavery debates with:
“There are but two sides to the question. The one is Union without slavery; and another is the immediate and unconditional acknowledgement of the southern confederacy… For the expression of this sentiment I may be called a fanatic…it results not from any sudden abhorrence of slavery, for I have been in its midst all my life. It does not spring from hatred of slaveholders, for, whether in honor or shame, I am a slaveholder today.
Ibid, vol. 1, p. 553.
Ames, pp. 215-216.
Congressional Globe, vol. 2, p. 1482.
Ibid
Ibid, p. 1483.
Ibid, pp. 1487-1488.
Ibid, p. 1488
Ibid.
Ibid.

15.

(7)
(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Illinois (February 1, 1865)
Rhode Island (February 2, 1865)
Michigan (February 3, 1865)
Maryland (February 3, 1865)
New York (February 3,1865)
Pennsylvania (February 3, 1865)
West Virginia (February 3, 1865)
Missouri (February 6, 1865)
Maine (February 7, 1865)
Kansas (February 7, 1865)
Massachusetts (February 7, 1865)
Virginia (February 9, 1865)
Ohio (February 10, 1865)
Indiana (February 13, 1865)
Nevada (February 16, 1865)
Louisiana (February 17, 1865)
Minnesota (February 23, 1865)
Wisconsin (February 24, 1865)
Vermont (March 8, 1865)
Tennessee (April 7, 1865)
Arkansas (April 14, 1865)
Connecticut (May 4, 1865)
New Hampshire (July 1, 1865)
South Carolina (November 13, 1865)
Alabama (December 2, 1865)
Ratification was completed on December 6, 1865. The amendment was subsequently ratified by the following states:
1. Oregon (December 8, 1865)
2. California (December 19, 1865
3. Florida (December 26, 1865, reaffirmed on June 9, 1869)
4. 4. Iowa (January 15, 1866)
5. 5. Jersey (January 23,1866 after having rejected it on March 16, 1865)
6. Texas (February 18, 1870)
7. Delaware (February12, 1901, after having rejected it on February 8, 1865)
8. Kentucky (March 18, 1976, after having rejected it on February 24, 1865)
9. Mississippi (March 16, 1995, after having rejected it on December 5, 1865)
END

Saturday, June 9, 2007

THE ROLE OF CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS

THE ROLE OF CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS"Not only criminal behavior but also punishment is disruptive to community harmony" (Lord Croughton)
The rationale behind the use of correctional facilities is separation, specifically, physical separation of the offender from society. This separation rationale or containment doctrine (uncharitably called "warehousing" by critics and charitably called the protection of society and betterment of the offender by advocates) assumes that the conduct of certain crimes is so serious and the chance of repetition so great that the judge, acting for the good of society, must physically separate the offender from any motive or opportunity to harm the public again. Separation or containment is sometimes referred to as incapacitation, although the correct term is incarceration. The difference is that incapacitation aims at making it permanently impossible to re-offend, while incarceration aims at making it impossible only for a short while, with a hope that re-offending will not occur upon release. If you banish somebody from their homeland forever, or if you castrate a rapist, that is incapacitation. If you send somebody away for awhile, and pay careful attention to where you send them, for how long, and whether or not they improved, that is incarceration. Given these examples, a sentence of life without parole would be incapacitation, as would the death penalty, and as would most eye-for-eye retribution. Incarceration is an inseparable combination of deterrence and rehabilitation. Incarceration without paying much attention to the "where," "how long" and "whether improved" is simply called punishment or penalty, and in the sociology of punishment, involves the study of "why" penal sanctions exist, or in philosophy, the study of the "why" or rationale behind punishment. Incarceration with attention to the "where," "how long" and "whether improved" is called penology (short for the 19th Century phrase "penitentiary science") or the science of corrections (a 20th Century social engineering term for the ability to be technically proficient at the processing of incarcerated offenders). The difference is that penology mainly looks at what needs to go on inside a prison to keep it functioning, and correctional science mainly looks at the effectiveness and efficiency of the whole correctional apparatus or the correctional subsystem component of criminal justice.
The central purpose of a correctional subsystem in criminal justice is to carry out the criminal sentence imposed by the court subsystem (Clear & Cole 2000). In this purpose, a correctional subsystem assists with maintaining the integrity of the law and the ability of law to protect society. In a larger sense, the existence of a correctional apparatus helps society to enforce its behavioral norms, since the mere existence of a prison system reinforces the belief that there is a place where people can be put who exceed our tolerance for criminal behavior. In this sense, prisons serve to protect society, help define the limits of behavior, and help everyone know and understand what is permissible and what is not permissible. Almost all contemporary correctional systems claim the twin goals of public protection and fair punishment. Public protection (or public safety) is maintained by having a well-regulated set of procedures, facilities, and philosophies that are consistent with what court officials want and what society needs. Fair punishment is accomplished by applying some "corrective" yet still "punitive" action to convicted offenders that most often takes the form of humane security, custody, and control along a range of program opportunities all administered in a just and equitable manner within the least restrictive environment consistent with public safety.
FOUCAULT ON INCARCERATION & THE HISTORY OF WORKHOUSES
Incarceration, or the use of correctional facilities, arose in the history of Western civilization out of a distaste for transportation (the banishment of offender to far-away lands like Australia) and a distaste for corporal punishment (which was eventually banned). If Foucault's (1995) historical account can be believed, Western civilization moved away from a reliance on physical torture because torture no longer served the interests of maintaining sovereign power and the all-encompassing "carceral" state. Prisons are a "natural" phenomena in a global system of sovereign nation-states because the ultimate purpose is to either make all of society one big prison or to either cherish "liberty" to the point where "deprivation of liberty" becomes the punishment par excellence. At least that is the thesis of Discipline and Punish, admittedly a complex piece of philosophical work about corrections. Another subthesis is that societies progressively moved from torture of the body to torture of the mind, again a controversial point in Foucault's philosophy.
What most historians agree with in Foucault's version of history is the fact that as many European societies "transported" plague and leprosy victims to the colonies, the emptied hospitals and other facilities were converted to the confinement of new clientele -- the insane and the criminal. The significance of the many plagues that made up the worldwide "Black Death" which wiped out nearly 40% of the world's population from 1347-1352 (lasting up to 1429 in some parts of the world and up to the 19th Century in other parts) cannot be overestimated. If you remember the children's song "Ring Around the Rosies... We All Fall Down," then you are remembering a song about the Black Death years. What is more notable is that as people kept moving and migrating in a futile attempt to "flee" the Black Death, governments created WORKHOUSES, or prisons for the poor, which kept beggars, vagrants, pickpockets, and welfare cheats off the streets. The workhouses were officially created in 1834 by what were called "Poor laws" and workhouses came to exist in every county either as a direct descendant of the county jail or the model thereof. Workhouses existed for the "undeserving poor" as opposed to almshouses which existed for the "deserving poor." Workhouses became the model of prison discipline, set the stage for the expected behaviors of "masters" or correctional officers, and eventually deteriorated into orphanages, jails, and aged juvenile prisons. Almshouses became the model for social work institutions. Asylums for the mentally ill crossed both sides, with some becoming prisons and others becoming social work institutions.
TRANSPORTATION AND PENAL SERVITUDE
In earlier times, larger prisons certainly existed as holding pens (usually nothing more than underground dungeons) for far worse punishments (torture, spectacle, or being fed to the lions in the arena). However, as Kittrie, Zenoff & Eng (2002) argue, incarceration as the "ideal" punishment (second in severity to the death penalty) came into favor only after the practices of transportation and penal slavery (servitude) died out. Prior to 1850, most countries relied on transportation to send serious offenders to far-away colonies. After 1850 (and to some extent before), governments started experimenting with a variety of transportation known as PENAL SERVITUDE. Penal servitude involved being "sold into slavery" for a period of years either as a sailor in the Navy, at a galley port for the Navy, as a soldier in the Army, as a fighter in a mercenary force, as a worker for a businessman, or as a worker for a plantation owner. Penal servitude became quite popular in Spanish-speaking parts of the world, and some experts regard early modern Spain (circa 1688-1748) as the birthplace of the modern, above-ground prisons in the form of Spanish forts (presidios) and central prisons which handled the overflow of implacable prisoners assigned to penal servitude. All presidios had prisons, consisting of 8x10 foot stone cells with iron bars, and they were primarily used as part of Spanish conquest (along with missions and pueblos) for housing foreigners and Indians. The model of a prison "cell" widely in use today can be traced to the presidio cells. You can see from the following table why penal servitude became so popular because it was seen a more lenient than transportation.
Transportation
Penal Servitude
7 years or less
4 years or less
7-10 years
4-6 years
10-15 years
6-8 years
15 years or more
8-14 years
life
life
The relationship between slavery and corrections is a story that needs to be elaborated on. Unfortunately, there are few books on the subject that are "classics" such as Hughes (1987) work on transportation. There is also the matter of some controversy over the 13th Amendment, which reads as follows:
THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
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 to their jurisdiction.
This Amendment is usually interpreted to mean that slavery and peonage (forced servitude for owing debts) are abolished, but nothing prohibits compulsory work (for a private master in a jail) if a breach of contract or offensive behavior is "duly convicted" as a crime. Compulsory conscription into the armed services has been widely used by many states under this Amendment, but there are less than clear-cut cases of when the Amendment might apply, such as whether participating in an illegal union strike against an employer would qualify.
THE UNIQUELY AMERICAN TWIST ON CORRECTIONS
The United States imparted an unique religious twist to correctional institutions, and that twist consisted of the idea that prisons should be harsh, painful places, but not so harsh and painful that the offender cannot have the opportunity to reflect over what they did and mend their ways. This idea is a combination of Enlightenment humanitarianism and 19th century Utilitarianism. It is, at once, both idealistic and practical. Some of the basic principles to enact such an idea include the rule against "fraternization," impersonality of dress, regimented meals and counts, marching in mass movement lines, and an expectation that each inmate will "do their own time." Architecture and routine are designed to convey the impression that restraint is the primary purpose and treatment a casual afterthought. These features make up the basic PENITENTIARY model.
It wasn't long before Americans realized that adding more programs, farms, shops, classes, and recreation resulted in better control of prisoners and to some extent eased tensions within a penitentiary. Hence, the REFORMATORY movement was started, and newer prisons were built, some of which were called medium-security prisons with fences instead of walls, and minimum-security prisons without the need for armed guard towers. Special correctional facilities also sprouted up, for women, for youth, for reception and diagnosis, for prerelease purposes, for medical and psychiatric treatment, etc. A basic problem in such correctional facilities is the lack of funds to evaluate the effectiveness of programs. Corrections has a tendency to adopt new programs in a faddish, impulsive manner, and everything that passes for "new" has probably been tried somewhere, someplace before.
SO, WHAT ARE PRISONS FOR, ANYWAY?
Separation, obedience, and labor appear to be the "Holy Trinity" which guides the rationale for the whole of corrections (Kittrie, Zenoff & Eng 2002). Prisoners could be expected to be treated "differently" from other citizens (morally deranged or defective, perhaps), would obey all orders without question, and would work diligently at their assignments or reflection upon their misdeeds. Of these three, obedience without question appears to take precedence, and for this, correctional facilities adopted the quasi-military model of organization. Nothing else seems to produce a preserved isolation, unquestioning obedience, and regimented efficiency better than a military model. Above all, prisons are supposed to be places of order, a shining example that the outside world can look into and see what good things happen when the right principles of organization are put into place. Unfortunately, we often don't think of prisons that way today. Perhaps it's the MILITARY MODEL. Some reformers have thought so, and suggested a replacement FACTORY MODEL. However, most prison administrators are uncomfortable with suggestions for change at this basic a level.
Fox (1972) has described corrections as having multiple and conflicting goals. From time to time, we hear debates over what is the "primary" goal of corrections -- to contain, to control, to punish, to restrain, to rehabilitate, to reintegrate, etc. Yet, one primary task remains essential -- prisons exist to retain CONTROL as a basic part of their organizational purpose, and control extends to any opportunities for treatment and betterment. The roots of this primacy run deep, as does public resentment, fear, and fashionableness which seem to drive a need to forget about prisons and deprecate those inside of them. To study corrections is nothing less than the study of factors that interconnect the psyche of mankind with the will to overcome inertia in society. Evading the study of prisons or failing to recognize their important place in society is something we cannot afford to do.
INTERNET RESOURCESGardens of the Law: The Role of Prisons in Capitalist Society History of the Workhouses Jurisprudence of the 13th Amendment's Slavery & Involuntary Servitude Clause (pdf)Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain Reentry & Reintegration - What is Corrections' Role? (pdf)What Role Can the Private Sector Play in Corrections?Wikipedia Encyclopedia Article on What a Prison is
PRINTED RESOURCESClear, T. & Cole, G. (2000). American Corrections, 5e. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.del Carmen, A. (2004). Corrections, 2e. Cincinnati: Atomic Dog.Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. NY: Vintage Books.Fox, V. (1972). Introduction to Corrections. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Garland, D. (1990). Punishment and Modern Society. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Hirsch, A. (1992). The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Hughes, R. (1987). The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. NY: Collins.Kittrie, N., Zenoff, E., & Eng, V. (2002). Sentencing, Sanctions, and Corrections. NY: Foundation Press.Reichel, P. (2001). Corrections: Philosophies, Practices, and Procedures, 2e. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.Schmalleger, F. & Smykla, J. (2005). Corrections in the 21st Century. Boston: McGraw Hill.Silverman I. & Vega, M. (2000). Corrections: A Comprehensive View. Minneapolis: West. Tewksbury, R. (1997). Introduction to Corrections. Boston: McGraw Hill.
Last Updated: 08/26/04Syllabus for JUS 294 MegaLinks in Criminal Justice

THE ROLE OF CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Penal Servitude
Forced Prison Labor Is a Form of Slavery
An excerpt from Beyond Prisons by Laura Magnani and Harmon Wray

"Art From Jail" Artwork by Jos Sances Serigraph, Edition 120, 8 color, 22" x 30"
"If we look at the chain gangs, jails, and other penal institutions in the country and the state, we arrive at one of two conclusions. Either education and wealth are two of the strongest fortifications against the commission of crime, or there is a different measure of justice for the rich and the poor, white and black, the educated and the unlettered." -- Raleigh (North Carolina) News and Observer, December 27, 1930
Prisons have always reflected the relationship between wealth and power in a country. In the United States today, prisons still clearly reflect the racism and greed that have shaped the national identity.
The use of prisoner labor for corporate or public-sector profit results in prison labor conditions similar to those reported to exist in China. The United States government has regularly and properly condemned the Chinese government's practices. Prison labor programs, and the privatization of prison systems and programs, encourage prison authorities and the state to maximize the number of people in prison rather than focus on public safety. They further shift prison policies away from constructive programs that actually prepare a prisoner psychologically and practically for his or her return to the community.
The forced labor of prisoners has been a crucial factor in the development of prison policy and in the stabilization of the American economy from the very beginning of the U.S. prison system. From the start of the penitentiary movement, the idea that decreasing idleness through productive labor and quiet reflection upon one's crime in the privacy of one's cell was the best way to reform the prisoner, and the practice of leasing prison laborers to private bidders, became the legal and cultural platform upon which the U.S. prison industry was built.
The United States has frequently relied upon a secondary labor force that is in bondage. Forced labor has always existed alongside of, and been recruited from the ranks of, free labor. In times of economic crisis (most notably the Reconstruction period after the Civil War; the period directly following the collapse of the stock market in 1929; and the current period, as we see great underemployment of minimum-wage and low-skilled workers), the prison population has swelled and prisoners have been put to work. These upsurges in the prison population historically have not been followed by a proportional abatement in the number of those imprisoned when the economic crisis has subsided.
Before the abolition of slavery, there were few prisons and penitentiaries in the United States. All large penitentiaries were in northern states. Southern states had smaller prisons, populated almost entirely by white people, since slave owners conducted their own punishment of their slaves. The rapid expansion of state prison systems in the late 19th century had the effect of maintaining the power, racial, and economic relationships that existed under slavery.
When slavery was abolished, the Slave Codes, which had regulated the behavior of slaves and all those of African descent, were rewritten as the Black Codes. The Black Codes had been used in northern states as early as 1790 to criminalize previously legal activities for African Americans and to regulate the activities of free people of African descent. Black men were arrested for "vagrancy" or "breaking curfew." In the South, after the Civil War, former slaves were sentenced to prison and then leased out by the prison to work for local plantation owners.
In the southern states, with the protection of the Thirteenth Amendment, the convict lease system expanded beyond the old slave plantations to include coal mining, railroad building, and other businesses rising in the "New South." In the 1880s, a fledgling labor movement took on the former slave states' exploitation of black and poor white prisoner labor and its effects of disemploying free labor and driving free-world wages down. After decades of political, sometimes violent, struggle, the convict lease system died out in most of the South by the early 20th century.
Just as sharecropping and tenant farming replaced slave labor, the convict lease system was replaced by a combination of chain gangs of prisoners (often under county jurisdictions), working on roads and other public works, and state prison industries run by the governments. Since organized labor had successfully pushed through laws prohibiting states from marketing prison-made merchandise on the open market, many prisoners were put to work manufacturing products to be used only in and by state government -- for example, office furniture, license plates, road signs, and work clothes and uniforms for prisoners and state workers. Others were employed in various farming, maintenance, food service, and laundry service work for the prisons themselves.
In 1979, the U.S. government repealed the interstate transport law that had forbidden interstate transport of prisoner-made goods. The Department of Justice implemented a national work program throughout the federal prison system. There, prisoners theoretically work for minimum wage, of which 80 percent is withheld for room, board, survivor compensation, medical fees, and educational costs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the economy saw increased mobility of U.S. corporations and the growth of transnational corporations. Seeking greater profit, manufacturers continued their century-long pattern of first going to the southern states, where labor was unorganized. Later, many plants and jobs were moved to poorer nations, as companies continued to seek to maximize profits at the expense of labor.
The flight of factories from manufacturing centers has left entire cities economically unstable. The ensuing poverty and economic vulnerability has resulted in dramatic increases in criminal activity, usually drug crimes and crimes against property, in urban communities. Some jobs are now returning to the United States -- but to the prisons, which contract with private industry, instead of to the urban centers. Industrial programs in prisons subsidize private industry by providing free factory space, subsidies for the tooling of the factory, security, electricity, and guaranteed cheap labor.
Thirty states now allow some type of legalized contracting of prison labor to private firms. Thus, prison labor has become an alternative to moving offshore for many corporations. Workers unemployed because of job flight -- and their children -- are now working these jobs in prison. Upon release, they will go home to the same poor and jobless communities, and they will be as vulnerable to crime as they were before they went to prison.
Involuntary penal servitude
"What we have is a billion-dollar manufacturing industry that legally utilizes slave labor, has little overhead, is unregulated by state and federal workplace safety or labor laws, provides no health insurance or benefits and no sick pay for its employees, includes hazardous materials in the construction of its products, forces customers to buy its products under penalty of law, and prohibits its workers from organizing."-- Karyl Kicenski, "The Corporate Prison: The Production of Crime and the Sale of Discipline," 2002
Today, all forms of convict labor have returned in one form or another. Minimum-wage laws usually do not cover prisoners. They do not receive workers' compensation if they are injured while working. Prison laborers are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, nor the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
Prison laborers are not permitted to meet among themselves to try to improve their working conditions. Average minimum wages for state prison labor in this country are $0.93 a day for nonindustry work; average maximum wages are $4.73 a day. The wages are much lower than public- or private-sector minimum wages because the vast majority of prisoners work in institutional prison jobs, not in jobs with private industry.
Private-industry state prison jobs pay anywhere from $0.23 to $7.00 an hour, but the "take-home" portion of prison pay is only about 20 percent of that amount. This is equivalent to the cost of maquiladora labor in the factories across the border in Mexico, which pay extremely low wages and have notoriously poor working conditions. Due to severe restrictions on the rights of prison labor, it is not surprising that some industries are turning to the use of prison labor as an alternative to moving offshore.
Politicians and policymakers like to promote prison labor programs as job training, but products fabricated by prisoners are products not being produced by free workers. Thus, labor skills mastered in prison do not necessarily translate into jobs upon release. Private industries, for their part, use prison laborers to drive wages and benefits down and to wield power over their external work force.
While prison officials use prison labor as a management tool, prisoners use it as their only legal way to earn any revenue. Statistics on the hiring of former prisoners do not exist, but very few former prisoners report being hired as a result of their prison work experience. In principle, a fair and voluntary work program, paying meaningful wages for meaningful work, with reasonable opportunities to unionize, gain promotions and raises, and learn job skills marketable on the outside upon release, would serve both prisoners and society.
But under the present penal regime, prison-industry programs are about exploiting vulnerable people's labor for wealthy executives' and shareholders' profit, not about job training.
Slavery and the 13th Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
We oppose slavery of all kinds - including the use of prisoner labor for profit -- while supporting the creation of substantial job-training programs. The AFSC National Board calls for revision of this amendment so this exception clause is deleted and the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits all slavery and involuntary servitude within the United States.
Work may be seen by some as a legitimate sanction -- a way for people to "give back" if they have caused harm. However, permitting slavery as an exception to the Thirteenth Amendment makes the prison system the direct heir to the chattel system. The fact that the United States incarcerates people of color at an alarmingly higher rate than whites makes this heritage all too clear.
Beyond PrisonsA New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System
by Laura Magnani & Harmon Wray
Published 2006 by Fortress Press208 pages Price $13.00Phone: 1-800-328-4648www.fortresspress.org
STREET SPIRIT1515 Webster St,#303Oakland, CA 94612Phone: (510) 238-8080, ext. 303
E-mail: Spirit
© 2002-2006 STREET SPIRIT. All rights reserved.
Published by American Friends Service Committee
Editor and Web Design: Terry Messman