Mass Incarceration Is A Form of Slavery – Mitchell S. Jackson On the 13th Amendment – Esquire

Getty / Photo Illustration by Mike Kim

Back in the late nineties I owned a SID number (12218354) and an address in an Oregon state prison. For part of my biddy prison bidthe old heads said my time was short fore I got thereI worked as an orderly in a mental ward of the Oregon State Hospital. The official duties included sweeping and mopping the halls, changing sheets soiled with feces and/or soaked with urine, and making beds tucked with tight hospital corners.

The unofficial duties included learning to at least feign aplomb when residents tossed food trays, tantrumed to the point of restraint, or screeched refusals of their meds.

On the up and up, it wasnt a job I wouldve appreciated on the outs, but on the inside, I was a pair of praying handsand furthermore envied by no few fellow prisoners for being allowed to leave the confines of the farmhouse-turned-prison that held us captive. Never mind the pay was paltry, so little that I misremember my actual wage, though research affirms it was less than pennies on the dollar.

Research also attests that I was a slave at the time. And I aint speaking hyperbolically or philosophically but literally and officially here. As proof, I submit Article I, Section 34 of the Oregon State Constitution:

There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in the State, otherwise than as punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

If that excerpt from my home states charter sounds familiar, thats because its almost verbatim the infamous clause of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution that banned slavery in all of the U.S., save one gaping-ass loophole: except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Following the Civil War, that clause, along with the bigoted laws that became the Black Codes, paved an oil-slicked road to an era of mass incarceration, and the language still figures into Americas first-in-the-world imprisonment rates.

In 2020, several recent Willamette University graduates founded an organization called Oregonians Against Slavery and Involuntary Servitude (OASIS), with the goal of centering the voices of the incarcerated in dismantling racist policies. OASIS partnered with a group of men incarcerated in the Oregon State Penitentiary to introduce a bill that seeks a formal ban of enslavement and involuntary servitude from the Oregon constitution. In addition to striking the language, it also proposes the addition of a new article:

(2) Upon conviction of a crime, an Oregon court or a probation or parole agency may order the convicted person to engage in education, counseling, treatment, community service or other alternatives to incarceration, as part of sentencing for the crime, in accordance with programs that have been in place historically or that may be developed in the future, to provide accountability, reformation, protection of society or rehabilitation.

The OASIS initiative (SJR10) will be voted on in the states November election as an amendment to the state constitution. (Can you believe we are still, in the twenty-first century, having to stage an effort to nix language that sanctions slavery?) Though the numbers point to the bill passing, does it surprise you that people have argued that slavery is dead, that the language has little bearing on peoples actual lived experience, and therefore why go through the formality of removing it?

We constantly get asked, Well, is this just a symbolic thing? says Riley Burton, an OASIS cofounder. And the question is, Is the amendment being used as just a symbolic thing? If the basis of your system is built on slavery, then it will have an effect. And if its not [built on slavery], then it wont.

When OASIS began its push, its most prominent opponent was a prolific Oregon legislator named Kevin Mannix. Mannix explained to me that at first he worried that SJR10 would create a challenge to the forty-hour workweek mandated for all Oregon prisoners by way of Measure 17a law he propelled to approval in 1994.

The enslavement-clause victory will be great, says Anthony Pickens, who helped OASIS work on the bill while incarcerated in the Oregon State Penitentiary. But until Measure 17 gets changed, prisoners are still mandated this forty-hour, almost-non-pay workweek. Were trying to get these walls broke down so that eventually we can get fair wages.

Pickens spent the ages of fifteen to thirty-nine in prison, was granted clemency last year by Governor Kate Brown, and now works as a paralegal. Its tough to square his critical view of prison work with Mannixs optimism. I think we should ask the prisoners themselves, says Mannix. Because they like the programs that we have. They are designed to give them job skills and help them engage in useful activity while they are incarcerated. I always ask folks, Do you want people to just sit in a prison cell with nothing to do?

Listening to Mannix tout the merits of prison labor, one might miss that his Measure 17on paper at leastdemands involuntary servitude from all prisoners. Listening to Mannix talk, youd never know that the amendment proposed by OASIS is part of a national movement, that there are nineteen other states with slavery language remaining in their constitution. Hearing Mannixalso the architect of legislation known as Measure 11, which sanctioned several of my peers with mandatory prison sentencespresent his arguments, one could lose sight of the billions reaped (Core Civic and GEO manage more than half the private correction contracts in the U.S. and in 2015 alone had combined revenues of $3.5 billion) from the racket that is private prisons. Mannixs spiel fails to mention that Arkansas, Texas, and Georgiais it a coincidence that they were all a part of the Confederacy?do not pay prisoners at all. That in Mississippis Parchman Farm and the former Louisiana plantation known as Angola Farm (Black prisoners make up 70 percent and 75 percent of their populations, respectively), the prisoners still work the fields, some picking actual cotton.

Mannix also lauds Oregons history as a free stateomitting the crucial fact that it was founded with a clause in its constitution that excluded Black people from residing in the state, a law endorsed by Peter Burnett, a member of the Oregon Provisional Governments seven-person council in the 1800s. Burnett went on to become the first elected governor of California, which I mention because both Oregon and California are known as bulwarks of liberalism.

But be not duped by their ultra-blue repute.

The Golden State pays its incarcerated workers eight to thirty-seven cents an hour for part-time work and twelve to fifty-six dollars per month for full-time work. And in what I see as emblematic of the states ethic on prison labor, Cal Fire uses incarcerated men and women to work as firefightersoften on the dangerous front linesand for decades, until just a couple years ago, barred them from being hired as firefighters once they were released or paroled, by reason of a rule against hiring felons.

True indeed, I never fought raging forest blazes nor picked cotton while I was down. Matter fact, the only other job I had during my biddy bid was washing dishes in the prison kitchen, a job for which I was also thankful. That gratitude, however, paled in comparison with what working outside the prison did for my spirits, with the feeling that I could be trusted with a measure of freedom, that I was still a contributing member of societythat in a place that made men wastrels, I was otherwise.

That the pay wouldnt turn my books into a bank vault was cool with me. In the moment, it felt like a fair trade-off. But, see, one of the harms of belonging to a marginalized group is having your oppression obscured.

How should I reconcile my previous appreciation for a holding a job outside the prison with what I now know about how my people became the grist for the prison-industrial complex? With what I now understand about the forces that made crackthe drug that landed me in prisonan epidemic in inner cities and not in suburbs, forces tied to those who made suburbs in the first damn place? With what Ive learned about the relationship between those inner cities and suburbs and the tax dollars that fund prime public schools? With whats been revealed about the links between draconian mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and the boom of private prisons?

How do I reconcile the prior boost to my morale with the knowledge that allowing enslavement language to endure in writ not only turns incarcerated humans into legal objects but aids ill-intentioned people in their abuses of them? How do I square believing my old job to be a form of benevolence with the truth that, by and large, people whose ancestors never stooped sunup to sundown over cash-crop tobacco and king cotton are profiting, profiting, prospering from all the above?

On July 7, 1998, breathing what mustve been the cleanest air that ever touched lungs and all but gliding beneath the clearest cerulean sky, I paroled from Santiam Correctional Institution. My parole conditions specified that I get a job, which I did, working as a construction laborer. Ive held several jobs since then, but not none working as a dishwasher or orderly. And what, reasonable people, does that say about the purported virtue of my prison work experience?

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

Link:

Mass Incarceration Is A Form of Slavery - Mitchell S. Jackson On the 13th Amendment - Esquire