"Absolute slavery” and the inherent violence of the prison industrial complex against Black lives
By Angel Parker
“There is really no difference, in my opinion, whether we hold them as absolute slaves or obtain their labor by some other method. Of course, we prefer the old method. But that question is not now before us!”
— Judge D.C. Humphrey of Alabama, 1866
Pictured: a Louisiana prison, courtesy of Giles Clark (Getty images).
Note: the terms “corrections officer” and “correctional officer” are used interchangeably in this text. “Corrections,” used with the capital “C,” denotes the Department of Corrections, generally speaking. The word “crime” is used, though we acknowledge that crime is a fictitious phenomenon created by the State to push its capitalist agenda and does not measure harm caused. Trigger warning for abuse, torture, enslavement, and white supremacy.
In 1865, the United States Civil War came to an end, ringing in a victory for the Union and for the alleged abolition of U.S. chattel slavery. When the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude was enacted, a subtle loophole was established: slavery was legal in the United States as punishment for crimes.
Immediately following the 13th Amendment, most Southern states enacted Black Codes, which were a set of laws used by former Confederates to reinstate slavery by use of criminalization, policing, and the court system. Most of the Black Codes’ laws were modeled after earlier Slave Codes and Code Noir used in slave states and colonies across the Americas. To avoid scrutiny from the federal government and Union officials, local governments enacted their own Black Codes to buff up their state laws and intensify the day-to-day criminalization of Black livelihood.
While many people only like to think of these happenings within a strictly historical context, their current impact goes largely ignored by those not impacted by the criminal legal system. The Black Codes are alive and well in the United States — and not just in the South, even if they are no longer the official law. I sat down with Johnny, a musician who was incarcerated in Louisiana for almost 20 years, to talk about his experiences enduring Louisiana’s criminal legal system. His tweet, “What if I told you that I’ve actually been enslaved?” shook a large section of Twitter. Many people were appalled at his story that followed.
One of Louisiana’s most notorious Black Codes pertained to children. In 1865, the state of Louisiana, determined to maintain its power and control over Black people and Black labor, created a law allowing the state to take Black children under state supervision if the child was accused of a crime or if the child’s parent was convicted of a crime, considered a vagrant, or deemed incapable of parenting. The state had the power to hire out the child and force them to labor under “apprenticeships.” This allowed the state to extract free labor from Black children through criminalization and abduction.
Since then, Louisiana and the U.S. at large have expanded juvenile detention as a means of continuing family separation and labor extraction. Johnny was thrown into this very situation at just 14 years old in the 1990s. Under the state’s supervision, Johnny was isolated from his community and forced to labor in a juvenile detention center — where child molestation and sexual misconduct were frequent — even before being convicted of any crime. Johnny was held as a pretrial detainee at Florida Parish Juvenile Detention inside of which children were forced to participate in physical activities such as jumping jacks and push-ups. Johnny considered it conditioning for the more intensive labor he would be forced to do in adult detention.
Pictured: prisoners at a Texas Youth Commission Facility line up against the wall before entering a dormitory.
Imagine a large plantation in Louisiana outlined by chain link fences and barbed wire. Hundreds of Black people in uniform working the fields as early as 7:45AM, planting endless rows of okra, tomatoes, and potatoes and using baked bean cans to water produce. On their hands and knees digging up crops. Passing out in the Louisiana heat. Suffering injuries from cutting okra, grass, and hay. Being threatened and forced to work in extreme heat, rain, sleet, and freezing cold. A big, greasy white man traveling row by row on horseback as he tinkers with his gun, threatening to shoot anyone who dares to defy orders and referring to adults as “boy” and “nigger.” Imagine never seeing a single dime from the countless hours of back-breaking labor. This is not a tale from the 19th century. This was Johnny’s experience only years ago — an experience that clearly exemplifies the insidiousness of the 13th Amendment loophole.
The conditions under which Johnny worked are unimaginable to those unfamiliar with or ignorant to the prison system. Every time he was transferred to a new facility, Johnny was inspected by corrections staff. They examined his physical condition and health, an experience Johnny likened to being on the auction block. Like Johnny, enslaved Africans were intensely inspected to determine their capacity for labor before being auctioned and sold into slavery. After a month of unbearable labor, Johnny refused to go to the field. His punishment? Unfettered torture and brutality, which was not uncommon in the U.S. prison system. He was placed in solitary confinement — also called “the dungeon” in some facilities — then transferred to a different facility.
Pictured: a solitary confinement cell, courtesy of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
On the way to the dungeon, corrections staff would handcuff and shackle people, place them in the back of a pickup truck, and drive violently along the back route. People have come out of this ride with broken bones, head injuries, and bruises. Even Johnny’s shoulder got dislocated on one of these rides. Johnny was beaten by corrections staff on his way to the dungeon and subjected to even more brutality once there. He was completely isolated, as they denied him paper, writing utensils, phone calls, or any contact with fellow prisoners.
Johnny was thrown in the dungeon on several occasions while incarcerated. He recalled instances in which he suffered through burning sensations and choking as pepper spray leaked into his cell. He has witnessed friends go insane from the isolation and torture. He described daily incidents of people mixing together their own urine, feces, semen, and milk to throw at people, as well as the lingering smell. There were times where he and others did not eat for days in the dungeon because staff was known for tampering with food.
Every prison system operates differently, but the one constant is inhumane cruelty. At another prison, Johnny experienced the prison boiler room, better known as “The Body Shop.” There, staff cuffed his hands behind his back, shackled his ankles, and beat him mercilessly.
Malnutrition was rampant at the prison and death was not a rare occurrence. He noted countless funerals that he and many others organized for fallen brothers. Whether folks fell fatally ill, died in their sleep, or were murdered by staff, death was an ever-looming reality for people at the prison. Yet, even in these unthinkable conditions, the full extent of their healthcare was Ibuprofen and Thorazine. The experience was even worse for those whose families were unable to visit, as the hyper-isolation set people up to be targeted even more than before.
Nowadays, it is common to hear politicians denounce private prisons. In fact, the vast majority of mainstream discourse on prisons centers around banning private prisons. Most people are in agreement that it is wrong for people to profit off the imprisonment of marginalized communities and that doing so incentivizes incarceration due to the profit it generates for the companies. What is often left out of the conversation is that only about 8% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons.
Pictured: prisoners of Arizona State Prison working on the LBJ Farm for $2 an hour, courtesy of Nicole Hill (Getty Images).
Federal, state, and local governments are the ones that drive mass incarceration — and for very similar reasons as private prisons. Jails and prisons are massive job creators for destitute communities, and many capitalists and politicians line their pockets through contracting with Corrections as suppliers of ankle monitors and shackles, healthcare services, food, phone services, commissary products, and more. There is plenty of money to be made through the prison industrial complex, and cities and states are especially incentivized to continue incarcerating people or lose an entire industry that many of them rely on to stay afloat.
“Federal, state, and local governments are the ones that drive mass incarceration — and for very similar reasons as private prisons.”
Johnny spent the majority of his time incarcerated at B.B. Rayburn Correctional Center in Angie, Louisiana, a village of Washington Parish and a town notorious for its history of white supremacy and terrorism. Once a sundown town with a history of lynchings, there is evidence to believe that Washington Parish had more Ku Klux Klan members per capita than any other county in the U.S. at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Unsurprisingly, Washington Parish still suffers from racial terrorism to this day. This inevitably found its way into Rayburn where Johnny recalled prisoners being pepper sprayed in retaliation against Barack Obama’s election and an instance when a white corrections officer dissented about “Martin Luther Coon Day.”
Pictured: the B.B. Rayburn Correctional Center sign.
Johnny spoke of seeing the new cadets and staff being oriented to the prison — most of them in their late teens and early twenties. It was a common occurrence that corrections staff were family or longtime friends because the prison is the primary employer of the town, which has a higher estimated median household income than that of Louisiana as a whole. This deepened corruption at the facility, as staff had both professional and personal incentive to cover for one another. Reporting an officer for brutality or getting them moved or fired felt pointless when another officer, who was their wife or father-in-law, could simply pick up where they left off or even retaliate against people who had the audacity to speak up. For the incarcerated, prison is another iteration of the reality of our ancestors on the very land upon which they slaved away.
The overseer was one of the most central figures in American slavery. Large plantations could not run without them, and they are often remembered for their brutality. Wealthy planters incentivized poor white men to be overseers — and slave catchers, now called police — by offering them an opportunity for upward mobility. A common practice also involved using enslaved men as plantation overseers, called slave drivers, as many individuals were eager to take whatever privileges they were offered given their plights. Surprising to some, slave drivers were known for being even more brutal than their white counterparts.
Today, corrections officers play the role of the overseer, or slave driver, and are similarly known for their brutality. The head overseer where Johnny worked was called the “line pusher” and was assisted by four to five officers carrying assault rifles on horseback. The line pusher not only decided where each person would work but also called out orders throughout the day. Johnny’s day-to-day experience entirely depended on who the line pusher was and who was working the gun. In overseer fashion, corrections officers were given total discretion and license to kill, and this discretion was rarely underused.
“For the incarcerated, prison is another iteration of the reality of our ancestors on the very land upon which they slaved away.”
Pictured: prisoners working on Louisiana’s Angola Prison under the oversight of an officer on horseback, courtesy of Bill Haber (AP Images).
Prisons and plantations not only breed but, more importantly, require a culture of brutality. Johnny has seen many officers come in with good intentions and either get fired for their inability to adapt to corrections culture or turn into some of the most brutal officers at the prison. He has watched officers become crueler by the day as they adapted to their jobs, as being a correctional officer requires one to not only overlook but actively participate in abuse. Johnny recounted getting in trouble for the most trivial reasons, such as his bed not being made correctly, failing to walk fast enough, or simply saying something an officer did not like. Write-ups and infractions led to severe and sometimes life-threatening punishment, all depending upon whether an officer liked you or how their day was going.
On the plantation, there was the gunline, which was an arbitrary and imaginary line that prisoners were not allowed to cross. If crossed, the officers fired off a warning shot, and people were expected to get down with their faces and stomachs to the ground. Johnny said that anyone caught standing after the warning shot would be subject to the next bullet.
Conflict with officers could lead to death, as Corrections prioritized covering for themselves over the safety of people in their custody. Johnny discussed frequent instances of officers even enlististing other prisoners to do their dirty work for them through threat or bribery. This created an environment in which people were apprehensive to trust one another. When folks were brutalized by corrections staff, which was often, officers made sure that those people did not have access to writing materials or phone calls.
In an environment that necessitates savagery and corruption, changing the color of the machine doesn’t change the way that it works. Johnny found that even Black correctional officers provided no solace, protection, or solidarity to prisoners who were predominantly Black, continuing their lineage as slave drivers.
After the Civil War, it was not uncommon to see formerly enslaved people “wandering about,” either looking for their families, trying to find paying jobs, or exercising their newfound freedom. The presence of free Black people infuriated Confederates and led to the passing of vagrancy laws throughout the South, though this type of criminalization was not unique to the South. Vagrancy laws essentially criminalized homelessness, joblessness, and most realities attributed to poverty. Vagrancy laws are alive today and take different names such as “broken windows policing” and, even more strikingly, through parole and probation rules.
Johnny described parole as a “trap,” and he was not speaking metaphorically. When Johnny was released, his parole officer explicitly told his mother that parole is “set up for him to fail.” In the state of Louisiana, if someone doesn’t have a valid address to be discharged, they remain incarcerated. Once someone has a valid address, they are required to obtain “gainful employment” within 30 days of release or risk being sent back to prison. Like our ancestors, once people receive their freedom from the state of Louisiana with no other resources at hand, they can be forced back into slavery for not having housing or employment.
Pictured: the Louisiana Corrections seal.
It is important to note that the agricultural work to which Johnny was subjected was barely useful to him in finding a job in his hometown of New Orleans. His GED and general studies degree were also of little use to him. Additionally, having a felony record was a large hurdle in finding employment. Due to being incarcerated since childhood, Johnny recalled sending in endless cover letters with no resume because of his absence of work history. After 30 days of being outside of prison and working odd jobs here and there on Craigslist, Johnny was still homeless and unemployed. With his parole officer looking for him, he ran. Johnny was eventually caught and brought back to prison.
Unfortunately, Johnny’s story is not uncommon. With tedious rules ranging from curfews, to who someone can befriend, to mandated employment, to continual check-ins — often conflicting with people’s work and childcare schedules — it is almost impossible to keep up with parole. In fact, one in four people in prison are incarcerated as a result of a technical violation, and in Louisiana, violations account for over half the prison admissions. It is often stated that “the largest alternative to incarceration in the United States is simultaneously one of the most significant drivers of mass incarceration.”
“In an environment that necessitates savagery and corruption, changing the color of the machine doesn’t change the way that it works.”
Prison, much like slavery, exists to separate individuals from their personhood — to isolate them, exploit their labor, and extract as much money from them as possible. As Johnny described to me, “it’s not so much as you lose everything [in prison], but they take everything from you.” Relationships are constantly disrupted as people enter and leave prison. People’s families are frequently turned away by corrections staff for the smallest, most arbitrary — if even legitimate — rules. One can lose their rights to visitation based solely on the word of corrections staff. People have to pay money to even be able to use the phones to call their loved ones. Even writing materials cost money. As mentioned earlier, corrections staff would go out of their way to create distrust and conflict.
Despite the extreme isolation and social deprivation, in the spirit of our ancestors, incarcerated people find creative ways to form community and foster strong friendships. Some of the most communal moments in Johnny’s prison experience took place when a fellow prisoner died. Men would come together to mourn, offer condolences, and provide support to one another. Even if someone didn’t know the deceased personally, many still attended the funeral to be in community with the other men and offer emotional support. Group activities such as card games and art projects were another way people formed communities. In an environment where people labored without pay while everything required money, sharing was one of the most important values to communities at Rayburn.
Pictured: an aerial view of B.B. Rayburn Correction Center.
Arguably one of the most influential driving forces behind colonial slavery was Christianity. Christianity was forced onto enslaved Africans, and church services offered the only setting for Black people to be in community with one another, away from the savagery of enslavers. Christianity was manipulated to force enslaved Africans into submission and provide biblical justification for European domination. Similarly, in Louisiana — more specifically, in Rayburn — Johnny found Christianity to be an omnipresent force in the prison. In fact, church service was offered at the prison every single day.
Many of Johnny’s peers attended service even though they weren’t Christian. Being treated even relatively decently by volunteer staff alleviated the brutality and abuse people commonly experienced from corrections staff. Service was also grounding for those who could not stand the monotony of life in prison. For people who had the unfortunate experience of being locked in the dungeon, no books or reading material were allowed with the exception of the Christian Bible. Even for men who opted to get an associates degree, the only two options were general studies or liberal arts religion. Johnny felt that Christianity was constantly being forced onto prisoners, but the conditions were so terrible that many people eventually accepted it to survive day-to-day life.
Pictured: prisoners sitting in on a weekly church service, courtesy of COOL Ministries, Inc.
Johnny entered prison at the height of the “tough on crime” era. At just 14 years old, Johnny was incarcerated in 1996, the same year that Hillary Clinton would go on to make her “super predators” speech. When he was released in 2014 — just four years after Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow shook up mainstream criminal justice discourse — the rhetoric surrounding incarceration was completely different. Every March and April, Johnny would pay close attention to the Louisiana state legislature, looking for word of prison reforms, but in the end, he dubbed the reforms “lip service.” Since 2014, Louisiana has enacted “major” reforms to curb their reputation as the biggest incarcerator in the country with the world’s highest incarceration rate. Despite reform after reform, Louisiana has made minimal progress with regard to their reputation and no progress at all with regard to prison conditions.
Just in 2019, the Louisiana state Senate voted to reform the state’s habitual offender statute by “eliminating certain first-time, nonviolent offenses from later being eligible for sentencing enhancements.” However, reforms like this are ridiculously limited in scope and do nothing for people like Fair Wayne Bryant who is currently serving a life sentence for stealing hedge clippers under the habitual offender statute. His appeal was recently denied by the Louisiana Supreme Court. Expectedly, 80% of people incarcerated under the habitual offender statute in Louisiana are Black, 81% of children in custody of the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice are Black, and as of 2015, “Black people were incarcerated at 2.4 times the rate of white people” in Louisiana. It is clear that the legacy of slavery and Black Codes lives on in Louisiana despite their many reforms.
This points to the issue of systemic racism. While the term has become a buzzword for mainstream politicians and corporate media, its true definition should not be lost on us. When something is systemic, it means that the entire system must be held accountable. It means that the entire system must be eradicated in order to root out the systemic racism. Johnny was not forced to work on plantations in a former sundown town by accident. The criminal legal system is a well-oiled machine, and its goal of re-enslaving Black people has continued uninterrupted since Reconstruction.
A popular reform idea is to ban unpaid work, and while this is certainly a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough. Reflect on Johnny’s experience with the dungeon, the brutality of corrections staff, the impossible task of rooting out abuse and corruption, the isolation, the parole trap, and the many arbitrary rules and discretion of enforcement. These things cannot be solved with reforms. This is an inherent structural and cultural problem.
Pictured: a corrections officer handcuffing a prisoner, courtesy of Jim Wilson (New York Times).
At the root of the problem is American society’s unmitigated need to control low-income Black and indigenous communities and disappear problems of poverty instead of solving them. Just as there was nothing our ancestors did to deserve 400 years of persecution and enslavement, there is absolutely nothing Johnny could have done to deserve being ripped from his mother’s arms at 14 years old, deprived of a quality education, forced to labor unpaid for almost twenty years, and be subjected to levels of torture and brutality that many people cannot even fathom.
We must ask ourselves: when the state tortures and enslaves people in the name of accountability, who is holding the state accountable for its actions? How can you hold accountable a system that was intentionally designed to enact violence? Removing one officer or one warden does not account for the thousands of corrections staff, prosecutors, judges, and politicians who not only allow these things to happen but actively champion this system. The entire system has to go.
Though Johnny has been out for some years now, putting his prison experience behind him will be a lifelong challenge. Along with being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he has also missed out on decades of social and cultural moments making it sometimes difficult to socialize with others. Even to this day, Johnny cannot stand having a long line behind him. Reminded of lining up day after day in prison, if Johnny has to wait in line for things, he will go all the way to the back of the line if the line gets too long behind him. He feels anxiety and distrust when a coworker is especially close to a supervisor, reminding him of corrections staff using their relationships with prisoners to terrorize others.
There are even smaller things that others take for granted, like enjoying time at a restaurant. When Johnny eats out, he is aware of all entrances and exits at all times due to the trauma he endured while incarcerated. While many people are able to get help for their trauma via therapy, Johnny has had an extremely hard time finding a therapist to speak to because no one has been able to relate to or even understand the conditions under which he lived in prison.
Overall, Johnny has taken solace in music, a hobby he picked up while being enslaved. He is doing the hard work of repairing his relationships with his family and being the best father and husband that he can be. There were so many opportunities for meaningful intervention throughout Johnny’s life. So many times that the state could’ve put a stop to its repression and chosen care and compassion instead. The only thing that prison brought to Johnny was suffering and trauma. Instead of having the tools and resources to learn processes of accountability and maintain supportive relationships, Johnny has had to learn these things on his own, while trying to cope with the lasting impact of decades of enslavement. Now that the state of Louisiana has supposedly — and falsely — done its job in holding Johnny accountable for his actions, who will hold the state of Louisiana accountable for what it has done to Johnny?
Pictured: the Louisiana State Penitentiary sign, courtesy of Judi Bottoni (AP Images).
Peter O’Neal was one of the “Original 33,” the first Black people elected to the Georgia General Assembly during Reconstruction and some of the first Black people elected to any state legislature in the entire country. In 1876, Peter O’Neal proposed a bill to the legislature for the abolition of the entire prison system. During Reconstruction, Black people — most formerly enslaved — proposed the abolition of capital punishment, political repression, and imprisonment for debt and bail. Yet century after century, reform after reform after reforms, we have seen little change. Abolition is not new. Abolition is not mainstream, and it never has been. In fact, abolition has been a life-threatening endeavor for centuries. Black people have been resisting enslavement since the first Europeans put shackles on our wrists and ankles in Africa, and we continue to resist today.
Perhaps the problem is not how we are enslaving and persecuting people, but the fact that we are doing it at all. In 1866, white supremacist and former Union Soldier Professor Burgess said, “almost every act, word or gesture of the Negro...was made a crime or misdemeanor for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and then consigned to a condition of almost slavery for an indefinite time, if he could not pay the bill.” Perhaps the even more important question to ask is who benefits from consistently masking slavery and torture as “safety” and “accountability”?
“We must ask ourselves: when the state tortures and enslaves people in the name of accountability, who is holding the state accountable for its actions?”
Pictured: prisoners exercising at Arizona State Prison-Kingman, courtesy of Tom Tingle (The Republic).