It says a lot of convicted African-Americans were forced to do hard labour without compensation …
what do US dopers think on this ?? Any one read this book ?? comments ??
I thought convicted felons were forced to work without compensation today.
I believe they usually are compensated somewhat (along the lines of a few cents per hour), although that probably varies hugely by jurisdiction. Nothing unconstitutional about involuntary servitude for the convicted, though.
From reading the interview, it seems that the push of the book is that blacks were unjustly convicted of crimes, or sentenced to much longer sentences than they would have otherwise in order to extract labor out of them.
They get some money, though if I understand it correctly, it’s nowhere near minimum wage.
The Thirteenth Amendment is clear - involuntary servitude (or slavery) can be imposed as a sentence at a criminal trial. Prisoners are required to work. Any payment is optional.
You know, that’s rather frightening now that I look at it. Depending on how you parse it, it looks as if it not only allows involuntary servitude in the form of a prison job, but actually also allows actual slavery as a criminal punishment, as in assigning the convict to be owned as chattel by another.
Or is this provision constructed only to allow making prisoners work?
From what I’ve read, for most prisoners today, a prison job is a desirable thing, and there aren’t nearly enough to go around.
What about “sharecropping”. You owned nothing as a sharecropper; the man who owned the land got your labor for zip. At harvest, you paid the rent in kind-then sold what was left for cash (from him, and you were grossly cheated).
Because you were in debt to the landowner, you couldn’t leave.
Sounds like a definition of slavery!
Absolutely correct.
If prisoners manufacture goods that move in interstate commerce, they must be paid a wage comparable to a free worker (under a program known as the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). If they work in service industry, in agriculture, or for the state (so that what they make does NOT move in interstate commerce) any payment is completely optional. Pay can range from about 25 cents an hour to about $2/hr on the high side.
Wish you could pay dinky offshore wages without the off-putting foreign accents and bad PR? Federal Prison Industries to the rescue! Federal Prisoners, the alternative to offshoring your help desk!
http://www.unicor.gov/services/contact_helpdesk/
My (white) dad was a sharecropper - oh, I meant tenant farmer - in the 30’s. But if you’re using that as a benchmark you’d end up with everybody who lived and worked in a mill town as slaves - you owe your soul to the company store. I don’t think that’s really a meaningful definition of the term.
The convict lease system originated in the Southern states during the Reconstruction period, during a time of (a) increased lawlessness; when (b) Southern courts were prone to convict African Americans of petty crimes on flimsy evidence, and © cash-strapped Southern states couldn’t afford to build penitentiaries.
The concept isn’t inherently evil; even today, prisoners can sometimes be employed more usefully by outside industry than by state-run workshops. In practice, however, it was a horror. Convict lessors abused the hell out of their prisoners. There was no state supervision, and prisoners were routinely starved, beaten, and housed under filthy conditions with no medical care.
The day-to-day life of a leased convict was often worse than day-to-day life under chattel slavery. It was a sickening chapter in American history, which deserves to be better exposed and better known.
Having said all that, the differences between convict leasing and prewar slavery should be noted: If prisoners survived until the end of their sentence, they were free, and their children weren’t enslaved. Convict leasing was bad enough without making it out to be something else.
As for sharecropping, it was no fun, but it was not slavery. If everything is slavery, then nothing is slavery.
Wasn’t that part of a Seinfeld arc? George was trying to pitch the show about nothing to the NBC executives, and he lost his nerve and ended up selling them on an idea where a judge sentences someone to be Jerry’s butler?
I’m pretty sure this was just on the last ballot here in WA state (that is, a law that would allow the state to contract out prisoners to private companies). I voted against it, as I don’t think a private company should be able to profit from other people’s punishment at the state’s hands. And that’s totally disregarding the possibility of abusive practices.
true, true, but as has been pointed out by researchers on the topic, convict lessors lacked even the marginal interest in the convicts wellbeing that a slaveowner did in his human chattel. Being worked to death was not at all unusual.
At any rate, Convict leasing is explicitly illegal in some states; in others it has been deemed unconstitutional (I’m 90% sure Washington is in this rgoup); but in most U.S. states, it is legal. Colorado and Arizona currently have active convict leasing in their agricultural sectors.
There’s a classic article on the history of prison labor called “Freeing Prisoner’s Labor” by Stephen Garvey, in the Stanford Law Review. “Freeing Prisoners’ Labor,” 50 Stanford Law Review 339 (1998)
OK, so share-cropping is not the same thing as slavery, but it shares some characteristics that make it more like slavery than many other situations.
It’s not implicit in the text but I’ve never heard of anyone being sentenced to chattel slavery. As far as I know, prisoners always worked at the government’s direction (even if they were leased out to a private company).
It depends. Some jobs are popular and some aren’t. But where I work, there are jobs for everyone - which is a mistake in my opinion as it creates a lot of make-work jobs.
Then we get back to Zsofia’s point that sharecropping was not a race-based system. It was a class-based system. There were plenty of white sharecroppers.
Sure there are some similarities but the differences shouldn’t overlooked. The problem with equating things with slavery is that it’s a two-way equivalence. Is you say that share-cropping is no better than slavery then you’re also saying that slavery is no worse than share-cropping.
I went to school with children of sharecroppers, although I can’t remember their numbers. All of them were white but Texas hadn’t yet embraced desegregation. I don’t remember any of them wearing worn out, patched clothing nor did any of them come to school without shoes. They were kids just like the rest of us and their parents worked just as our parents did. They weren’t looked down on and no one I knew would have so much as thought of comparing their lot in life to slavery. Comparing sharecropping to slavery is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
It led to some weird intersections of class and race - LouisB, my dad definitely didn’t have shoes all the time when he was a kid, although he was one of eight with an often-absent father. Depends on the time and place, I imagine. At any rate, there were a lot of black families that were doing a lot better than my dad’s family - there was a black lady down the road whose name I’ll remember after the edit window passes - something like Miss Ella, but that’s not quite it. My dad and his siblings would “just happen” to be playing with her kids around dinner time, hoping to be invited in for dinner, because there was a whole lot more on her table than theirs. (I think he said her husband worked at the grist mill or something.) They were often invited in to eat at her house, but when they were playing with her kids at my dad’s house my grandmother fed them on the back porch, because colored people didn’t come inside your house like that and sit at your table. Except Granny never said “colored” or “black” or even “Negro”.
I am reminded, in hindsight, of the story Gene Hackman tells about the mule in Mississippi Burning.