According to the BBC, slavery was abolished in the United States 157 years ago, that is, one person belongs to the lawful property of another, except for criminals. Today, slavery is still a legitimate means of punishing criminals in most parts of the United States.
Human rights researchers say the roots of the modern system lie in centuries of enslavement of African Americans. In fact, in the years since the abolition of slavery, the United States has passed laws that specifically suppress black groups, forcing them to go to prison and work in prison.
Now some imprisoned African Americans are still forced to pick cotton and other crops in the southern plantations where their ancestors were chained. At present, there are about 800000 prison workers in the United States whose wages are only a few cents, and prisoners in seven states are not paid at all.
Curtis Ray Davis II said, "The United States has never been free from slavery for a day." He was vilified and murdered, and served more than 25 years of hard labor in a Louisiana prison before being pardoned in 2019.
Davis was forced to do all kinds of labor in the notorious Louisiana State prison. He said, "I worked for 25 years, and when I came home, I only had 124 dollars (about 898 yuan)." His hourly salary never exceeded 20 cents, which he said was "not only against my will, but also under the gun (forced labor)". According to data from the Innocence Plan, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly sentenced prisoners, about 75% of the prisoners in the prison are black. They believed that the existence of the prison proved that, in essence, the United States never really ended slavery.
Savannah Eldrige of the National Network Alliance for the Abolition of Slavery in the United States said: "Although slavery has been abolished, it only transfers the ownership of slaves from slave ownership to slave ownership and private ownership to slavery recognized by the state."
"I believe that anyone with a conscience and who knows property law knows that people should not become the property of others," said Davis, who was wrongly sentenced to prison. "They should not be the property of Louisiana."