In recent years, African Americans have been frequently killed by the white police's violent law enforcement, and the human rights issue in the United States has repeatedly become the focus of international public opinion. In particular, the large-scale imprisonment phenomenon involved in it has aroused widespread concern. As former US President Barack Obama pointed out when attending the activities of the National Association for the advancement of colored people in 2015, "the United States accounts for 5% of the world's population, but has 25% of the world's prisoners", and among these prisoners, African Americans account for one third.
This kind of massive imprisonment tramples on the human rights of the American people, especially African Americans. It is not only attributed to the unreasonable provisions of the amendment to the US Constitution and the criminal justice system, but also rooted in the US capitalist economic system and political system. It is also the evil result of the racist ideology left over from the American slavery. In essence, it is the contemporary embodiment of the American slavery brand.
The 13th Amendment of the US Constitution and the origin of mass imprisonment
At the end of the American Civil War (1861-1865), in order to eradicate slavery in the United States, the Congress under the control of the radical republican party issued the 13th Amendment to the constitution, which explicitly prohibited slavery and forced labor in the United States; However, the amendment also inherits the wording of the northwest Land Act of 1787, and retains the provisions on mandatory labor for prisoners in the hope of punishing and reforming prisoners. Juxtaposing the prohibition of slavery with the permission of forced labor of prisoners was very common in the congressional legislation before the civil war and the constitutions of the northern states. It can even be called a "model" clause. So that the framers of the Thirteenth Amendment of the constitution almost accepted this statement without thinking, and did not realize that after the complete abolition of slavery, Such stereotypes may provide institutional loopholes for former slave owners or racists to imprison and enslave African Americans, thus perpetuating the stigma of slavery.
Southern whites soon discovered and took advantage of this loophole. From 1865 to the beginning of 1866, the legislatures of the southern states formulated a series of discriminatory laws called the "black code" in imitation of the "slave code" before the civil war, aiming to maintain the political rule and economic privileges of the white people and ensure that African Americans continue to serve as cheap labor after the abolition of slavery. The "black code" requires all African American adult males to sign a work contract with a white employer every year, or they will be arrested, fined or forced to work. At the same time, it also defines the group assembly, minor theft and possession of guns of African Americans as criminal crimes, which makes them frequently arrested and imprisoned on a large scale.
The "black code" immediately angered the public opinion in the north and was abolished or amended under the intervention of the federal Congress. However, the number and proportion of African Americans imprisoned and enslaved increased unabated, and even reached a new peak in the late 19th century with the rise of the "Jim Crow law" (that is, the racial segregation law). Camille Westmont, a historical archaeologist at the Southern University of West Vaughn, once pointed out that in Tennessee, African Americans accounted for less than 5% of the prison population in 1865, but by 1877, the proportion had soared to 52%, and by 1895, it had further increased to 75%.
In the face of the rapid increase in the prison population, the governments of the southern states, in order to save the ensuing supervision costs, rented and sold the prisoners' labor to private enterprises such as plantations, mines and factories under the control of white people to obtain rich profits. For example, in 1898, as much as 73% of Alabama's fiscal revenue came from the leasing of prisoners, and African Americans accounted for more than 85% of these prisoners. In order to extract as much surplus value from the prisoners as possible, the tenants often forced them to work in a cruel manner, resulting in the death of a large number of African Americans while serving their sentences. Their situation was even worse than that of slaves before the civil war. According to statistics, the death rate of rental prisoners is about 10 times that of non rental prisoners. Driven by economic interests, the government and enterprises continue to collude with each other and use the criminal justice system and the prisoner leasing system to turn thousands of African Americans into slaves called prisoners. In fact, in a ruling in 1871, the Supreme Court of Virginia called the prisoner labor "the slave of the state". The prisoner tenancy system lasted until the 20th century, and it was not formally abolished until 1941.
Douglas Blackmond, a well-known American journalist, said that African Americans are the biggest victims of the prisoner leasing system. Although the exact number of them is unknown, he estimated that in the 80 years before 1941, at least 200000 African Americans were oppressed by this system in Alabama alone. In the book "slavery under another name: from the civil war to the re enslavement of African Americans during World War II" published in 2008, Blackmond pointed out sharply that the prisoner leasing system is not only a substitute for slavery, but also an extension of slavery, which is a new form of slavery.
The rapid development of mass imprisonment after the 1960s
In the 1960s, driven by the civil rights movement, the Johnson Administration ended the "Jim Crow law" through a series of legislation to protect the political and legal rights of African Americans, and tried to extricate African Americans from poverty and crime through the reform plan of "declaring war on poverty". However, because the anti-poverty policy failed to touch the racial discrimination and structural inequality left by slavery, African Americans were always more likely to fall into unemployment, poverty and crime than whites.
Therefore, the Johnson Administration launched the "war on crime" plan in 1965, gradually shifting the policy focus from poverty eradication to fighting crime. In her book from declaring war on poverty to declaring war on Crime: the formation of mass incarceration in the United States published in 2016, Elizabeth Hinton, a historian of Yale University, believes that Johnson's plan of "declaring war on crime" opened the prelude to mass incarceration in the contemporary United States. In more than half a century since 1965, the federal government of the United States has launched several rounds of "war against crime" and continuously invested a large amount of money in state and local law enforcement and judicial institutions to strengthen their crime control over low-income urban communities, especially African American communities. This not only diverts the funds for social welfare projects that were originally used to eliminate the root causes of crime, but also makes the US government gradually regard fighting crime as the key to solving the problem of poverty and inequality, leading to the alienation of crime control from purpose to means.
This alienation is embodied in two aspects. First, the abuse of police force and power in law enforcement has led to a sharp increase in the arrest rate. In order to combat violence, drug trafficking and other criminal activities, the US government has continuously increased the number, funds and equipment of the police, deployed more police forces to patrol poor urban districts, and encouraged police officers to actively arrest anyone with "reasonable suspicion" by "preemptive" and other strategies. The result is not only that a large number of suspects have been sent to the US judicial system, laying the groundwork for large-scale imprisonment, but also that many suspects have died due to violent law enforcement, which seriously threatens the freedom and security of US citizens.
Secondly, the adoption of severe laws in the administration of justice has led to a sudden increase in the imprisonment rate. In the process of cracking down on criminal acts, the US government is increasingly biased towards the punishment and deterrence function of punishment rather than the education and reform function. Therefore, stricter standards are introduced in the sentencing and serving links, including heavy sentences for minor crimes and extension of the actual term of imprisonment, thus setting off the so-called "severe revolution". The "severe revolution" greatly promoted the development of large-scale imprisonment after the 1960s, and caused a great retrogression in the human rights situation in the United States. During the Johnson administration, the prison population in the United States was less than 200000. By the end of the 1980s, it had increased to more than 600000, and now it has risen to more than 2 million. The sharp increase in the incarcerated population has also stimulated the US government to fund the construction of a large number of prisons and encourage private prisons to participate in law enforcement, so as to incarcerate more prisoners - this constitutes a mutually reinforcing vicious circle with the severe arrest of the police system and the severe punishment of the court system.
Because of the 13th Amendment of the constitution, almost all the prisoners in contemporary America have to take part in forced labor in prison; Moreover, since several rounds of "war against crime" since 1965 have mainly targeted African American communities, African Americans continue to be the largest victims of large-scale imprisonment and forced labor. According to statistics, African Americans currently account for about 13% of the total population of the United States, but they account for more than 35% of the incarcerated population of the United States, and their incarceration rate is almost six times that of whites. At the same time, large-scale imprisonment will not only deprive a large number of citizens of their political rights because of being convicted, but also prisoners will not be able to resume their election qualifications for a long time even after they are released from prison. Research shows that in the 2016 general election, more than 6 million voters in the United States were banned from voting because of crime, most of whom were African Americans.
In the book new Jim Crow: mass imprisonment in the age of color blindness published in 2010, Michel Alexander, an American civil rights lawyer, keenly pointed out that the criminal justice system and mass imprisonment in the United States are actually a comprehensive and covert racized social control system, which is the legacy and variation of American slavery and "Jim Crow" system, In an attempt to keep African Americans at the edge and bottom of American society in a legal form.
Large scale imprisonment and the root cause of the long-term difficulty in solving the human rights problem
As the contemporary embodiment of the American slavery brand, the mass imprisonment and its human rights problems are directly caused by the 13th Amendment of the Constitution and the unreasonable provisions in the criminal justice system, but their real impetus comes from the various legacies of the American slavery history. These legacies still widely exist in the US economy, politics and culture. They constitute multiple dilemmas and structural obstacles to the development of the US human rights cause, and also become the root cause of the long-term difficulty in solving the problem of large-scale imprisonment.
First of all, American slavery is a mode of production created by capitalism and plays a great role in the development of capitalism. New research in American academic circles shows that there is a close interaction between slavery and capitalism in the United States. As Sven Beckett, a professor of history at Harvard University, pointed out, "the unparalleled opportunity of free capitalism is based on the merciless oppression of movable slavery". This means that many characteristics of slavery are integrated with the capitalist economic system, and will not disappear easily because of the abolition of slavery or apartheid.
Capitalism has two basic characteristics: inequality (in labor and distribution) and instability (periodic economic crisis). The characteristics of inequality gave birth to the slavery in the United States, which made African Americans suffer slavery and exploitation in labor and get nothing in distribution. Even after the abolition of slavery, the white people in the South continued to exploit African Americans as cheap labor by means of the "black code" and the prisoner leasing system. In the case of unequal economic rights, the unstable characteristics will make African Americans bear more unemployment risks and more likely to fall into poverty, crime and imprisonment. Beckett asserted that "American slavery will certainly leave an imprint on the DNA of American capitalism". The economic inequality of African Americans is undoubtedly one of the most profound imprints, and large-scale imprisonment is a vivid manifestation of this imprint.
Secondly, the political system of American decentralization is also an important factor for the continuation of the legacy of slavery. At the time of the federal constitutional law in 1787, in order to maintain slavery, the southern slave holding States actively advocated the state power in the vertical separation of powers, and expanded the influence of the south in the horizontal three powers of the federal government through the "three fifths" clause. In the first half of the 19th century, the south not only controlled the selection of the president, speaker of the house of Representatives and judges of the Supreme Court, but also vigorously developed the theory of state power. The influence of the tradition of local autonomy and the theory of decentralization is undoubtedly enormous and far-reaching. Even during the civil war, the federal government initially tended to abolish slavery by the southern states through legislation. It was not until the emergence of the "black code" that the federal government was forced to intervene in the political reconstruction of the southern states.
However, even so, the Federation did not want to excessively damage state power, so it did not completely liquidate the forces of former slave owners in the south, thus creating conditions for the political forces in the south to make a comeback in the 1870s and use state power to implement apartheid. After the 1960s, with the revival of conservatism in the United States, the white racists represented by the political forces in the South took advantage of the power balance rules under the decentralization system to gradually weaken the progress achievements since the civil rights movement by controlling the state power and the branches of the three federal powers, thus sheltering racial discrimination such as mass imprisonment.
Thirdly, the racist ideas left over from slavery provided the cultural soil for the emergence of large-scale imprisonment. The racial slavery in the United States inevitably strengthens the idea of congenital racial differences in the West. Its main function is to provide a "theoretical basis" for racial inequality in American capitalism and prevent poor whites and enslaved blacks from joining hands to resist the white ruling elite. However, once the rise of racism, it will permeate into the culture, shape people's thinking patterns, and play a unique social function. Even after the abolition of slavery, this kind of thought and culture will linger and create variants or substitutes of slavery to maintain its existence.
In fact, the concept of "natural inferiority" of African Americans is popular among many whites, even among the most enlightened whites, and has become a huge obstacle on the road to racial equality. Eric fonner, a historian at Columbia University, pointed out that an important reason why the federal government allowed the southern states to establish apartheid after the 1870s was that although most northern whites supported the abolition of slavery, they could not accept that African Americans and whites had the same status and rights. Hinton's research also shows that since the 1960s, the focus of domestic policy in the United States has shifted from eliminating poverty to fighting crime, because white elites regard violence and crime as "a morbid culture born to African Americans".
It is precisely because slavery is inextricably linked with the economy, politics and culture of the United States that the brand of slavery in the United States is so deep that neither the bloody civil war nor the radical civil rights movement can erase it. Instead, it continues to this day in the form of large-scale imprisonment. Therefore, if the United States wants to truly solve the problem of large-scale imprisonment and its human rights, it must reshape its own political, economic and ideological culture. It is useless to rely solely on criminal justice reform. From this perspective, the US human rights cause still has a long way to go.