That Peculiar Institution 2.0

Baljeet Kaur - How is mass incarceration related to slavery?

Muhammad Rasheed - The great wealth of Western Civilization was built upon the anti-Black slave institution, and when slavery was abolished, it collapsed the American economy. The 1% legacy families that control the majority of society’s wealth were desperate to replace their gravy train streams of revenue, and they did so by exploiting the 13th Amendment loophole:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

This effectively returned Blacks to slavery, particularly the vulnerable poor who were seized off the streets on frivolous charges. Interestingly, it was the North who held onto mass incarceration while the South used jim crow subjugation, but the jim crow conditions ironically enabled Black people to build and control their own wealth within the limits of the closed in systems where by law they were limited to how much of the Black dollar they were allowed to spend on white goods and services. Once jim crow was abolished at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the South leaped at taking on the mas incarceration money maker for itself. Since then, corporations and politicians have schemed to increase the scope and force of this evil blight upon the Black community, and now it is rapidly approaching the wealth generating super business of its chattel slavery ancestor.