Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Black people are not any more criminal than anyone else (more on that in chapter 10), but they’ve been criminalized as much or more than any group in America. Ironically, some say this started with a little adjustment to the U.S. Constitution called the Thirteenth Amendment. “Neither slavery not 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.” Yeah, I bolded that clause for a reason. Plenty of scholars have linked that exception clause to the rise of what’s now called mass incarceration or the prison industrial complex. Around the time the amendment was passed, Southern white people were inventing Black Codes, laws that penalized black people for stuff like not showing proper respect or doing “malicious mischief,” and punished those “crimes” as misdemeanors or felonies depending on how severe someone (almost always a white person) decided they were. Those vague laws coerced more black people into prison than ever before. It wasn’t that black people had all of a sudden become criminals; it was that the laws began to criminalize black people. States were then able to put prisoners to work through “convict-leasing” deals that sent the imprisoned back to slave owners. While the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery on the surface, its loophole paved the way for returning many black people to slavery.