Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons

[babsbunny]

http://www.truthout.org/article/slavery-haunts-americas-plantation-prisons

Thursday 28 August 2008

by: Maya Schenwar, t r u t h o u t | Report


On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false - could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil.

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long gone by. It's the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up in the decades following the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.

"Angola is disturbing every time I go there," Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. "It's not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on."

Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, concurred.

"I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a sophisticated plantation," Johnson told Truthout. "'Cotton is King' still applies when it come to Angola."

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

photo
On land previously occupied by a slave plantation, Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an hour. (Photo: Louisiana State Penitentiary)

Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Angola made news with a host of assaults - and killings - of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that they resorted to cutting their Achilles' tendons in protest. At Mississippi's Parchman Farm, another plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a "prison hospital" that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970. And Texas's Jester State Prison Farm, formerly Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. I had no idea! :^(

[IndyOp]

3. My summer was dominated by reading and thinking about "Slavery by Another Name"

by Douglas Blackmon. My understanding of the American past and present has had to be readjusted considerably.

The Age of Neo-Slavery

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II.

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies which discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

http://slaverybyanothername.com/

Slave Wagons - North Carolina, 1930's
http://slaverybyanothername.com/files/imagegallerymodule/@random47e2e6d383464/gallery1/wagons.jpg

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. Thanks for that link. I knew our prisons were full of people who

did not belong there, and I knew that the prisons were a racket thanks to Greg Palast, but this just blows my mind. I keep forgetting that the world outside of DU is such a cruel and unfair one. :( I hope this will be addressed by president Obama

[NOLALady]

6. "I hope this will be addressed by president Obama"

If he addressed this issue, he would not do it in his first term.

[IndyOp]

8. It blew my mind in a major way...

I knew about Jim Crow and people being arrested for trumped up charges and lynchings and... but I did not KNOW that slavery was indeed embraced by most people in most places in the south - not just rural areas where people were enslaved to farm or to mine coal or minerals, but also in the cities where people were enslaved in industrial brick-making plants and such. I did not know that MOST blacks lived exclusively in neo-slavery or a harsh peonage system.

I have a whole new understanding of what Al Sharpton means when he says that his mother "came up out of the South" -- it means "up out of slavery".

:(

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[PDJane]

5. I knew that the prisons were bad..........

and I knew that a lot of folks in them aren't necessarily guilty. That's what comes of cops told to get a conviction and minimum sentencing...and a prison system that is mostly in private hands.

This, however, is a bit tough even for me to take. It's time for a revolution.

[grasswire]

7. Bill Moyers...

...had an episode that was just stunning, and related to this. It was about the book written by .... oh I've forgotten his name. I'll have to find it and come back to post here. It is an expose of the de facto slavery post Civil War. I realized while watching it that even the predatory lending recently targeted to AAs has been a form of economic slavery. There's no end to it, yet.

On edit: someone above posted the name of the book while I was puttering around! That's it. I recommend watching the Moyers interview of Blackmon.