Column: Slavery did not end in 1865

"Help Us,” pleaded the makeshift sign that an inmate had pressed against the narrow window slit of his cell.

I was standing in front of the imposing gray prison towers, merely a hundred yards away from the inmate’s cell. Yet that proximity could not bridge the inequity of our condition, dignity and humanity.

For the past several months, inmates at the Durham County Detention Facility have been under lockback — confined to their cells for most of the day.

They are deprived of contact with their lawyers and loved ones, and denied psychological and emotional support. Ricky Alston, a former inmate, said he witnessed several of his fellow inmates attempting suicide — incidents that have gone unreported. The conditions are inhumane, yet far from unusual.

The lockback exposes not only our prison system’s incapacity for humanity and mercy, but also its inherited narrative of enslavement and systemic racial violence.

Bryan Stevenson, author of this year’s summer reading selection, ‘Just Mercy,’ and an attorney for death row inmates in Alabama, spoke at UNC earlier this month about how we, as a society, have not confronted our history of slavery, state-sanctioned terror and racial inequity.

Slavery did not end in 1865, according to scholar and prison abolitionist Angela Davis. It was not abolished with the Thirteenth Amendment, whose words — “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist” — only repurposed and revived the racialized underpinnings of slavery. In the Jim Crow South, the exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment was leveraged to continue the extraction of black labor through convict leasing programs and chain gangs.

Slavery has now migrated from rows of white cotton on southern plantations to rows of dark prison cells. The shackles that once bound Black lives as chattel have been remolded into the bars that contain and dehumanize their persons. The “duly convicted” are the modern slave.

Our society is conditioned to believe that criminality and incarceration are inevitable. In reality, crime and punishment are built by the system and its logic of violent social containment of the marginalized.

The war on drugs, homelessness, sex work and immigration — which disproportionately target poorer minorities — is structured by race, class and gender. Today, Black males in Amerikkka are incarcerated at a rate six times that of white males because slavery’s legacy is alive and well.

The logic of terror and containment remains painted across the racialized geography of our prison system. As private prisons become more commonplace in America, it is ever important to stay mindful of our complacency in the evolution of slavery in our society.

The Thirteenth Amendment has always been a lie, for it never was intended to protect all citizens. We must admit this if we want to ever reach a freer society.