Opinion: Incarceration is an unjust profit-driven enterprise

Laurel Taylor English literature senior
Laurel Taylor
English literature senior

If you haven’t read the Constitution recently, you may not have realized that slavery has not been abolished in the United States. In fact, the 13th Amendment clearly states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except in the punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” One more time — “except in the punishment for a crime.”

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that a fully functioning slave plantation exists in our very own backyard. Angola, or the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is an 18,000-acre, fully functioning plantation — complete with corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Every physically able prisoner is required to work for 2 to 20 cents an hour for a minimum of 40 hours each week.

With over 6,000 inmates, Angola is the largest correctional facility in the U.S. by population. According to the 2010 Louisiana State Penitentiary’s Annual Report, of those prisoners, 76 percent are black. Of the employees, the majority are white, many from families that have lived and worked at Angola for generations. After all, before Angola began masquerading as a prison in 1901, it operated as a slave-breeding plantation.

And not much has changed. Like the plantation of the past, Angola regularly replenishes its supply of human livestock using majority black convicts, treating them as expendable and working them as slaves. Angola’s annual report states that 71 percent of the inmates are serving life sentences and will never reenter non-institutionalized society, and approximately 2 percent are on death row.

Angola has been criticized for its frequent implementation of solitary confinement. Most famous for enduring this torture are the Angola 3, Black Panthers who were wrongly charged with the murder of a prison guard and put into solitary for decades. In fact, one of the three, Albert Woodfox, remains in solitary confinement, where he has been for the past 42 years; all this despite ample evidence proving his innocence.

Under the Constitution, Angola has the right to subject their inmates to live as slaves, perpetuating a despicable and shameful practice of which the South seems to feign memory loss. It certainly cannot be denied that when one out of every 17 African-American adult males has been incarcerated and at a rate ten times that of white males (note: when convicted of the same felony, blacks are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than whites), there is a problem.

This problem becomes a glaring injustice when those men are then forced into fields to pick cotton for little to no pay and sentenced to solitary confinement if they cause trouble. That is a picture of the U.S. we pretend to have left behind 150 years ago.

A picture of Louisiana slavery can be enjoyed for just $20 at Angola’s Prison View Golf Course, or of course, the upcoming Angola Prison Rodeo. A relic of our repulsive history has rebranded itself as a penitentiary, boasting its own ingenuity and sufficiency while violating human rights. To begin learning more, check out angola3.org.

Brittany Gondolfi Social justice senior
Brittany Gondolfi
Social justice senior

Why is it that predominantly black men and women are sitting in cages under the threat of a gun? Why are so many people of color caught in a gross system of entrapment? Who are those judges, defenders, legislators and companies that handle the mass amount of work it takes to operate the systemic housing, feeding, shackling and working of nearly 60,000 humans in Louisiana? Why are most of the humans in this system men and women of African descent?

Louisiana has made a mockery of human dignity by perpetuating a culture that wins political elections using fear, crime, and incarceration as vehicles for social order. They attempt to solve the problems of racial inequality and poverty by recreating slave systems disguised as “law and order,”, “rehabilitation” and “re-entry”.

Most of America has not yet read “The New Jim Crow” and does not know about tragedies such as the Angola Rodeo and the 60,000 predominantly non-violent offenders locked up in Louisiana. But most of us students at Loyola do know about this and much more.

The injustices of slavery, racial inequality and systemic violence are purportedly being solved in Louisiana and the rest of America via incarceration. In all cases and forms of human entrapment, people do not typically enslave and cage one another unless it is for someone else’s benefit. We talk about crime costing society, but we live in a society where a media-perpetuated culture of crime has created a mass web of plantation style penitentiaries.

Don’t believe it? Go to Angola.

Who is benefitting from this thing we have learned to call the prison industrial complex? Let’s start at the top: the State of Louisiana and their treasury manages all the profits made from a branch of the government called “prison enterprises.” Next comes the private and non-profit companies operating these “work/rehabilitation programs,” then the judges doing the judging and the lawyers who do the defending and prosecuting. Then comes the law school training the lawyers and ultimately, we have the media and academics that teach us about these systems and make money off classes that raise our consciousness, or lower it in many instances. And let’s not forget the police that do the entrapping — that walk around free to commit crimes against people of color.

Incarceration in Louisiana is out of control. The media triggers the public’s embedded racist fantasy of the dangerous black man with crime reports, calls for people in the French Quarter to walk in groups and applauds massive “sweep ups” of people in the city.

How can we sit by and justify the police state we see before us? We are living in a time where, “to the cages,” “to the fields” and sometimes even “to the rodeo” is the anthem of our criminal justice system. It is a false justice system that is itself criminal. Do we believe for a moment that punishment can sufficiently deal with poverties of the human spirit, such as addiction and substance use — we punish who for what substances, might I ask — theft, which is a response to poverty, lack, greed and violence — a sign of serious emotional instability and dehumanization. Crime is not the problem. The right to live a life of dignity is what we are missing.

Angela Davis once said that we cannot think that one problem solved by the police and the prison industrial complex could not be solved in a way far more effective at dealing with the root of our social illness.

Why do we allow our states to uphold laws that none of us truly believe are contributing to a more holistic, healed, sustainable, moral, just, aware and compassionate citizen population? How can we understand in our current place and time that America is a nation built by genocide, slavery, war, colonialism, theft, greed, corruption, media control of populations, incarceration and environmental calamity?

Is it time for new abolitionist movement? Is it time for a new Student led movement for Liberation. I think so.

If you agree, get in touch with me via [email protected]