Are we even human beings anymore, or are we just a bunch of numbers in human bodies? This is a question that comes to my mind more frequently in the context of mass incarceration. I wonder, Is this how the slaves felt during the era of slavery?
It is scary and very problematic when the answer to those questions lean more to the scary past history of slavery. The problem of mass incarceration, or should I say retributive justice, in America is a pandemic in need of urgent action.
This is a pandemic caused my multitudes of serious diseases and viruses that can never be fixed by reform, or a simple restructuring of the system. Rather, it demands a complete abolition of the current system, and a creation of a community-based system, founded in equality, fairness, and humanity. We need a system where human life isn’t used as a financial bargain for corporate America, a system in which interest isn’t based on the amount of convictions secured rather than on the amount of life positively impacted and changed; a system that relies on community- and youth-based programs to help disenfranchised community, rather than a system that invests in the promotion and expansion of the ‘Prison Industrial Complex’.
The reason why the current system shouldn’t be sustained is because it has more than flaws. It is fundamentally inapt, established and created to be systemically unfair, unequal, and disproportional to certain populations and demographics. The system operates the way it does because it is created to mirror and modernize the old sin of slavery under the disguise of justice. We can look no further than the plain language of the United States’ Constitution, Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1, which states: “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.”
The Constitution authorizes slavery as a punishment, as long as the person is duly convicted! Isn’t it funny that securing a conviction at all cost happens to be the main government practice? Isn’t it funny that the government has developed a plea bargain system, making it easier to force a person to become a felon, pleading to a crime which guarantees a conviction, which the outcome is incarceration, whereby satisfying the constitutional requirement of becoming a slave who belongs to the State?
Why is it that when a person gets a sentence, the judge awards the sentenced individual to the Department of Corrections? They are now your masters: you listen to what they tell you, what they tell you to do you do; you wear what clothes they give you; you eat what they feed you, when they feed you. Not exactly what a sentencing judge says when a person is been sentenced, but paraphrasing the conditions a sentencing judge sets on a convicted individual.
Furthermore, the indoctrination of mass incarceration promotes acts of the dehumanizing of real people, actual “human beings”. This process of dehumanization has become the go-to tool of prosecutors and judges alike.
This system makes it easy for people in power to control other people’s emotions and thought processes by controlling their opinions and decisions. What makes it worse, is these are the same tactics rich plantation owners, slave markets, and crooked politicians utilized to justify buying, selling, using, abusing, and even murdering African American slaves and Native Americans. By dehumanizing these people in the public’s eye, they were able to gain support to continue the horrible practices of slavery and land stealing times.
Terrible, right? Well, wake up, America! These are the same tactics still being used by politicians and the justice system. Dehumanizing people makes it easy for others to cast judgement and enforce ridiculously long prison sentences on human beings, not monsters. It’s modern day slavery when you really get down to it. Locked in cages, fed almost inedible food, everything in life controlled by people holding weapons, stopped and searched, literally being fondled and groped all over by strangers with authority complexes, strip-searched and made to manipulate one’s body parts so others can look at them, sleep habits controlled by pointless 3:00am count times, worked all day in sometimes hostile conditions for literal pennies on the dollar of what the same job pays on the street – all while corporations give kickbacks to government officials to do business in prisons; using the money profited from the Prison Industrial Complex to lobby lawmakers to enforce harsher penalties for crimes, while at the same time selling items to prisoners at overly-inflated prices to profit even more.
As was the case in a Washington state prison, Monroe Correctional Complex, recently, where expired COVID-19 vaccines were administered to some 260 prisoners with absolutely no public apology, explanation, or even a notification! Oh, they are prisoners, who care? Nobody cares, right? Are they just prisoners? Wrong, they are people! They are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, but, most importantly, they are human beings, deserving of being treated humanely, with dignity.
In conclusion, I wonder whether this unfair system is sustainable anymore, and why we should keep on “kicking the can down the road”. Why keep a system that we know is rooted is systemic racism, fascism, and classicism? As previously stated, the only effective and reasonable solution is the abolition of the current ineffective, obsolete system, and the creation of a community-based program that serves to strengthen, heal, and promote the well-being of the people it serves. We need a solid foundation; one with cornerstones of truth, righteousness and justice. What we have is an Achilles’ heel. Until there is radical change, we will be a nation divided, and what is divided cannot and will not stand.
This is not an indictment of the American people or public, it is rather an indictment of a system that has betrayed the people it is meant to serve. It is also a call to action, an appeal to the American people to take action and stand up against the injustices and lies perpetrated against the disadvantaged population!
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