How The American Prison System was Built on the Back of Slavery
By: Kayley Quinn
Tags: Perspective, Prison, Slavery, Prison System

I am going to preface this discussion by stating that I am a twenty-year-old white girl who goes to a University College and studies English Literature. I am not here to look at opinions, I am simply here to bring forth facts and new perspectives to a discussion that I believe is long overdue. With that being said, let’s jump into it.

When people say that the American prison system was built on the back of slavery, there are always those who will sit there and tell them that they are wrong. They will argue that the lovely America would never create prisons just to round up former slaves and force them to work again but to them, I say that they’re looking at the wrong picture. So I would like to take a moment to paint a more accurate one for them.

Imagine that you are a slave waking up on January 31st, 1865. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and you have just received word that you (for the first time in your entire life) are free. The man who lives in the white house at the end of the field who has done nothing but beat, curse, and use you, no longer controls you. You take a breath of fresh air, maybe shed a few happy tears and take a step off that plantation… and then it hits you. You have nothing. You don’t have land or a house or food or even money. The shirt on your back might be your own but it won’t get you very far in life. So what do you do?

Well, you could always stay on the plantation. In fact, that’s what many former slaves ended up doing. However, your former master isn’t going to treat you any different just because you’re free. He’s still going to beat, curse and abuse you just the same as he always has.

You could get a job, I hear you saying. Like a real one, that pays money. Well, that’s a great idea, except who’s going to hire you? Yesterday you worked for free and now you’re expecting people to pay you money? I’m sure a few sympathetic people would but those are very few and far between so let’s look at some other options.

You could always hunt for food. That’s another great idea, except you have no hunting gear, and giving a former slave weapons of any kind was considered to be nonsensical and dangerous.

But wait, wasn’t everyone supposed to get 40 acres and a mule? Well technically yes, but not really. You see most of that land came from former slave owner's properties and they weren’t real keen on you taking it from them. On top of that, the promise really only applied to a couple of thousand people and didn’t do much to help out the rest of them. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t think you’ll be getting that land and the mule won’t do you much good if you can’t even feed yourself, so let’s look at a few more options.

You could borrow, although you’d have to find someone willing to let you. You could beg, but begging probably didn’t go over so well back then. Or… you could steal. But stealing is illegal, I hear you say and you are correct. Stealing is very illegal but for the nearly 4 million former slaves, they didn’t have much of a choice. When your back is against the wall and no one is offering help, what else can you really do?

Even if half of all slaves stayed on the plantations and about a quarter of them managed to find some sort of job or financial stability, that still leaves a million slaves who had to choose between stealing and starving to death. It’s no wonder why the American prison system was established in 1891, only 26 years after slavery had been abolished.

Do not get this message confused. This isn’t to say that former slaves (or those who have descended from them) are inherently criminals or bad people. It is simply to say that we placed them in a position where they were forced to commit crimes in order to survive. At the end of the day, we were the ones who failed them, not the other way around. And we will continue to fail them each and every day if we do not fix the problems that we have created for them.

To the white people who are reading this who think that it is “not your issue” or “not your fault”, let me tell you one thing. You have inherited a broken house. And you can sit here and shift the blame until the roof caves in and crushes you… or you can fix the damn house.