The United States has just five percent of the world population yet holds approximately 25 percent of its prisoners.
From the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery deprived the captive of legal rights and granted the master complete power. Millions of slaves in America were humiliated, beaten and killed while black families were torn apart.
Slavery was abolished in 1865 with the end of the Civil War and passing of the 13th Amendment, but America found what many see as a disingenuous way of continuing its slave master ways – mass incarceration.
The NAACP recently released statistics that revealed that, in 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34 percent, of the total 6.8 million correctional population.
African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites and the imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women.
Nationwide, African American children represent 32 percent of children who are arrested, 42 percent of children who are detained, and 52 percent of children whose cases are judicially waived to criminal court.
Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32 percent of the US population, they comprised 56 percent of all incarcerated people in 2015.
If African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates as whites,
prison and jail populations would decline by almost 40 percent, according to the NAACP.
“Five hundred years after the transatlantic slave trade, the strife and hate that remains is largely
“I know the 13th Amendment provides the means for the criminal justice system to continue the practice of institutional slavery in the United States, for it is very clearly stated, ‘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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation,’” said Shawn Halifax, a cultural history interpretation coordinator at the Charleston County Park & Recreation Commission in Charleston, South Carolina.
“There is plenty of evidence, since its passage, that individual states and the United States have chosen to exercise the entirety of this amendment to the constitution and have manipulated the institution of criminal justice to make it happen,” Halifax said.
From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration
