The New York Times reports that an Alabama inmate, Mark Melvin, is suing prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Alabama Commissioner of Corrections for the right to read a book. According to prison officials, this book is "too incendiary" and "too provocative" to be allowed within prison walls. It might incite "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff." What is this incendiary book, and why is it so dangerous?
The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon, a senior correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. It documents the history of the Convict Lease System, which sprang up across the South after the formal abolition of slavery in 1865. Through this system, thousands of inmates were leased to private and public corporations. They built railroads; they worked in coal mines; they even worked on plantations planting and picking cotton, sometimes for the same planters who used to own them as slaves. When their bodies were spent, they were sold to medical schools for dissection; their urine was collected and sold to tanneries.
Historian David Oshinsky has called the convict lease system “worse than slavery” because it granted white property owners access to a ceaselessly-renewed source of labor while removing the incentive to provide even a minimal degree of care for the workers. The inmates were not paid for their labor; they were leased at a flat rate from the prison. Often, inmates were not even fed but rather left to scrounge in the woods for food after a full day of heavy labor. Mortality rates were extremely high, with many prisoners dying before they could serve out their full sentence.
Convict lease systems sprang up in every former slave state; they operated between 1868 (with Georgia as the first state to institute such a system) and 1928 (with Alabama as the last state to outlaw it). During its period of operation, incarceration rates in those states skyrocketed, with a 10-fold increase in the prison population in Georgia from 1868–1908, more than a 10-fold increase in North Carolina from 1870-1890, an 8.5-fold increase in Florida from 1881-1904, a 4-fold increase in Mississippi from 1871-1879, and a 6.5-fold increase in Alabama from 1869-1919 (see Sheldon 2005). A vastly disproportionate number of these inmates were black, charged under the new Black Codes and later under Jim Crow laws.
How could such a thing happen after the abolition of slavery? To this day, the Thirteenth Amendment continues to this day to hold open an exception for prison inmates: "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" (emphasis added). By leaving open the possibility of treating convicted criminals as slaves, the Thirteenth Amendment did not simply abolish slavery, it relocated and reinscribed slavery within the prison system, and within the legal limits of the constitution.
Slavery by Another Name is indeed an incendiary book; it takes as its very subject-matter a "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality." But this violence is only compounded by the censorship of reading material available to prisoners who remain caught in the space of exception held open by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Joy James has argued that, by leaving open a loophole for the enslavement of convicted criminals, the 13th amendment did not abolish slavery, but rather "resurrected social death as a permanent legal category in U.S. life, yet no longer registered death within the traditional racial markings. Breaking with a two hundred-year-old tradition, the government ostensibly permitted the enslavement of nonblacks. Now not the ontological status of “nigger” but the ontological status of “criminal” renders one a slave" (James 2005, xxix).
Mark Melvin is white; he has been in prison for almost twenty years, since he was convicted at the age of fourteen for helping his older brother commit two murders. What does it mean to deny him access to this book? What would it mean to let him read it?
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