Legacy
New Texas Observer Story Synthesizes the Legacy of White Supremacy, Incarceration, Forced Labor, Death, and Anti-Transparency
If you read only one thing this week, read this piece from the Texas Observer’s Josephine Lee and Michelle Pitcher. It ties together a historical record enslavement and death within the Texas prison system better than any effort in recent memory. It exposes how the prison system has always defaulted to secrecy and torture. There’s something about publicly admitting to what it’s doing that carceral slavers and torturers find unacceptable, so they cut off access to the records, rather than the practices that create them. Lee and Pitcher situate the present state of Texas prisons within a history where the voices and resistance of torture survivors stand nearly alone within the state’s efforts to silence the past.
Though Texas is particularly egregious in its brazen cruelty and refusal to pay any wages at all, its prisons are not exceptional in their use of forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and abuse. Incarcerated workers everywhere — in prisons, jails, and detention centers for both kids and adults — face brutal conditions without the basic dignity and protection anyone else who labors must receive under the law. Amidst rising global temperatures and record-breaking heatwaves, people locked inside cages labor and die without basic necessities like rest and water breaks, protection from the sun, and medical attention for work-related injuries. As Victoria Law writes for The Nation, even where incarcerated people do not work, people needlessly suffer die from the heat inside their cells and dorms. As recently as last Saturday, an incarcerated woman died in the Golden Gulag amidst 110 degree temperatures. Failing to prevent preventable deaths using basic technologies of civilization is morally indistinguishable from intending to cause those deaths. We can, then, call them what they are: death camps.
One of the iconic sites of slaving conditions and wanton death and suffering is Louisiana’s Angola slave plantation. A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit may force Louisiana’s prison slavers to provide sunscreen, shade, and protective equipment when the heat index exceeds 88 degrees. Voice of the Experienced and several named plaintiffs, represented by the Promise of Justice Institute, Rights Behind Bars, and Paul Weiss, filed a class action suit seeking to halt the forced labor practices in Louisiana’s scorching heat. The federal appeals court declined to put in place several other provisions of the stay issued by a Baton Rouge-based federal judge because they would “intrude on state sovereignty.” Same as it ever was.
People who have already read Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and Shane Bauer’s American Prison would benefit greatly from grappling with Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear. The critical intervention Prof. Burton makes is to connect the legacy of slavery and forced prison labor to its original legal rationale of conquest. Continuing to enslave captive Africans (and others born in the hemisphere) even after the Constitutional sunset of the slave trade was legally justified, according to the Marshall court, because their capture was the product of conquest.
As with Walter Echo-Hawk’s In the Courts of the Conqueror, we see clearly that U.S. law and the institutions that uphold it draw their power from the legal logic of war and conquest. We understand, then, that the maintenance of prison forced labor schemes, no different from the maintenance of borders and bordering regimes, no different from the maintenance of policing and prosecution, no different from the US imperial war machine, acts as a mechanism of undeclared war on racialized surplus populations the world over. The radical imaginations and resistance of people who survive these undeclared wars stand as the sole bulwark against annihilation.
It is within this context that we might assess the recent pronouncements that “political violence has no place in America.”