One-hundred-seventy-nine years ago, Douglass told the world that “killing a slave, or any [Black] person, in Talbot County, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community”. Two years ago, a bipartisan Senate report found that the Justice Department hadn’t even recorded the deaths of at least 990 inmates. A 2023 Marshall Project investigation discovered that New York State does not fire 90% of guards who “brutalize” prisoners. Among the list of injuries caused by those guards are “Shattered teeth,” “Punctured lungs,” and “Broken bones”. In at least three cases of brutality where prisoners died, the officers involved weren’t even disciplined.
One-hundred-seventy-nine years ago, Douglass wrote about handing the profits of his labor over to Thomas Auld. Four months ago, almost one thousand inmates fought the California wildfires. They were paid ten dollars and twenty-four cents a day, plus a dollar an hour in emergencies. If we assume they worked twenty four emergency hours in a day, their hourly rate would be less than two dollars. Their hourly pay is less than the cost of a soda. And that rate is pretty high for an inmate – the average pay for a US inmate is between thirteen and fifty two cents an hour, if they’re paid at all. In Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, unless you work for a state corporation, the average maximum hourly wage is zero dollars zero cents. Nothing.
One-hundred-seventy-nine years have passed, and we still have not put an end to unpaid forced captive labor – slavery by another name.
From "What Frederick Douglass and Modern American Inmates Have in Common". Available free on Spotify and YouTube
Script with Sources
