http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/political-pulse...
I'm not a southerner. I'm certainly no Floridian. But I strongly suspect that's not a "coincidence". I think the current system was likely set up as a political "gimme" meant to appease Southerners.
The only difference is that here in Wisconsin we know that our government is corrupt, and because of the corruption here there is little we can do to combat that corruption. I mean we have everything from Walker, to little boys being used for sex at Lincoln Hills, to out and out DA's who are crime lords. (Literally, a few years back there was a DA who would take "donations" to "charity" from drug runners. They would actually divert shipments to go through his jurisdiction because if you get caught all you had to do was pay the "donation". It was really bad.)
I'm pretty sure if you were to ask the average Wisconsinite, they would openly admit much of the corruption up here. Not only with crime, or blacks, but with money, with land, with everything basically. Why do you think we have protests with hundreds of thousands of people showing up? It's not just Walker, at least in my opinion it's not. It's the system that people feel he represents and defends.
By contrast, in Florida, I get the sense that people think that's the way things are supposed to work. They believe they have a good system and that the system works the way God intended.
It depends who you ask. I've only lived in Florida for 40 years but I find it split in thirds with 1/3 willing to tolerate Tallahassee corruption and crumbling infrastructure as the price of low taxation while the other 2/3 are appalled but don't or can't vote.
There also seems to be more political homogeneity.
For instance, the loophole in the 13th.
Which, but for it's existence, would not have allowed "...Southerners to give effect to their desires..."
The South really exploited that allowance as a replacement for chattel slavery, though, but they did that with every power state governments were not explicitly denied (and, because of the lack of substantive enforcement of much of the 14th Amendment for nearly a century after the Civil War, many which they were explicitly denied.)
Are you seriously proposing that the loophole in the 13th was not placed there as a consolation to Southerners? I mean let's be frank here, the entire issue of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance was a compromise to Southerners. It wouldn't have passed otherwise. Fast forward to the end of the Civil War, and they chose the compromise in the Northwest Ordinance instead of the Sumner Amendment for the same reasons. Sumner's Amendment didn't even make it out of committee.
I don't see how anyone can say that slave states have not had an outsized influence on the slavery question as it is practiced in the US. They've had that influence, in my opinion, since our inception. It, (slavery), really was almost one of the original questions we had to answer at the founding of our Republic.
Imagine if Britain had been the one drafting the 13th amendment, at the same point in history. Removing this language would have meant giving up on the penal labor colony known as Australia. America was—not as famously—doing exactly the same thing.
Why would we have cared what Britain was doing?
They were our cold enemy during the Civil War. (At least, they were the cold enemy if you were on the Union side.)
What the rest of the world was doing was irrelevant to how the 13th was drafted. The war would be won. Slaves would be freed. The only questions we were considering was how to put that all down on paper. And for that question, the only thing that mattered was domestic politics.
The "loophole" is, to put it in modern terms, a concession to the American penal-labor-colony industry lobby. (Well, not really, since we didn't have private prisons back then. All the work being done by US penal labor colonies was directly to the productive benefit of the US government.)
In fact, even a review of the Congressional Record, which I had the misfortune of having to do on these very two questions for a Capstone project back in undergrad, makes that very clear. It's obviously been a very long time, and the material involved was voluminous, but I can't recall offhand any mention of the penal labor industry. The debate was dominated by appeals to interests and even feelings of slave states.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted[...]
The current system is absolutely a political gimme to appease the south, or at the very least the south of the past.
The UN ILO should have IMO effectively abolished US labor camps in 1957 with resolution 105 [1]. It bans among other things its use "as a method of mobilizing and using labour for purposes of economic development." As such prisoners in the US can be loaned out to private enterprise, an argument should be made. Not to mention, forget immigrants, nothing undercuts wages payable to US workers quite like slave labor.
I actually can't see why the US system isn't in violation of resolution 29 in 1930 where forced labor is only permitted when under "supervision and control of a public authority and that the person carrying it out is not hired to or placed at the disposal of private individuals, companies or associations." [1]
When your system is "universally condemned" by the United Nations, maybe it's time for another look?
[1] http://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-inte...
The question we're debating is why they are legal in the US. My theory is that the government made them legal to appease Southerners after the Civil War. Some people disagree, but the evidence in terms of the Congressional record of the time definitely points to a deal to appease Southerners.
The Nixon Southern strategy was not to appease only Southerners. It was to appease the ignorant. Bigots with malice in mind.
It's worth listening to the Lee Atwater interview he didn't want released until he died. They had a vile plan, they put it into action, it was successful, and it's still happening. And such ideas and policies are far worse than just a word that begins with the letter n. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
It didn't; this is indisputable, because they existed and were legal, both in and out of the South, before the Civil War.
You could argue that they were not outlawed at the time chattel slavery was in order to mitigate the imposition on the South being done by the Civil War amendments (13-15), but that's implausible for a number of reasons, but most notably that being punitive was major feature of th Civil War Amendments, the cooling to punitive measures and accommodationist approach to the South didn't take long to appear after they were imposed, but it was a later thing.
> the evidence in terms of the Congressional record of the time
Specific citations would be welcome.
Race baiting incited draft riots in the north. Low wage labor was very much threatened by the prospect of freed slaves migrating.
Prison labor isn’t a uniquely American institution and IMO was less about appeasing southerners and more about practical management of prisons.