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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

People always get confused when I say the US should finally get around to banning slavery.

I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.

People argue that what we currently have isn't the same or as bad, but present-day prisoners would point out that the current system is a form of eugenics: We keep a large percentage of reproductive-age black males locked up where they can't father or raise children. Back in the slave days, owners often chose who breeded with whom. Both are reprehensible, but you could argue either situation is worse than the other. At least the old policy didn't have the effect of slowly reducing / diluting out the black population.

Anyway, the US should ban slavery.

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The 1860 census counted just over 4 million enslaved African Americans in the South, out of a population of about 31.4 million.[0][1]

There are about 1.9 million people incarcerated in jail or prison in the United States today.[2]

The scale of incarceration in the US today is mind-boggling, but is itself under half the number of people enslaved at the height of the Southern slave economy.

[0]https://usafacts.org/articles/the-1860-census-counted-4-mill... [1]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1864/dec/1860a.h... [2]https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html

The oddness of referring to the "slave trade" is the height of the "Atlantic Slave Trade" far predated the peak of slavery in the US and contributed directly far more to the Caribbean and Brazil than to the rest of the Americas. US chattel slavery, particularly the form that exploded post cotton-gin, was a system of directly controlling the reproductive capacity of enslaved black and native Americans.

>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade

Wikipedia says

>According to the latest available data at the World Prison Brief on May 7, 2023, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000

531 people per 100,000 works out to about half a percent. Meanwhile during slavery in the US, wikipedia says

>The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the population.

Even in low slavery areas, the slavery rate is higher than current incarceration rates by several fold.

they mean absolute numbers

Their choice of the word “percentage” is incongruent with meaning “absolute.”

Are we reading the same comment? OP said

>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.

It's explicitly talking about "percentage" at the start. It would be weird if they silently switched to absolute numbers afterwards.

i read it as percentage applied to the first half, but not the second -- perhaps only on the grounds that to distribute the word "percentage" would make the claim obviously false.

Whether false by percentage or not, I'm not sure relative percentages are of that much importance. Surely the hundreds of thousands of american soliders dying in the US civil war wouldnt be relieved to hear that perhaps more black people were enslaved today, only to feel their sacrifce justified when hearing it was a mere 0.5%

The 13th amendment explicitly excludes prisoners. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any civil war soldier.

i think the post civil war era of America would be horrifying to many who died precisely to avoid it, their deaths rendered effectively pointless for at least a century

They are also wrong by absolute numbers.

Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.

Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.

The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.

> We keep a large percentage of reproductive-age black males locked up where they can't father or raise children.

To tie this into eugenics I think you'd have to make the case that black people who aren't criminals are being unfairly targeted for imprisonment. Otherwise it's just a side effect of criminal behaviour, and criminals end up in prison regardless of ethnicity.

I'm not suggesting it would be difficult to make that case. But some people tend to disregard systemic bias, so it would seem that everything is fine. If you don't want to be imprisoned, all you have to do is stop acting like a criminal.

you'd only need to make the case that laws were created to systematically target black people and hence rope them into prison slavery

this is a fairly easy case to make, see, for example the reason for the current distribution of race in us prisons

A racial discrepancy exists in the demographics of those convicted of murder. Furthermore, most of the black men in prison for murder were convicted of killing another black person (most murders are intraracial). Do you mean to suggest that the laws against murder, which put black murderers away for killing other black people, were created to systematically target black men?

nope. you would indeed need more evidence than mere racial disparity in the distribution of inmates. thankfully such evidence exists, not least in the base rates of crimes in both populations compared to their prison populations -- but even such things arent needed, we have legislators on record explaining the motivations of the drug laws (et al.)

there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves, we need not pretend we live in some world where society operates on egalitarian principles. The last slaves died in the 40s, 50s; institutional racism as an explicit policy of the state and of core economic and political institutions carried on until at least the 90s.

this isnt speculation

> not least in the base rates of crimes in both populations compared to their prison populations

Is this calibrated per severity of crime? The statement as it stands seems to general to support this case.

AFAIK, US prisons aren't making use of that 13th amendment exception and prison labor is voluntary. Prisoners choose it, despite the low wages, because it beats sitting around on their ass all day. There's a very valid argument to be made for paying them the normal minimum wage, if for no other reason than to be fair to the rest of the workforce, but doing away with the opportunity to work for prisoners would just be cruel.

As for it being eugenics, most prisoners are in for violent crimes or property crimes. Imprisoning people for stuff like failure to pay child support (modern debtors prison) is shameful, but not the sort of thing most US prisoners are in for.

you should provide numbers for that for a claim that big

I did some digging because I was curious.

From the 1860 census [1]:

Total Number of slaves: 4m

Total Population: 31.4m

Percentage of population as slaves: 12.7%

From the 2010 census [2]:

Total Population: 309m

Total Incarcerated Population: 7m [3]

Percentage of population incarcerated: 2.2%

OP is absolutely not correct, even if we are generous and assume every incarcerated person is forced into labor.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_census [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

That figure of 7m is not the total incarcerated population. It's the total correctional population, which includes parole and probation.

I missed that, that makes the true number even smaller

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