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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

The middle passage is one of the most awful things anyone can say about humans.

Another, sadly, is the current state of the US prison system.

I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally.

> except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted

The drug war and prison state aren't metaphorical continuations of slavery, but the literal legal legacy.

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> I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally.

I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past.

Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be literal slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other parts of the world.

We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily basis[2].

[0] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

[1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs-of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison.

[2] https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-re...

Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems, equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S. through the Civil War--is senseless.

You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people and shipping them to another continent to live in chains.

It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough, "genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.

The US prison system (and, in conjunction, the justice system as a whole) is appalling by developed-country standards and in need of reform, but I don't think it even ranks on the list of "most awful things anyone can say about humans."

Can't upvote enough. It's sad that more people aren't aware of this.

Absolutely. Free will and ability to differentiate right from wrong are way overrated.

And who decides what is right and what is wrong in each and every case?

Is their judgement never wrong? In what percent of cases is it wrong?

Have your ever been wrongly convicted of something? Would you think or say the same things if you were?

Agreed. We need more funding, research, and articles that remind us about the middle passage and how it relates to the drug war and the current state of the U.S. prison system. I for one, completely fail to see a relevant relationship.

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