Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States". The final ratification of the 13th Amendment came in December 1865 and was met with the painful tears of joy from four million descendants of the first unbreakable individuals kidnapped from the shores of Africa. Promises of liberation from 300 years of the worst form of slavery known to mankind was met with jubilee by every slave from Chatham Manor in Virginia to the last liberated in Galveston, Texas. Little did they know, the very amendment that freed them had language in it that the government would use to attempt to enslave them and their descendants in perpetuity by deliberately disseminating the concept of black criminality throughout the media. The deliberate attempt to create a world in which black people are synonymous with what it means to be a criminal is over a century and half in the making, and has switched forms multiple times throughout history. Although we all have a certain level of culpability when it comes to the decisions and mistakes we make, multiple social institutions are set up so that black people remain a disenfranchised, second class population in America, The beginning of the detrimental dissemination of the message of blacks as criminals began right after slavery ended when the Civil War and the liberation of four million free workers left the southern economy in shambles. Although the abolition of slavery was undeniably impactful, the critical moment for blacks in America came when the "except if convicted of a crime" loophole in the 13th Amendment was immediately exploited. Instead of finding a more morally sound way of making money, "black codes" were created. Black codes affected newly freed black men and women who were arrested in mass amounts as punishments for previously minor offenses such as vagrancy, loitering, and public drunkenness were immediately increased, and America saw its first prison boom. Not only did mass incarceration persist in the south for free labor, but it also existed in the North. According to W. E. B Dubois in his book, Black Reconstruction in America, "African Americans were often subject to harsher sentences than those of their white counterparts". With the introduction of black codes and the subsequent massive number of new criminals, convict leasing began. Convict leasing was the first attempt at a pseudo form of slavery as prisoners were sold to the mining, railroad, and oil companies, this became an integral part of the post-civil war/ reconstruction era economy. Although they were the earliest forms of nationwide branding of African Americans as criminals, black codes and convict leasing were extremely effective in imprinting the image of black criminality in the minds of American citizens.
The wording of the 13th amendment has allowed a pseudo form of slavery to persist since 1865, and with the subsequ...
