Asklemmy

The US imprisons more of its people than the height of the Soviet GULAG, than anything China has ever done, and has held the top spot for 50 years. Recently Cuba and El Salvador became the top spots, but that's not the whole picture. El Salvador is hosting US deportees in concentration camps at the behest and in collaboration with the US. Cuba's prisons are integrated with the community and are sites of rehabilitation and not slave labor as in the USA . But most damning is that the USA is the only country that charges prisoners hundreds of dollars a day to be in prison, and saddles them with that the debt when they leave as a condition of their parole. The parole system in the US is twice as big as the prison system, meaning our criminal justice system is managing and surveilling the lives of 3x as much of our population as literally any other country on the planet and getting some of the absolute worst outcomes.

And in addition to that, this "difference" you speak of is not the difference you think it is.

Prior to the 13th Amendment the US prison system was 90% white. 10 years later it was 90% black. The exception for prison slavery created an incentive to write all new laws that only targeted behaviors of newly freed black folks. Those folks ended up prison and enslaved all over again. The state used them as free labor for a time, but they caught too many of them so they created a leasing program and they leased the slaves to their former masters on the plantations. Does that sound like a difference between being enslaved for the color of your skin versus being enslaved as punishment for a crime?

Many of those laws are still on the books and still inform what we think of as "civil society". Loitering, vagrancy, sleeping on park benches, public intoxication all things you think of as normal all started to catch black folks and turn them into state slaves.

And now? You think the situation is so qualitatively different now? Black folks living in ghettos defined by banks using red lining and states determining where to place industry and dump waste? Black folks overrepresented in prison, poverty, and state violence? Black folks getting lynched by vigilantes every year?

Really? You think it's somehow different now instead of just the same fundamental shaped through adaptation?