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John —
When the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, chattel slavery was formally abolished throughout the United States — “except as punishment for crime.” These five words allowed slavery to evolve into mass incarceration as we know it today.
Soon after abolition, Jim Crow laws were put in place as a way to limit the freedoms of newly emancipated slaves. These policies imposed curfews on Black people, prevented them from getting certain kinds of jobs, and kept them out of certain neighborhoods — essentially excuses to arrest, incarcerate, and exploit Black people. Once imprisoned, they were then farmed out to work on plantations — a supply of nearly free labor to help keep businesses that previously relied on slave labor running.
Fast forward 50 years, and many of our clients, especially those who were wrongly imprisoned in the South, spent years working in prisons for pennies per hour, while people outside the prison walls profited from their work. Some call these conditions “modern-day slavery,” but those who lived through decades of wrongful imprisonment, like Malcolm Alexander, will tell you, “this is slavery” and there’s nothing “modern” about it.
In our latest feature, we explore the evolution of slavery into mass incarceration through the eyes of three people who survived wrongful incarceration in “America’s bloodiest prison,” the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola farm.
Take a moment today to read through the stories, and then share them with your friends and family online.
A prison guard oversees incarcerated people returning to the dorms from farm work detail at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, LA, on Aug. 18, 2011. The guard rides atop a horse that was broken in and trained by incarcerated people. (Image: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Angola was built on a former slave plantation. Today, about 5,300 people are incarcerated at Angola, and approximately 1,800 people work there. It spans 18,000 acres, most of which is farm and agricultural land.
People incarcerated at Angola spend long hours picking cotton, corn, and more from the same land slaves were forced to work 200 years ago. Seventy-five percent of those behind bars in the penitentiary are Black, and most are serving life sentences. In many ways, Angola is a place where slavery never ended.
Hear from Malcolm Alexander, Henry James, and Calvin Duncan — who spent a collective 95 years wrongly incarcerated — about their experiences at Angola.
In gratitude,
— The Innocence Project Team
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