The issue with the 13th Amendment

The 13th Amendment was passed on January 31st 1865. This was the year that slavery in the U.S was supposedly 'abolished' with it fully taking effect by December 1865. So, what actually is the 13th Amendment?

Well, the 13th Amendment is one of the 27 amendments in the U.S constitution. This amendments focuses on ending slavery and states that "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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." But read that middle bit again - "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" - and keep that in mind for later.

When slavery in the United States supposedly 'ended' in 1865, at the end of the civil war, America would find themselves needing a way to make the money and rebuild themselves from the loss they would face with abolishing slavery. However now that slavery and involuntary servitude had technically been banned, who were they to rely on to rebuild the U.S, to get all that money back? This is where mass incarceration and prison labour steps in. The Government knew that they had no right to force people to do hard labour "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". This meant that the more people they arrested, the more people they would have to do work and look at where that led the U.S. In 1972, the United States of America had a population of 300,000. 48 years later and the U.S now has a prison population of 2.3 million people making it the highest rate of incarceration anywhere in the world. 

Making up just 5% of the world's population, 25% of inmates around the world are located in the U.S.  So for every 4 prisoners in the world, 1 of them would be located in a U.S prison. Scary, right? 

On top of all of this, those who had been emancipated were not really free. There was no helping hand that could guide them from a former enslaved being to a normal american citizen who had the same rights as their white counterparts and to make it even worse the Jim Crow laws ( which will be talked about in another blog post later on ) were then introduced in 1876 and lasted up until 1965 which allowed for racial segregation to continue all this time.

But let's look at the impact this had on African - Americans. Mass incarceration meant that as soon as slavery was abolished, African - Americans were targeted and arrested for minor crimes. You could be sent to jail for multiple years for just stealing an apple or even just loitering about. The government then needed even more reason to arrest people of colour and introduced what would become the ' War on Drugs '. This term became popular after a press conference on June 17th 1971 by the president at the time - President Nixon. Drug use / abuse was named as America's number one public enemy and hundreds of thousands of people were being sent to jail for possessing even the smallest amount of drugs. But, how is it fair to say that the War on Drugs was to get black people into jail, maybe they just needed to deal with the rising issue of narcotics spreading across the country? 

Well, a Nixon administration official admitted exactly what I just stated. His exact words were:

" You want to know what this was really all about ? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying ? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs ? Of course we did. "

- John Ehrlichman

- Nixon Advisor

So what were the effects of the war on drugs on African - American communities?

To this day, the 'War on Drugs' has massive impacts on African - American communities. First of all we have the even higher rates of incarceration in the U.S. Did you know that as a white man in the U.S your chances of being arrested in your lifetime are 1 in 17, as a black man living in the U.S, this rises to 1 in 3. As well as this, we have the stereotype about absent fathers which was heavily powered by this 'War on Drugs'. With black families unfortunately being worth way less than their white counterparts, many fathers would have to turn to gangs and even drug use which they could get locked up for and most did. This was the same for black teens who maybe were struggling with work and so would drop out of school for example. 

Did you know that the majority of drug users living in the United States are white , however black people are the group that is targeted the most and are thought of being the root of this problem?

In conclusion, the 13^th Amendment is often thought of as one of the most important amendments as it plays a massive part in the liberation and in signifying the ‘end’ of the Slave Trade in America in 1865. It allowed for people to not have to serve involuntary and under force and yet somehow this still seems to be an underlying issue in America’s prison system.  In recent years and especially in recent months, the issue of Mass Incarceration is becoming more and more obvious to people all around and as we reflect on where this year has taken us in terms of hopefully being closer to truly understanding systemic and initialised racism, it only seems right to move forward in a way which we can hopefully come up with a solution to such a crucial flaw. And if we all can do even in 2020 is to donate, sign petitions, keep yourself educated and talk to others, I wouldn’t say that that is such a bad idea .

- Princess