OP never said anything about race or incarceration statistics -- he just said the prison system is a mechanism to recreate slavery. To Americans, the word "slav

OP never said anything about race or incarceration statistics -- he just said the prison system is a mechanism to recreate slavery. To Americans, the word "slave" has a very, very particular meaning -- revolving around the nature and history of black people in our country. But it should not, and can not, not be divorced from the abstract concept of what slavery is. Slavery is about power, and slaves come in many forms and fashions. And if you forget that, you'll be made a slave yourself. You don't have to be in chains to be one. This is what OP is referring to -- not that prisons and their systems seek to reintroduce "black american slavery", but to reintroduce, and normalize, the abstract concept of 'slavery' in society, all on its own. That's much more dangerous. You see it in a lot of places where people talk about the lives prisoners lived, during and after release -- go check the comments on any news article. You'll see how many people think it is "just" that said convict has their entire being and life crushed. That it's good, good that they're a slave, in return for the crimes they committed. This isn't really very different from what you're saying, in a sense -- that everyone is set back when we lose track of these things. But the difference between "slave" meaning "black american slaves" and "slave as a concept" is an important distinction to draw. There's an important ontological gap, there. Frederick Douglass took note of this well over 150 years ago: > The power of the antebellum slaveholding class, after all, resided not only in its direct domination of black slaves, but in its ability to divide and exploit an even larger multiracial working class. Douglass knew how well this system worked from bitter personal experience: As a hired slave in Baltimore, he was assaulted by white dockworkers with bricks and handspikes. Yet he remained clearheaded about who benefited from this racial violence. As he wrote in 1855: “The slaveholders, with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the black slave himself…. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers.” https://www.thenation.com/article/the-enduring-struggle/ https://www.thenation.com/article/the-enduring-struggle/