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When I mean slavery, I mean chattel slavery. I don’t think imprisonment is slavery. There are many problems with the US prison system and it needs a lot of wor

When I mean slavery, I mean chattel slavery. I don’t think imprisonment is slavery. There are many problems with the US prison system and it needs a lot of work to reform and correct. But at least it’s not chattel slavery. Equating the two is not very helpful to the discussion because it distracts from a conversation about slavery by equating two different, but slightly similar topics.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> I don’t think imprisonment is slavery Imprisonment is not slavery. Penal slavery was very much a thing in much of the US for quite a while after the civil war (the federal government has since taken statutory and administrative steps to eliminate it, and may or may not have generally succeeded depending on exactly how you bound the term, but previously penal slavery in the US differed from chattel slavery only in that it had (often extremely corrupt) criminal conviction as an entry gate. And while penal slavery itself has been mitigated and arguably eliminated as a deliberate state practice (rather than an aberrant corruption of individual officials) subsequently (though still Constitutionally permitted) a whole lot of the over-criminalization and police and correctional culture built originally around the institution remains.