Mass Incarceration & New Slavery

One of the main takeaways of Spivak’s work is that the prison system is rigged against people of color and poor whites. Although slavery had been abolished by the 1930s, African Americans were still being treated by the legal system as being less-than, and Spivak’s research and investigation into prison conditions exposed him to these injustices. Many of the newspaper reviews of the novel include quotes from Spivak. One quote in particular that captures this idea is: “All Lincoln did was lower the price of slaves. Peonage exists, with all its evils, of hundreds of thousands of negroes today” (in clipping at left). He gives an example in the clipping of how African Americans were routinely and constantly kept down. “‘It works this way: A planter needs some laborers to pick cotton. He has a charge trumped up against a couple of negroes; then offers them cash as a loan to pay their fines. He agrees to let them work out the debt, using the advance against their wages. By selling the cotton picker all his clothes and food, by charging him rent and interest in the loan, which has been as high as 72 per cent, the negro never gets out of debt. There is a law in the South that if a man leaves a plantation while in debt to his employer, he may be arrested as a swindler and sent to the chain gang.’” In this way, African Americans are unable to break out of the cycle of debt and imprisonment.

It is remarkable that Spivak was working to shed light on this phenomenon in the 1930s and that he succeeded. His work created a huge reaction and spearheaded a conversation on the inhumanity of the prison system, and it can be argued that it indeed incited prison reform. More information on the reaction to his novel can be found here. Although much about the legal system has changed since the publication of his novel, it is shocking to see that traces of slavery and the prison system of the 1930s have lingered to today.

In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, law professor Michelle Alexander discusses how the prison system in America today is another form of legalized racial control. She argues that “the problems plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising incarceration rates, [are] a function of poverty and lack of access to quality education-- the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” (3). This is exactly what Spivak recognized almost a century ago, and as Alexander describes, it is still continuing today. The legal system of the United States functions in a similar way to the prison and chain gang system of the 1930s, unequally targeting people of color and capturing them in a loop of prison and freedom while systematically denying them the right to vote and separating them from the mainstream economy. Once people who have been incarcerated are released, they are “relegated to a racially segregated and subordinated existence… through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma” (4).

It is clear that much has changed for people of color since the early twentieth century, but they are still facing injustice and prejudice in the legal system that white people do not have to contend with. The War on Drugs is one mechanism that unfairly targets people of color, and although all racial groups use and sell illegal drugs at similar rates, it is young black men who get targeted the most. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities… in Washington, D.C. it is estimated that three of four young black men can expect to serve time in prison,” Alexander states. This statistic is shocking but true, and carries much weight in today’s society, when black people are imprisoned for the use of marijuana and white people are let off more easily for the same. In this way it can be seen that the problems Spivak identified and fought against are, on principle, the same issues we are facing today, and that archival research is a powerful way to come to terms with both the past and the present.

I would like to conclude this discussion with a transcription of the text of a newspaper review of Spivak’s work which I believe captures the meaning of the novel and the issues surrounding it:

“Ever since history began/The lust for torture has increased/Man’s inhumanity to man/And made him brother to the beast.

Down South the Inquisition still/Sets its abominable stamp/On flesh. Officialdom can’t kill/But always there’s the prison camp.

After a term in jail this black/Boy, David, is turned loose to find/That convicts never can come back;/The Law keeps trailing close behind.

Slowly, inexorably, the net/Is drawn about him; circumstance/Works well when there’s a man to get--/A nigger hasn’t half a chance!

Fiction is just a peg on which/The author hangs his grim array/Of facts that cry at concert pitch/For a more drastic expose.

Wire cages, chains, the whipping post,/Might make Legree himself recoil! Reader, though hardier than most,/We think-- we hope-- your blood will boil!

L. N. J.”