Why The Voting Rights Act Is Still Necessary Today

Originally published by Criminal Injustice at Critical Mass Progress

After the end of the Civil War, Congress ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The 13th Amendment ended slavery “except as punishment for crime” which left state governments with the ability to enforce enslavement through other means:

Although the creation of African-American free communities and institutions during Reconstruction were almost immediately threatened by new configurations of white power and supremacy, freed slaves continued to exercise their right to vote and hold office in order to enact their own plans for education, land ownership, and self-determination. This incomplete transformation was cut short by vigilante justice and racialized violence, as well as by the state-sponsored criminalization of African Americans.

In the past decade, several influential studies of this period have revealed the relationship between emancipation, the 13th Amendment, and the convict lease program (Lichtenstein, 1996a; Mancini, 1996; Davis, 1999). Built into the 13th Amendment was state authorization to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. Slavery was abolished “except as a punishment for crime.” This stipulation provided the intellectual and legal mechanisms to enable the state to use “unfree” labor by leasing prisoners to local businesses and corporations desperate to rebuild the South’s infrastructure.

The prison industrial complex is still in full force today. Through enforcement of stringent drug laws and through police violence and harassment, a disproportionate number of black Americans and especially black men are residing in our nation’s prisons. This is no accident; it’s a byproduct of the fact that our nation never fully took seriously the task of ending slavery and allowing incorporation of black people into society as full citizens of the United States through appropriate legal and constitutional means. Simply eradicating pieces of an institutionalized system of oppression that had its roots in the early 1600s is not good enough. The number of prisoners who are racial minorities is staggering: