The New Amistad: How Our Jail System Fails Us

If our criminal justice system is the "New Jim Crow", and if our prisons are neo-plantations, then our network of county and city jails are akin to slave ships - the "New Amistad", if you will.  There's an appropriate visual when you consider cells like those in Colorado's Arapahoe County Detention Center that have been modified from double to triple bunks - at a glance they resemble the cramped bowels of slave ships where African inmates-as-cargo were lain in tight stacks and rows. 

  

Appropriate analogies abound - like slaves, jail inmates are a valuable commodity; local lockups get paid per body and operate like any business by cutting costs of operation as much as possible to maintain create revenue. Slave traders made and maintained profits by providing the barest minimum for slaves to survive transport to auction, often leaving them naked with no medical care and feeding them scraps for food. Jail menus provide so minimal calories and nutrition, food becomes currency and inmates vie and scheme constantly for extras and medical care is more negligent than it is "care".

As transports sailed the Middle Passage, the ships' inmates were brought up on deck to exercise, often instructed at gun or sword-point to dance or jog in place in order to maintain fitness suitable enough for high auction bids - and to distract from conspiring to escape or attack the ships' crew. Not dis-similarly, inmates are herded to concreted and grated enclaves or fenced in kennel runs to walk laps or shoot hoops.

Dancing the slaves...

Dancing the inmates...

Consider that, due to the nature of its occupants, jails are ground zero of initiation into criminal behavior where petty offenders learn to commit more severe and lucrative levels of crime. In this world of depravity and violence, inmates become easily and overwhelmingly inculcated to adopt violence and depraved behavior to cope and survive. Similarly, one can argue that Black pathos, especially self-destructive behavior has roots in the belly of ships where captives clawed at and crawled over each other in desperation for the scraps thrown down to them.

As the demand for slaves grew, sometimes the slave ships captured those who used to supply them, turning on and ensnaring the African tribes who first sold their captives to Dutch and Portuguese slavers. It is notable that the Arapahoe County jail was formerly named after its Sheriff, Pat Sullivan, until he himself, in the throes of addiction and sexual predation became an inmate in his own jail. 

If African captives interred on ships like the Amistad were being prepped for slavery, what ends do jails justify? In short: prison. As with slavery, incarceration is Big Money, creating the viral industry of private prisons and supervision services. Inmates themselves are double-dipped commodities, tapped to provide labor in exchange for wages less than third-world sweatshops pay. Then, they are rendered as captive consumers having to use their meager earnings to buy necessities sold back to them on commissary. 

Slave ships imprinted the status quo of slavery in the minds of those captured - this was reinforced systematically by plantation culture and American white supremacist hegemony. The court system encountered by jail inmates plays a similar role of indoctrination. Inmates are expected to submit to a legal process that whittles away their rights - for example, they are commonly coerced to waive their right to preliminary hearings, alleviating the prosecution from having to prove reasonable doubt for detention and trial. Plea bargains are also a coercive tool incessantly utilized by DAs. They are akin to manacles and whips used by slave drivers. 

DAs will generally intimate to defendants that if they do not waive their prelim, future negotiations for lesser charges are off the table. Inmate desperation coupled with an under-resourced and overworked Public Defender’s office guarantee that defendants will fall over themselves to plead guilty to reduced charges in exchange for being released to probation or minimal jail/prison time. The results are an impeccable conviction record and a never-ending supply of bodies shuttled to prisons, halfway houses and monitoring programs.  

Thanks to our jail system not only are prisons bursting with people of color, we get the privilege of buying license plates that inmates make for pennies per hour.  And all those flags flying state to state in the land of the free that ere the fodder for the kneeling/anthem controversy are courtesy of Lockdown Nation.

Of course our national attitude towards inmates is a combination of out-of-sight-out-of-mind, and do-the-crime-do-the-time.  Despite the fact that jail inmates are generally not guilty of any crime and are locked up simply because they are too poor to afford bail, they are looked at as guilty criminals who deserve to be behind bars.  It is an outlook that correlates to the view that justified the enslavement of Africans as a social, religious, and biological mandate.  Africans were hailed as inferior and inhuman and thus preordained, like cattle, for servitude.  Southern convention even held that slaves actually desired to be enslaved.

Some Africans remain slaves for life, yet some gained manumission.  Likewise, some jail inmates enter a life of perpetual incarceration, while many others return to a free society facing the challenges to integration similar to the Antebellum.  At some point, like true abolition, prison and criminal justice reform may actually occur in America.  

However, as the gears toward reform grind slowly forward our Inmate Nation must implement alternatives to achieving freedom akin to Joseph Cinque and crew escaping the clutches of the Amistad.  This can be achieved by inmates’ nonconformity to today’s system of bondage and toil.  Exercising rights to preliminary hearings and eschewing plea bargains for an actual trial will force the system to abandon the economics of convenience and expedience in favor of actual justice.  An increase of 5% more inmate demand for full trials will see district attorney’s jettisoning the frivolous cases that they prosecute to bloat their absurd conviction rates.  This will ease jail intake and overcrowding in the process.  

As they currently operate our jails – our new Amistads – or beacons of failure.  Until we can moor them, we must inspire their cargo to break their chains and abandon ship.