Abstract
To fully appreciate the significance of the NCPLU, the larger Prisoner Union Movement, and its connection to race and the Black Power era, one must first understand the trajectory of the Jones decision within prisoners’ rights law. Although the passage of Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 effectively abolished involuntary servitude, it is mistaken to believe that it either ended slavery or disconnected race from American punishment. One needs look no further than the language of the Amendment itself to recognize the historical and legal contradiction. The Thirteenth Amendment reads:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Frank Y. Bailey and Alice P. Green, Law Never Here: A Social History of African American Responses to Crime and Justice (Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 1999).
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2011).
Matthew Mancini, One Dies Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South (Columbia, SC: University Press 1996). See also,
David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996);
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008);
Hilda J. Zimmermann, “Penal Systems and Penal Reforms in the South Since The Civil War,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1947);
Rebecca H. Moulder, “Convicts as Capital: Thomas O’Conner and the Leases of the Tennessee Penitentiary System, 1871–1883,” East Tennessee Historical Society Publications 48 (1976): 58–59;
George Tindall, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), 267–71.
Copyright information
© 2012 Donald F. Tibbs
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tibbs, D.F. (2012). Anatomy of a Decision. In: From Black Power to Prison Power. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137013064_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34280-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01306-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)