Contrary to popular belief, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, did not abolish slavery; it codified it—shifting the location of its deployment from the plantation to the prison. The amendment reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (my emphasis). Slavery and crime are explicitly linked in the founding document of American democracy. In a double motion, the Thirteenth Amendment extends political freedom to blacks as it simultaneously withholds such freedom. It fashions the punishment of crime as the exception to abolition-democracy, and establishes the “criminal justice system” as the institutional inheritor of the slavery regime, as the receptacle of slavery’s racialized forms of punishment.
