I Cannot Tell A Lie-Honest Abe Enslaved The Free
The 13th amendment set the stage for bias-based policing, mass incarceration, and systemic racism in criminal justice.
President Lincoln’s signing of the 13th amendment in 1865 abolished slavery and involuntary servitude and African Americans are eternally grateful however, many are not familiar with the exception clause of that same amendment. That clause italicized below set the stage for the mass incarceration of African Americans, the unconscious biases that exist among police officers, and the systemic racism that permeates the U.S. criminal justice system today. In its entirety the 13th 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. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
During the first industrial revolution (1760–1840), slavery was fully institutionalized into the American economic system and cotton was its driving economic engine. In fact, cotton was the world’s largest commodity at the time. “More than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, the…
