06/29/2025
"The U.S. prison system today is deeply rooted in American and especially in Southern history, but ours is a qualitatively new epoch, in which labor-replacing electronics is destroying capitalist wage-labor and creating a new propertyless class of workers, cast aside, jobless and impoverished. As the ruling class, which owns these new tools of production, moves to concentrate all wealth and property in its hands, the polarization of wealth and poverty increases. The new class are the prisoners of want."
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Prisoners of Want
June 2025
by John Slaughter, Poor People's Army
poorpeoplesarmy.org
In 1857 Dred Scott, a slave who resided in Missouri, but who had also lived for a time in the “free” state of Illinois, where slavery was forbidden, sued for his freedom as well as for his wife and two daughters. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “a slave is not a citizen.” including free Negroes, since their ancestors were first brought to the U.S. as slaves.
Ten years later, after the Civil War, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which banned slavery and established “birthright citizenship” for everyone born in the United States. But the 13th amendment contained the clause “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for punishment for a crime.” After the brief Reconstruction period in the South was defeated and the slave-owning class returned to power, this “exception” for slavery provided the basis for the construction of the prison system, first in the South and then evolving to become the system for the entire country, which prevails today.
Southern towns began to criminalize formally enslaved men and women for minor offenses like loitering, vagrancy and curfew violations, utilizing new laws known as the “Black Codes.” “Incarcerated laborers are like indentured servants, who receive no pay, no benefits and have no legal protections.” (Southern Prisons in the U.S)
Incarcerated workers were leased out to local farms, beginning the system of what came to be known as “convict leasing.” In 1898 73% of Alabama’s entire state revenue came from convict leasing. The conditions for the incarcerated were brutal. The Angolite (from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana) reported that “not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of ten years or more.” They were worked or whipped to death.
After convict leasing was outlawed in 1928 the convict guard system evolved, which saw “overseers” on horseback and armed with shotguns riding herd on prison farm laborers and on chain gangs as well. As late as 1988, Ronald Smith describes how he worked on a chain gang in Dixie County, Florida, shackled while using a swing blade to clear sugar cane fields. (Slavery and the Modern-day Prison System.)
Parchman prison in Mississippi, one of the most notorious in American history, is a working prison farm that has prevailed well into the 21st century. As Bianca Tylek told NBC in an interview, “The point is to remind people that the state owns you.”
The U.S. prison system today is deeply rooted in American and especially in Southern history, but ours is a qualitatively new epoch, in which labor-replacing electronics is destroying capitalist wage-labor and creating a new propertyless class of workers, cast aside, jobless and impoverished. As the ruling class, which owns these new tools of production, moves to concentrate all wealth and property in its hands, the polarization of wealth and poverty increases. The new class are the prisoners of want.
At about the same time that the microchip began to be introduced into production, the development of the prison system tracked the massive layoffs and outsourcing of industry to low-wage destinations across the globe, the prison system was militarized, with heavily armed SWAT teams with no-knock warrants, waging war on the new class, arresting and incarcerating many for minor offenses based upon the so-call war on drugs, and targeting “gangs.” Harsh prison sentences were handed out in the name of “law and order.” “Three strikes and you’re out” laws meant life without parole.
Today at least 1.9 million are contained in 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile detention facilities and 80 native American jails in reservation jails. Add to that military prisons and state psychiatric centers. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and preparations for the mass detention of millions of immigrants, and the numbers of incarcerated are destined to greatly increase. One in every twenty persons in the population will spend some time in prison. In 2022 people went to jail seven million times.
Many who have been arrested for minor offenses remain for months in “pre-trial detention” because they cannot afford bail. The $10.000 median bail is out of reach for most who are arrested. They languish in jail, most never even going to trial, and even when released into the parole and probation system, more fines and fees are heaped upon them (sometimes for not getting a job!) Here we see again how every prison sentence is virtually a death sentence. Most will never work again. In 2021, over five million were under supervision by the criminal injustice system
Of course, based on the history of this country, African Americans comprise 38.9% of the prison population. They are at the core of the new class, as well as the 19% of Hispanic Americans. That number is bound to increase significantly as immigrants from Central and South America are targeted as criminal aliens.
But the real targets are the entire new class. 59% of those incarcerated are white, and while the ruling class utilizes every means at its disposal to divide and conquer the new class, the reality is that all workers in the new class are united in a common condition of impoverishment.
A 2015 report concluded that “jails in the U.S. have become massive warehouses of the impoverished.” In a 2017 report the U.N. Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights said, “The justice system throughout the United States is designed to keep people mired in poverty.”
The Human Rights Watch of the ACLU in 2022 found that “abusive, degrading and dangerous conditions prevailed in the U.S. prisons and jails, and that “prison labor produced $11 billion in goods and services. Added to that mix are the growing number of private for-profit prisons, particularly in the Southern states. What is more, the incarcerated poor are “disappeared,” in that their numbers are not even included in official statistics on poverty and unemployment. If they were, the numbers of the poor and jobless would be even greater than now acknowledged.
American prisons are already overcrowded, and yet they are being called upon to take in the anticipated millions of immigrants who have been criminalized. Vast detention camps are being constructed, especially on U. S. military bases, and the process of offshoring the imprisoned to Guantanamo, while arrangements are being made to ship the detained, including U.S. citizens, to Central American countries.
The history and development of jails and prisons in the United States is disturbing, but even more so is the present process of a ruling class, the owners of private property to transform and consolidate a fascist state, with a brutal police state as an integral component, designed to exclude, contain and control a revolutionary new class of workers whose only option is to fight for their very survival. Along with wage-labor, capitalist private property is over. The ruling class is bent on constructing a new world of the supremacy of private property without capitalism. The new class, emboldened with a new morality – that an injury to one is an injury to all – are beginning to understand that they cannot survive, cannot go forward, without abolishing private property itself. Only then will the “owning” of human beings come to an end. Only then will the prisoners of want be free.
