Hi. I know we’re “this close” to nuclear war and you’re glued to the news so you can hear when to run, duck, cover, and get underneath a 1960s grammar school students desk for protection against a nuclear blast. I get it. The end is near. Again.
I just wanted to remind you that slavery is still legal and in practice here in the US through our criminal injustice system. Codified into law through state constitutions and the federal 13th amendment’s infamous exception clause. I know war is hell. But so is slavery. And it’s happening right here right now.
This past Sunday on our broadcast of Abolition Today we spoke with a man on Rikers Island who has been in a living hell for 3 grueling years. Unconstitutionally held without trial and denied basic human rights. Tortured, beaten, railroaded, and standing under a guillotine every day. Everyone in merica knows Rikers is a hell on earth where people are treated as disposable commodities. A viscous money laundering scheme that puts bounties on citizens heads upwards of $600,000 annually. That’s the cost to incarcerate one person for one year on Rikers.
Are we but sheep paying to be slaughtered?
It’s not something that affects all New York residents or all mericans equally. In that same plantation jail named after a Judge who sponsored fugitive slave law bounty hunters, over 90% of inmates are black or Hispanic. That’s how it is in Louisiana, Alabama, and in every other state. Black and Brown citizens are criminalized, hunted, captured, warehoused, and worked for free at rates as high as 19 to 1 per 100k. Placed under conditions that would get you prosecuted if you did it to an animal. Ask Michael Vick.
Rikers is just one jail in the nation that has more people in cages than any other country on earth during any time in the history of mankind. It’s brutal, horrific, bloody, deadly, unfair, and an outright crime against humanity that has been allowed to continue for generations.
The vast majority caught and held for conditions and not crimes. People who needed help and instead got swallowed by an ancient demon called slavery. Decimating families and communities.
States that still have a chance to make it to this years ballot include California, Ohio, New Jersey, and Florida.
We have waited long enough and endured long enough.
Max Parthas 3/8/22
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