Fires Burn and the State Turns Over Black Life on Prison Farms

Whether by what Daniel Patrick Moynihan dubbed in his famous report, "benign neglect" or by orchestrated, calculated manipulation of laws, the state continues, as was true in the construction of its governing Constitution, to shackle and exploit black bodies.

In his piece, "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration", Ta-Nehisi Coates links a misreading and representation of statistics to the lack of genuine response to problems plaguing black families.  Coates argues that the report was used to label black American families as pathologically damaged by their history in American.  He says the report lacked recommendations.  Coates adds that the one recommendation (besides the tacit suggestion that black men and women battle each other over supremacy), that mass employment of black men be the major step in remedying the problems associated with intergenerational poverty was ignored.

Coates says, "Moynihan looked out and saw a black population reeling under the effects of 350 years of bondage and plunder. He believed that these effects could be addressed through state action. They were—through the mass incarceration of millions of black people."

Instead of employing black men and women, the state has incarcerated them.

Coates takes us back fifty years for his analysis; but, I argue that we need to go back a bit more because the roots of black incarceration cannot be disconnected from the patterns of America's management of its black citizens.  The seeds of mass incarceration were sown after we walked off the plantations looking for our family members, following the Civil War.

We made mad progress during Reconstruction.  Black farmers purchased property and started businesses and opened schools and ran for office (and won!)-- too much for America.  Southern whites went north to study how to institute Black Codes.  The backlash against black progress (feels so familiar) birthed terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.  The terrorists operated, along with the state, extended through the police, the courts, governors and legislators, to again codify white supremacy and black subjugation.  Lynchings became common.  Race riots erupted across the nation.  Black folks were disenfranchised, robbed and murdered at an alarming rate.  White folks did whatever they decided to black bodies--and with impunity.  

But, by 1930, only after Ida B. Wells-Barnett's work and documentation of black lynchings in her Red Record, and NAACP campaigns and the mass migration of black southerners to northern cities, did the number of lynchings and random terroristic violence against black folks decrease.  It became harder to lynch black folks.  Something had to replace this mode of social control and it came in the form of mass incarcerations.  Chain gangs emerged.  The southern work-release system formed.  We cannot unlink black exploitation and the financial prosperity of the state and the landed white gentry.  The prison population operates as a reserve labor pool.



In 1983, Manning Marable wrote, in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 


 " ... as black life and labor shifted toward urban and industrial areas, lynchings were made more difficult.  The informal, vigilante-inspired techniques to suppress Blacks are no longer practical.  Therefore, beginning with the Great Depression, and especial after 1945, white racists began to rely almost exclusively on the state apparatus to carry out the battle for white supremacy.  Blacks charged with crimes would receive longer sentences than whites convicted of similar crimes.  The police forces of municipal and metropolitan areas received carte blanche in their daily acts against Blacks.  ... The criminal justice system, in short, became the modern instrument to perpetuate white hegemony."

Marable then goes on to quantify how the state endorsed the use of this newly chained black prison population--black labor population-- in southern agriculture and in factories.  Historian, Robert Perkinson (2010) explains why chain gangs gained favor especially in the South:

“[P]oliticians rallied to the chain gang because it provided public works on the cheap.  Between 1904, when state felons first began working on its roads, and 1915, convicts were primarily responsible for expanding Georgia’s surfaced road grid from two thousand to thirteen thousand miles, making its state highway system the most advanced in the South…Just as leasing had jump-started postbellum railroad construction, sugar milling, and coal mining, chain gangs helped lay the infrastructure for twentieth-century rural development.  The American South was built not only by slaves but by convicts.”

Today, prison populations do more than work in factories for pennies a day; but, according to Julie Lurie, writing for Mother Jones,

"About 4,000 low-level felons from California’s state prisons are fighting fires, operating out of so-called 'conservation camps,' ... Between 30 and 40 percent of California’s forest firefighters are state prison inmates,” she reported. Inmates who committed certain offenses, like sex crimes or arson, are blocked from entering the firefighting program. Prisoners work in 24-hour shifts during forest fire season, followed by 24 hours off. Prisoners earn $2 a day just by being in the program, plus an additional $2 an hour when they are actively fighting fires."

Many of these prisoners are black.  In fact, one of my former students, arrested some years ago for a property crime, told me on the street one day he learned to fight fires in prison.  I asked him why he committed the crime in the first place (as shook my finger in his face).  He said he "needed to pay rent."

So, back to Coates and the Moynihan report.  Mass incarceration over mass employment.  Instead of paying up front to train a black American citizen to do a job that she/he is qualified to do, the state prefers to incarcerate the citizen, and pay him/her pennies on the dollar for his hours of labor, thereby profiting from his incarceration.


Moynihan's original report was referenced as a cornerstone for Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.  It is a much maligned document: discredited for its patriarchal, racist denunciation of black families and black communities.  It grew out of a well-intended gesture and was meant to confront some of the lingering problems the country has with race.  It made one decent point, however: that mass employment (well-paid, I might add) would go a long way in remediating untenable conditions within so many (primarily working class) communities.


Ta-Nehisi Coates says, "at a cost of $80 billion a year, American correctional facilities are a social-service program—providing health care, meals, and shelter for a whole class of people."  So, what would normally be managed within families is managed by the state so that it may continue to exploit black bodies and maintain white supremacy.


When do we stop laying the problem at the foot of black folks and let America be responsible for its history?  Let's tell the truth, pay people for decent jobs and continue to monitor the state's treatment of its black citizens.