Page 146 - Demo

2345 Redefining AmericaPeople of color in the United States, particularly young black men, are often assumed to be guilty and dangerous. In too many situations, black men are considered offenders incapable of being victims themselves. As a consequence of this country%u2019s failure to address effectively its legacy of racial inequality, this presumption of guilt and the history that created it have significantly shaped every institution in American society, especially our criminal justice system.%u2022 %u2022 %u2022At the Civil War%u2019s end, black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. States began to look to the criminal justice system to construct policies and strategies to maintain the subordination of African-Americans. Convict leasing, the practice of %u201cselling%u201d the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, used the criminal justice system to take away their political rights. State legislatures passed the Black Codes, which created new criminal offenses such as %u201cvagrancy%u201d and %u201cloitering%u201d and led to the mass arrest of black people. Then, relying on language in the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude %u201cexcept as punishment for crime,%u201d lawmakers authorized white-controlled governments to exploit the labor of AfricanAmericans in private lease contracts or on stateowned farms.1 The legal scholar Jennifer Rae Taylor has observed:5 While a black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer %u201cdiscipline%u201d to their human property), the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.Beginning as early as 1866 in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia, convict leasing spread throughout the South and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leased black convicts faced deplorable, unsafe working conditions and brutal violence when they attempted to resist or escape bondage. An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi, grand jury recorded that six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death. The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying black men whose bodies bore %u201cmarks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment . . . so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.%u201d2The explicit use of race to codify different kinds of offenses and punishments was challenged as unconstitutional, and criminal statutes were modified to avoid direct racial references, but the enforcement of the law didn%u2019t change. Black people were routinely charged with a wide range of %u201coffenses,%u201d some of which whites were never charged with. African-Americans endured these challenges How does the anecdote that opens Stevenson%u2019s essay lead into the last sentence of paragraph 5, which is likely his thesis? Come back after you%u2019ve read the whole selection to assess how effectively Stevenson develops his argument.111%u201cThe Mississippi Black Codes were copied, sometimes word for word, by legislators in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas,%u201d writes the historian David M. Oshinsky in Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 21.2See %u201cPrison Abuses in Mississippi: Under the Lease System Convicts Are Treated with Brutal Cruelty,%u201d Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1887.What does it mean to %u201ccodify%u201d (par. 8)? Why do you think %u201cthe enforcement of the law didn%u2019t change%u201d?22Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.