Opinion: Prison slavery sets people up for failure, not success
Labor Day is not only a moment to celebrate workers but also a chance to reflect on how working affects us. The labor movement is rooted in this reflection, recognizing that work can be violent to our spirit and body, as Studs Terkel once wrote. Enslaved nearly three decades in Texas prisons, that’s the labor I know.
The first time I went to the fields I was just 19 years old – it was my third day in prison. When they called our squad to work, we sprinted to the gate through a wall of cackling guards swinging batons at us. They loaded us onto trailers and drove us to the fields. Twenty-five men pounded clods into dust until our hands blistered and bled, all under the watch of armed men on horseback.
After a year, I was moved inside and made a hospital clerk. It was a step up but wouldn’t last. One evening, the warden dragged in an unconscious man who'd clearly been beaten. The warden asked me to file paperwork that falsely claimed the man had fallen down the stairs. I refused. The next day, I was back in the fields.
That’s how it goes in prison. There are house hands and field hands – not working is not an option. The former is a prize for obedience and minding your own business. The second is punishment for misbehavior or having a bad attitude. Either way, your body and labor belong to the state.
My entire 27 years in Texas prisons, I worked for the state. I spent 13 years as a field hand – picking cotton, corn, and sorghum, cutting down trees, and grading dirt roads. As a house hand, I washed clothes, scrubbed pots, mopped floors, built furniture, repaired computers, fixed engines, clerked in libraries, and made thousands of Texas license plates. My labor helped the prison and state run.
And yet, I was not paid a penny for my work. I left prison, for the last time, 13 years ago with $50. No money to rent an apartment, lease a car, or even buy decent clothes.
Texas is one of the handful of states that doesn’t pay incarcerated people for their work. Others pay a few cents per hour, hardly anything to brag about. It’s this issue of wages that tends to dominate the conversation about prison slavery. And while it’s important, it’s not the worst part of being enslaved.
The most dehumanizing aspect of slavery is the stripping away of individuality and the brutalization of ambition. It’s the loss of self and self-determination.
Prison slavery tortures every incarcerated person into believing that their labor is without value. It creates a sense of worthlessness that runs deep into your spirit and follows you into the free world – a tin can that you drag behind you, forever rattling with your inadequacy, forever reminding you that you are unfit, and forever making you an imposter in every undertaking.
One day, they tell you, you’re free. With the soul of a slave – battered and resilient –you walk out into a world that thinks slavery ended more than 150 years ago and expects you to “make something of yourself.”
Roughly 600,000 people leave U.S. prisons each year – nearly 70,000 of them in Texas alone. Like me, they were each enslaved: forced to labor for little to nothing and made to believe their humanity is worth little to nothing.
We have an opportunity to change this forever with the Abolition Amendment (SJR 21 and HJR 53), a bill that would abolish slavery for all and begin the process of healing more than a century of trauma caused by the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment that allows for slavery as punishment for crime.
I will never forget what slavery did to my spirit and the lengths I had to go to heal. And so, I hold my freedom dear, but it remains tenuous. I’m on parole until 2051; a job termination or traffic stop can send me back to prison to be pounded into dust again. My soul can’t bear it, and none ever should.
Renaud is the National Criminal Justice Director at LatinoJustice. He lives in Austin.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Opinion: Prison slavery sets people up for failure, not success
