I am currently serving a life sentence for murder. While in jail, I became a Christian and pled guilty to my crime. My life changed drastically.
While in prison, I developed a passion for social justice. I studied the history of the U.S. prison system and found an interesting progression: from slavery to sharecropping/convict leasing to prison. Thus, the U.S. prison system was modeled directly on the plantation system of the South—from slave labor to convict labor. I also found that the 13th Amendment didn’t end slavery; it simply abolished it for African-Americans. Now convicts instead would be “slaves of the state.” This explained the abuses listed in “rehabilitation,” as well as the state’s lack of interest in a self-reformed prisoner.
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