The Modern Chain-Gang: How Our Jails Secretly Act Like Slavery

How jails and bias messed up our government system is one of the biggest issues we have to deal with today. Bias is all over the place in our society, and we see it happen every single day when cops abuse their power, pick on regular people just because of their race, or treat people completely differently based on the color of their skin. Because of this deep problem, our prison system treats different races completely differently than others, which creates a huge divide. Prison is really just another form of slavery because people get treated terrible but don’t deserve it. Some people who didn’t even do any crime still get locked up for something they never did, while the people who actually did bad things get to walk free. If you look closely at how the system works, it becomes obvious that we are just repeating bad parts of history instead of fixing them. We have to look at the math and the rules to see how this hidden loop keeps hurting families who are just trying to live their lives. 

Instead of throwing our tax money into building brand new prisons, we really need to focus on giving people better opportunities that actually help everyone in the community. Rather than paying for more jails, our neighborhoods could use that money to make sure people have basic things like healthcare, cheap housing, good jobs, and a better school education. In her article, an activist named Mariame Kaba argues this exact point when she says, "We should redirect the billions currently going to the police departments toward providing health care, housing, education, and good jobs." 

Note: Using real facts and numbers about budget studies shows a logical point for fixing our neighborhoods. Quoting a famous expert like Kaba makes the argument sound way more trustworthy and reliable. 

We should be spending our money on these helpful resources instead of paying for more prisons for people who, most of the time, don’t deserve to be locked up. When you look at the actual math and data from researchers, having a family member in jails costs people across the country a huge amount of money. Reporter Meg Anderson points out that “the true cost of prisons and jails is higher than many realize.” She includes research showing that the system “costs people around the country almost $350 billion every single year.” That is a giant amount of money, and it “keeps families poor” and trapped in poverty for generations. This proves that our current systems' spending habits just suck money away from the neighborhoods that need it the most. Another big problem with our world is that we are insanely biased, which creates a broken system where some people get all the advantages and other people's lives get ruined. If we spent all the money on the communities to build schools and local businesses, people wouldn’t be forced into bad situations in the first place.

Our society is basically split into two groups: people who are blinded by bias and racism, and people who just try to treat others like basic human beings. Because of prejudice in our system, history books leave sensitive groups out entirely. An author named Kory McClary wrote about this exact problem straight from his own prison cell while serving a massive sentence. He says, “I’m sentenced to die in prison, but I still have big dreams.” He explains that his writing is the only thing that keeps him going; “writing articles lets him stay human” so he doesn’t just "Become a number in a jail cell.” He wants people on the outside to look at his work because he wants “history to see his full potential and not just his past mistakes.”

Because of this bias, certain groups of people are always left out because they don’t get the same everyday advantages as everyone else. 

The system separates them and treats them like objects instead of real human beings with feelings. This kind of racism forces people to judge others only by their skin color instead of who they really are inside. A famous author named Angela Davis connects this to history in her book titled Are Prisons Obsolete?. She notes that prisons perform a magic trick where “prisons do not disappear social problems; they disappear human beings.” She argues that modern jails are just a new form of slavery because private corporations make huge amounts of money. Davis explains that “private corporations make a ton of money off the free labor of inmates," which turns the justice system into a massive business. When a system treats a person like a paycheck for a corporation, it stops being about safety and becomes a business that needs to keep its cells full to keep making cash.

To stop this cycle of bad abuse and violence from going on forever, we have to look at how often regular people and cops interact on the streets. In her research, Mariame Kaba points out a very serious truth about how the system works when she says, "We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce the contact between the public and the police.” 

Notes: This part connects a lot to feelings of trying to survive and showing how stressful and scary these interactions are for normal families.

A lot of neighborhoods are already doing their best to avoid getting racially profiled or picked on by law enforcement. Kaba writes that police history is deeply broken; she says that officers “have always been violent since the days of slavery.” The easiest and most useful way to lower the chances of this violence happening is to just stay away from cops, because regular interactions can turn dangerous super fast over something small. People are genuinely scared of getting hurt, arrested, or even killed over tiny mistakes, which causes a lot of stress and trauma for families that live in areas where this is common. This fear changes how people live their lives, which makes them feel like prisoners in their own homes before they even see a jail cell. That just goes to show how deep this goes. 

Still, a lot of people think that prison is a good thing because they truly believe that it helps bad people change their ways and fix their lives before they go back into the world. They think jails keep us all safe and make sure prisoners get punished exactly the way they deserve so that justice is served. They think that without these huge buildings, our streets would be completely unsafe to walk on. But this idea completely ignores the fact that our system is always blaming and locking up totally innocent people who didn’t do anything wrong. It also costs a crazy amount of money to build and run these prisons. For example, when politicians try to build huge high-security prisons, they waste tons of tax money that could simply be spent on making healthcare and local schools way better. While the government builds stricter jails, the people inside get treated horribly, and the neighborhoods outside are suffering without good doctors or enough money for schools. Punishing people by putting them in a bad environment does not teach them how to be better; it just breaks them down while costing the public billions of dollars. 

This reality is exactly what Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah warns us about in his famous book, Chain-Gang All-Stars. The story happens in a “scary world where prisoners have to fight each other on TV to try and win their freedom.” The book shows that treating human beings like a violent game show is “mean and unfair.” The author wrote this to open people’s eyes to how bad things can get if we just let prisons treat people like animals only because they want to make money.

This story connects perfectly to real life. Just like the money-hungry game in the book, real-life prisons care way more about making money than actually helping people change and fix the mistakes they made. Real families are hurt by this greed every single day. Meg Anderson uses the story of a real mother named “Dorothy Gaines whose kids had a very hard time when she was locked up.” Real inmates and fake characters both have deep feelings, big dreams, and want their voices to be heard so that the world knows that they are suffering. It doesn’t matter if it’s a character on a TV screen or a real person sitting in a cell right now, the pain that their families feel is exactly the same because the system “cares more about money than people.”

We really need to care more about this issue because it makes no sense that we waste millions of dollars on a biased prison system when that money could be used for better things like healthcare and schools. This matters to everyone. Bias can happen to anyone out of nowhere, and if it happens to you, you have to know the truth to fight it and stand up for your rights. Some people might think that it’s too scary or dangerous to look at how our society actually runs behind closed doors. But ignoring a problem will never make it go away forever. A lot of people come to this country looking for a safe, stable life. They don’t want to be scared all the time. In the end, prisons don’t fix what they promise to; they just hide our problems away behind bars. We have to stop using jails as a quick fix and start helping communities instead.