You Gotta Serve Somebody

By Murphy Davis

Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 1-5

I want to begin by saying a word about my life in the Open Door Community since this so deeply affects anything else I would say.

We are a residential Christian Community of 32 folks. We are African-American, white, Hispanic, young and old, women and men, formerly homeless, formerly prisoners and those of us who have always been housed, Ph.D.’s and illiterates, from backgrounds of the middle class, obscene wealth, and utter poverty.

As a family we live together, eat together, worship, work, and sing together, share our money and other resources, and try to understand, learn from, and love each other.

Out of our family life and shared faith we live a life of servanthood and advocacy among and on behalf of the homeless poor of Atlanta: many more than 10,000 men, women, children and families who have nowhere to go; and servanthood and advocacy among and on behalf of prisoners in our state: the many and increasing thousands of women, men and children who live in cages. We particularly work among the 111 people who are on death row in Georgia.

As a way of beginning to discuss the challenge of service, let me introduce you to three friends.

First there’s Charlie. When I left home yesterday morning Charlie was lying in the sunshine in our front yard waiting for the soup kitchen to open. He is, like hundreds of thousands of men and women and children across this land, homeless.

Charlie has been a working man since he was 17 years old. The last job he held was one he had for five years. He

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had worked his way up to four dollars an hour. But at age 45, Charlie was slowing down a little and the employer realized there were any number of 22-year-olds to be had for the minimum wage.

So Charlie was fired. He had no savings and no benefits. The weeks and months of job hunting were fruitless: “Sorry,” they all said, “but you know we’re really looking for somebody a little younger.” The strain on Charlie’s marriage grew to the breaking point. By the time he found himself with no job and no family and no home, he began to wonder what kind of a sorry excuse for a man he was anyway.

He gets an occasional job out of a labor pool. He crawls out of his cat hole at 4:30 a.m. and goes to sit in a dingy room full of hopeless humanity and prays for eight hours of work. Usually there’s nothing for Charlie. But if he does go to work, he goes out hungry, and the soup kitchens will be long closed by the time he gets back. The best he can expect, though his employer for the day might pay the labor pool seven dollars an hour for his work, is the minimum wage minus a few bucks for transportation, hard-hat rental, and all-maybe he’ll have $19 or $21 at the end of a day.

The only place that will cash his labor pool check is a liquor store across the street-with a purchase, that is. So by nightfall the best he’s looking at is a bottle, a pack of cigarettes, and sixteen bucks. Try to live on it.

Charlie gets locked up a lot. From time to time he does twenty to forty days in the City Prison farm for the terrible crime of public urination. We jail those who relieve themselves in public even though Atlanta has not one single public toilet. In other words, there is not a legal alternative. The money we spend in one year of punishing this

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heinous crime we could build and maintain public toilets all over the city. But for doing what every human body must do Charlie goes to jail.

Charlie also did ten months on a one-year sentence for criminal trespass. That was from the time he was caught sleeping in an abandoned warehouse. He has another court charge pending because he went into Underground Atlanta and walked down the street. The police told him he didn’t belong because he stank. So he was arrested.

When the pain gets to be too much for him, Charlie drinks. As he lay in the sunshine in our front yard yesterday a car drove by. A young man stuck his head out the window and screamed, “Get a job, you bums!” Charlie raised his head for a minute and dropped it on his arm again.

Next I’d like for you to meet Jerome. Jerome was young, African-American, poor and retarded. He was executed by the state of Georgia in June 1986. He was convicted of being involved with another man who killed a woman in Columbus, Ga.

When Jerome got his death warrant, the Georgia Association for Retarded Citizens got involved in his case. GARC examined him extensively, confirmed that he was clinically retarded, and made a passionate appeal on his behalf.

But our society had long ago given up on Jerome. I read one school record from the time he was about eleven. A counselor wrote this advice to Jerome’s teachers and guides: “Jerome is slow and probably unfit for anything other than simple factory work. He’s not worth your time.”

The admonition was apparently heeded. Nobody wasted any time on Jerome. His mama loved him, but her life was hard. She was a maid for the county sheriff end though she worked more than full time, she was paid so little that her family had to depend on government surplus powdered eggs and milk to keep from going hungry.

His life was one of degradation and neglect but Jerome, in his own simple way, tried to do right. When the state set his execution date they sent their own psychiatrist to examine him. Jerome tried his best on the intelligence test and he was very proud. The shrink said that he wasn’t quite retarded enough to be spared from the electric chair.

The doctor was paid and Jerome died with 2,300 volts of electricity through his body once, twice, three times.

Before he died Jerome said to me one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. We had been talking about prison life and Jerome looked at me and said: “You know-peoples was not made to dog around. Peoples was made to be respected.”

Third, I’d like for you to meet Nancy. If you had met Nancy a few years back you would not have expected her to end up with a ruined life.

She was a school teacher and her second marriage was to a prominent lawyer in a small Georgia town. He had once worked for the state attorney general’s office and had friends in high places.

For all his prominence Nancy’s husband was a violent man. Soon after they were married he began to have outbursts that would leave Nancy bruised or with an occasional broken tooth or bone. Didn’t Nancy’s coworkers and friends and family wonder that she was “falling down the stairs” so often?

But we learn from Nancy that the problem of male violence against women and children cuts across every class line and every racial line. Our leaders like to talk about Willie Horton and stranger violence against women on the streets, and it’s a problem. But we most often avoid the most obvious truth. And that truth is that the very most dangerous place for a woman to be in the United States of America is in a relationship with a man.

The most dangerous place for a child to be in the United States of America is in a family.

Hear it! Most women and children who are victims of

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violence are victimized at home. That’s how deep our sickness is.

For Nancy the sickness was eventually fatal. One night her husband came across the room toward her with a 2×4 in his hand. She turned, picked up his gun and shot him dead.

She was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

She really and truly tried to make the best of her life in prison. She taught other prisoners to read. She wrote letters for the illiterate. She helped to set up a special program for mothers and solicited transportation for their children to be able to visit.

The prison doctor told her that the lump that developed in her breast was benign. When it grew he insisted that it was “nothing to worry about” and accused her of malingering.

When she finally got another biopsy, itwas too late. This “dangerous criminal” was sent home in a wheelchair to spend the two remaining months of her life with her teenage son and her elderly parents.

Now that you have met my three friends I can discuss the challenge of service. The title of this article should actually have been, “You Gonna Have to Serve Somebody.” Bob Dylan sings that song:

You might like to wear cotton
Might like to wear silk
Might like to drink whiskey
Might like to drink milk
Might like to eat caviar
Might like to eat bread
May be sleepin’ on the floor
or sleepin’ on a kingsize bed
But you gonna have to serve somebody…
It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you gonna have to serve somebody.

The point is: Everybody is serving somebody or something.

Not having made a decision does not mean we are not serving. I really believe that anyone, especially of the middle or upper class, who is not serving her oppressed neighbor is serving the status quo.

In other words, as long as our neighbors are being oppressed among us–and they are–and we are not serving them, then we are serving those who benefit because of our neighbor’s oppression.

We would not have homeless people if it did not benefit someone. We would not be spending millions, billions of dollars a year at every federal, state, county and municipal level to build prisons and jails if it didn’t benefit somebody. Don’t tell me we’ve got all these billions and we can’t build housing for people. Where do you think crime comes from? Despair! But prison construction is big business. Beware when you raise a question.

The oppression of some benefits others. Our government speaks, for example, of “acceptable levels of unemployment.” Meaning, of course, that a certain level of unemployment is actually good for the economy.

Tell that to the unemployed!

You gonna have to serve somebody. The question is who?

In traditional terms, when we talk about serving our neighbors, we really have in mind charity.

That’s a great word: caritas. Love; passionate caring; compassion; advocating love; stand-up love.

But charity is often taken to be serving somebody a bowl of soup and thinking that’s it.

The bowl of soup is critical. A hungry person has to cat and the sooner the better.

But let a love for justice walk hand in hand so that at the very same time we serve the food we ask, “Why is my neighbor hungry?” What’s going on in our system that creates so much hunger in a land where we throw away more food than any people in human history ever dreamed of!

Charity and justice together provide a night’s shelter while asking why? Why? Why are all these thousands of people homeless? Women and men and boys and girls and families?

We have huge quantities of construction materials–and buildings every where–church buildings, college buildings, government buildings, so many of them standing empty most of the time.

Why? Why are so many of our neighbors homeless?

At many points in history women have taken important roles in the struggle for justice for the oppressed. One group of our foremothers who are a resource for us today is the ASWPL–the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching.

After the Civil War, African -American people were freed from chattel slavery. But Southern whites were determined to maintain a tight social control. In three decades after the war it is estimated that more than 10,000 African-Americans were lynched.

Gradually the myth of the black rapist became the excuse for lynchings well into the twentieth century. And it was done in the name of Southern white women.

Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Tolbert: bold, courageous, outspoken African women, stood up, protested, pleaded with their white sisters to take up the cause. “Because it is done in your name,” they argued, “you are the very ones who can stop it.”

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It took about 35 years to get some real action. But in 1930, Jessie Daniel Ames joined with white church women from around the South to form the ASWPL.

Their motto as they picked up the crusade against lynching was “Not in our Names.”

They were tireless in their petition drives, meetings, letter writing, and demonstrations and in taking on their own men. Their effectiveness in bringing to an end the public acceptance of lynching is a reminder to us of the power of women working together to end oppression.

The crusade against lynching had its problems, but it was genuinely an interracial womens’ movement: the sort we need so desperately today.

Do you know? Do you have any idea how much the poor and your oppressed neighbor need you? Do you have any idea how much your life, your service, your compassion and love is needed by the many who suffer because of injustice?

Oppression in the form of racism, sexism, war and poverty is causing death and destruction around the world and right under our noses. The flagrant destruction of the earth and its precious resources and the destruction of human hope and human dignity are a part of the same death-dealing spirit that says: Serve yourself. Take what’s yours and then get yourself a gun and an insurance policy to protect it. Use up whatever you want right now and let somebody else worry about it tomorrow.

Our earth and the earth’s people (most of whom are in this very moment poor and hungry ) need us to give our lives to service of our neighbors toward the goals of justice and social transformation.

It is so easy to be blinded by our class, our privilege, and yes, even blinded by our educations and educational institutions.

But in these days our ignorance of our neighbors’ plight–whether willful or unwitting ignorance–our silence and our inaction mean, literally and powerfully, service to a public policy that is killing our neighbors at home and around the world.

You gonna have to serve somebody.

Murphy Davis is the Open Door Community’s Southern Prison Ministry Director. This article is adapted from a symposium talk in May 1990 at Converse College. (Open Door Community, 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30306-4212; (404)-874-9652.)

Deadly Cuts: Grady Hospital and the National Health Care Crisis

By Murphy Davis

Vol. 21, No. 3, 1999 pp. 3-5

The county commissioner looked perplexed. “You understand, don’t you, that we’re the bottom of the food chain here. You’re coming to us because you know who and where we are. But we’re not the real cause of this crisis at Grady Hospital. It’s much bigger than DeKalb and Fulton Counties.”

The commissioner is absolutely right and she is absolutely wrong. Grady, Atlanta’s public hospital since 1892, is facing a $26.4 million deficit for the 1999 calendar year. To cut costs, the administration recommended to the Hospital Board that they begin to charge even the poorest of the poor a five dollar charge for each clinic visit and a ten dollar co-payment for each prescription and medical supply. This policy attempted to lay the budget problems on the backs of the city’s poor. If enacted, it would amount to a death sentence for some Grady patients, especially the poorest many of whom are elderly and/or with chronic illnesses that require several medications to sustain life and health.

The situation at Grady is a local problem with local causes. It is also a symptom of a national crisis with national causes. Local governments are responsible for the problem; local governments are victims of the problem. The health care crisis is a particular place where the national drama is being played out on a local level. Perhaps it might also be the place where we come together nationally and bring about significant change.

Over the past twenty years, the United States has undergone massive and sweeping changes that have increasingly consolidated resources into fewer and fewer hands. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1980 and 1997, the mean household income of the lowest quintile (20 percent) rose a mere 1.45 percent ($129). The wealthiest quintile, on the other hand, enjoyed a mean household income increase of 26.9 percent ($32,952). A significant number of people near the top have accumulated more money and possessions than anybody could ever need in one lifetime. The middle class is more vulnerable. The working class is close to falling over the edge. The poor have sunk more and more deeply into the misery of substandard housing, homelessness, prison, and limited access to good schools, proper nutrition, and health care.

Health care has not all of a sudden become an issue of privatization. Much to the detriment of the common good, health care has long been understood as a commodity in the United States. It has more often than not been a problem for poor people to find adequate care. But we have had at least some sense of the obligation of government to care for the public health. It has, for several generations, for instance, seemed imperative that we sustain the agencies that monitor, test for, and treat infectious diseases. It has been an acceptable notion that all children, regardless of economic circumstances, should be immunized to protect them from preventable illness. We have even supported programs like Medicaid and Medicare to insure at least minimal care for the very poor,

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people with disabilities, and the elderly.

But now even this minimal level of care provided from public resources in the United States is under fire. Since the early 1980s, a steady and persistent legislative and judicial program has given advantages to wealthy individuals, corporations, and institutions and increasing disadvantages to working class and poor people. Public institutions and services have been opened up to the forces of privatization for the purpose of increasing profits for the already-wealthy and destabilizing the lives of workers. All services and institutions are becoming fair game for the market and all space is becoming commercial space. Prisons and jails are being constructed and managed by corporations whose stocks are soaring. And while Corporate America bites off larger and larger chunks of the public funds, the strident resistance to government “interference” by planning or regulation is a steady theme.

The values and language of the market have come so to dominate our common life that ethical discussion, or religious or moral discourse have begun to seem quaint if not completely irrelevant. The bottom line is everything. Those who matter are consumers. But poor people (by definition, those without capital) are not consumers, so they, literally, don’t count. In fact, they don’t even exist except as commodities in the prison industrial complex.

At the same time, on national, state, and local levels, we have cut programs that help the poor and vulnerable among us. The results are increasingly disastrous for individuals, families, public institutions, and the common good. The Grady crisis represents this unfolding drama.

As a single example of the national trend and its local impact, two pieces of federal legislation, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, have meant a loss of $28 million for Grady Hospital in 1998 -more than this year’s projected deficit. As people have been moved “from welfare to work,” they have often moved into low-wage, dead-end jobs that almost never provide health insurance. Without access to Medicaid, these families continue to depend on Grady for medical services, but the patients cannot pay for services and medication, and the hospital can no longer be reimbursed by Medicaid. Grady’s plight is one that is also affecting teaching hospitals across the country.

The state of Georgia has taken the federal cuts and made even deeper cuts in Medicaid and Medicare. The DeKalb and Fulton County Commissions, which are legally responsible for Grady have voted for less and less county support for the hospital since 1992. Simply put, the emergency that Grady faces has been created by specific policy decisions at every level of government over a period of years. Some folks knew doggone well what was happening, a few people protested in vain, and the rest seemed to be watching television and shopping at the mall. But as the cuts continue to trickle down to the local level, they are deadly for the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable.

The crisis is local, so the organizing has to begin locally. The elected officials closest to home are those who must first take the heat for this multi-level assault on public institutions and poor people. They are responsible for their own malicious policy decisions. And they are responsible for not raising cain with state and federal decision-makers who helped them to craft this disaster.

For us, the Grady Coalition, there is a rich privilege in being part of a diverse and growing coalition that is confronting the local health care emergency and crying out for those who cannot cry out for themselves. When we forced a discussion with the Grady Board, they voted to temporarily rescind the co-payments. We made a commitment to work with them and help advocate for additional funding to meet the deficit. We knocked first on the door of the Fulton County Commission and were received by those commissioners who are friends of the poor and advocates for Grady. They allocated an additional $3.5 million. When we went to the DeKalb County Commission and CEO with the same appeal, we were met with a stone wall.

On May 11, thirty members of our coalition of activists were arrested for praying and singing when the DeKalb Commission once again refused to discuss the hospital. It was, without a doubt, the largest and most diverse group arrested for an act of civil disobedience in Atlanta since the Movement activities of the 1960s. We were clergy and laypeople, Christians, Jews, and Buddhists, women and men, gay and straight, Black, white, and Asian, students and retirees (the oldest were seventy-nine and eighty-one), medical professionals in white uniforms and members of organized labor taking the day off. While we were loaded onto the police bus and taken to jail, two hundred or more supporters sang and prayed. Then they moved the vigil to the DeKalb County jail.

On June 8, the DeKalb Commission approved $1.1 million for the Grady Pharmacy.

We are continuing this struggle on several fronts. We are appealing to Governor Roy Barnes to get involved to make state resources available to move past this crisis toward long-term resolution of Grady’s support as a regional and state resource. We understand that this must include discussion and action for public hospitals in every area of Georgia.

We are also looking toward public dialogue about the responsibility of the private institutions that have a role in Grady’s long-term health. Emory University made its international reputation as a medical school and research center at Grady Hospital. The medical school has been a major source of Emory’s growing wealth and power. With

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an endowment of eight billion dollars, Emory’s is the fastest-growing endowment of any private university in the nation. It is time for the wealth to be shared to endow Grady’s future as a resource for health care for the poor and the excellent teaching context that it continues to be.

Other private sources that must be called to accountability are the many for-profit hospitals in the Atlanta area who sometimes send their patients to Grady when insurance monies have run out. We understand that some cities or regions levy a tax on for-profit hospitals to help support public hospitals. Drug companies and insurance companies must be called to account for their massive profits and pricing based on market feasibility rather than their own costs. And finally, Morehouse Medical School and other smaller teaching institutions and programs must be called into the discussions to explore shared responsibility for this precious resource in our community.

With our local partners, we must seek new ways to work together to advocate in Washington. The Balanced Budget Act will bring deeper cuts in the coming years. Our health care system is in serious trouble. We must stop the damage and move toward a national health insurance plan.

We in the United States, spend some four thousand dollars per person per year for health care, more than any other people in the world. This is a cost nearly twice any other country and a much higher figure than other industrialized countries like Canada and Great Britain. And their expenditure pays for a health care system that provides access to care for everyone.

The diverse and lively coalition that has formed around the Grady crisis is a long-haul group of committed activists. We are working and planning together with clarity that we have a long road ahead. We look forward to learning more of how this struggle has taken shape in other cities and regions. And we hope to be part of a growing movement that will struggle for not only a guarantee of decent health care for all God’s children, but justice, housing, freedom, and peace for every woman, man, and child.

Reverend Murphy Davis is a partner at the Open Door Community, Inc., an Atlanta community of Christians who minister with the homeless and prisoners, particularly those on death row. Davis is the coordinator of the Southern Prison Ministry.

Prison Slavery

By Rev. Murphy Davis

Vol. 22, No. 3, 2000 pp. 21-24

Our friend Thony is locked up for a sentence of 481 years in an infamous Southern plantation-style prison. He spends his days with a swing blade cutting grass on the edge of ditches over the 20,000-acre prison. For his labor he is paid two cents per hour. One penny per hour is banked until his parole consideration (2070); the other is his to spend at the prison store.

Mary Louise sews blue stripes down the pants legs of prison uniforms at the garment factory near the women’s prison. For her eight hours a day she is paid nothing. She begs stamps from friends to write to her children.

Charles stands, day after day, in front of a machine, watching it stamp out license plates. The work is monotonous, and he is paid nothing for it The prison tells him he is building “work skills.” But since license plates are only made in prison industries, he is not being prepared for any work in the outside market.

Frank sits on death row. Day in, day out, he is, for all practical purposes, idle. Television, exercise, writing letters, and playing checkers pass the time. Frank, though young, strong, and energetic, is not allowed to work. He has spent the past ten years of his life unable to do anything of use to anyone.

Thony, Mary Louise, Charles, and Frank, like more than two million men, women, and children in the United States, cannot control their own labor. They are slaves.

Slavery is, of course, not a fashionable word in the early days of the twenty-first century. We assume ourselves to be rid of it. But an often-overlooked fact of U.S. political life and history is that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did not abolish slavery in this country. It simply narrowed the practice. The amendment reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (emphasis mine). Prisoners are, by mandate of the United States Constitution, slaves.

In the 1970s, the terminology of the prison system started to change. We began to have “Correctional Institutions,” -Diagnostic and Classification Centers,” “Youth Development Centers,” etc. Wardens became “Superintendents;” guards became “Correctional Officers;” prisoners became “inmates.” Solitary confinement, or the “hole,” became the “Adjustment Center?’ The language of scientific penology attempts to mask harsh reality.

Some of the tough talk of recent years has abandoned the “new” penology and reverted to the chain gang approach. But whatever words we use for the system or its captives, prisoners are people from whom most rights of citizenship have been taken. They have no right to control where they are, with whom, or how they spend their time in forced labor or forced idleness. Whether we say they are given over to the prison system to be “corrected,” “rehabilitated,” or “incapacitated,” the fact remains that they are in the system to accomplish one goal: punishment.

Why? And for whom? Can we be satisfied to live with the commonly held assumption that people are in prison solely because they have done bad things? If this assumption were true then why would there be such wide variation in incarceration rates around the world and even within the United States? The United States goes back and forth with Russia for the distinction of being the world’s number one jailer. That is to say that the U.S. depends more than any ether government in the world-on caging people as a response to our problems. In recent decades, we have closed mental hospitals, addiction services, and community programs for the retarded and the disabled, not to mention support services for families, children, and the elderly. Prisons and jails have become the one-stop solution for all our problems. There are, in many states, more mentally ill people in county jails and state prisons than in hospitals. Most expressions of ‘deviance” have been criminalized and the criminal control system is supposed to take care of it all.

Prisons have not always been such major institutions in the United States. Georgia’s penal history is representative of most Southern states: The first state prison was opened in Milledgeville (then the state capital) in 1817. The prison was based on the “Auburn plan” which assumed that hard work would simultaneously punish and reform. The average number of prisoners remained around two-hundred–all white. Black people, of course, were slaves and were dealt with inside the system of private ownership.

This development in Georgia roughly coincided with the opening of state prisons in other states. Thomas Jefferson took from Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria the notion of confined convict slavery and designed a prison for Virginia that opened to receive prisoners in 1800. Centuries earlier, governments had learned that the punishment of slavery could be used to the benefit of the state. Galley slavery of ancient Greece and Rome was used again in France and Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth

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centuries.

In the nineteenth century, slavery as punishment was tailored to the needs of the American system. The benefits of this form of punishment to general social control were frankly admitted. A prison report in 1820 stressed that convict submission was ‘demanded not so much for the smooth functioning of the prison but for the sake of the convict himself, who shall learn to submit willingly to the fate of the lower classes.”

As the system of American prison slavery was honed, the controversy raged over the practice of chattel slavery. At the close of the Civil War, the controversy focused on the wording of the Constitutional Amendment to legally abolish slavery. Led by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, those who argued for the complete abolition of slavery in the United States lost their struggle. The Thirteenth Amendment as it was passed, and as it stands, forbids slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” This was a major victory for the white political forces of the old Confederacy, bitter over the loss of their captive labor force. Rather than legally abolishing slavery, the amendment changed the system to permit the state, not private citizens, to be slave owners.

After the Civil War, Southern planters thought themselves lost without their slaves. The one legal form of slavery still available to them was imprisonment Some states passed “Black Codes.” Georgia and other states passed vagrancy laws, and similar statutes and ordinances as a way to lock up black people who were seen not to be in their “proper” place.

In 1868 Georgia established by law the convict lease system modeled after the Massachusetts system begun in 1798. Convicts could be leased to counties or county contractors for use on public works. In 1874 the Georgia law was altered to permit leasing convicts to private individuals and companies. By 1877, Georgia had 1.100 prisoners-994 (90 percent) of them were black.

In 1878, former Confederate Colonel Robert Alston. serving as state representative from DeKalb County, visited convict work camps all over the state. As head of the Committee on the Penitentiary he wrote a scathing report: “The lease system at best is a bad one, and seems to have been forced upon the State by an inability to provide for the great increase in the number of criminals growing out of the changed relations of labor. To turn the prisoners over to private parties, who have no interest in them except that which is prompted by avarice, is to subject them to treatment which is as various as the characters of those in charge and in many cases amount to nothing less than capital punishment with slow torture added.” Alston encouraged leading citizens to withdraw from the companies leasing convicts. Before long, a man who

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leased convicts murdered Colonel Alston.

As difficult as it must have been in the harsh days of, the post-Reconstruction era,, the black community found various ways to protest the lease system. One of their methods was an annual memorial service and “decoration of the grave” for Alston as the first white person to “condemn and denounce the workings of the abominable, blasphemous and vile penitentiary lease system, under which so many of our race are doomed to horror, agony, and pollution.”

In 1908 the Georgia Prison Commission reported that, in the penitentiary and chain gangs combined, there were 4,290 Negro males, 209 Negro women, 461 white males, and six white women. In that same year a committee report to the legislature on corruption and cruelty in the lease system led the legislature to abolish the lease. After that, chain gangs worked on public works rather than for private individuals and companies. But abuses continued. One infamous warden used to send black trustees with a pitchfork to make the hogs squeal so that the townsfolk would not hear the human screams as the warden beat a prisoner with hosepipe. Submission to the “fate of the lower classes” seems to have continued as an agenda in the prisons.

In 1957, forty-one prisoners at the Buford Rock Quarry broke their own legs with their sledgehammers to protest harsh working and living conditions. When the investigations promised by prison officials never took place, a second and then a third group of prisoners broke their own legs. As recently as 1979, a number of prisoners at the Wayne County “Correctional Institution” cut their own Achilles tendons in protest of harsh and demeaning working conditions.

I will never forget my first visit to the Georgia State Prison at Reidsville in the spring of 1978. We drove onto the prison “reservation” and there, as far as I could see, were groups of men (mostly black) bent over working in the fields. Over them sat a uniformed white man on horseback with a rifle across his lap. I was utterly amazed; nothing in my formal education had prepared me to see this contemporary picture of slavery. Indeed, the privilege inherent in my formal education had contributed to my inability to see.

I did not realize then that slavery still existed as a legal institution in the United States. Most American citizens probably do not But as the Committee to Abolish Prison Slavery has said: “In any form, slavery dehumanizes, cripples, and destroys anyone who willingly, or unwillingly, partakes in its practice.” Prisons and prison slavery are crucial institutions in this country for controlling labor in the interest of the powerful few and to the benefit of all people of privilege.

It is beyond dispute that imprisonment rates have always gone straight up and down with rates of unemployment among the poor and especially people of color. But this has changed. Today, unemployment is at its lowest rate in recorded history, and crime rates have dropped dramatically, but still the imprisonment rate has continued to grow. What now drives the criminal control system is it crime and punishment but the drive to feed the vast Prison Industrial Complex which has been created to seek growing profits from prison labor. Within this monstrous system, creating even more political and social obfuscation, the phenomenon of privatization of prisons has now made marketable commodities of even prisoners themselves. To feed corporate profits, our legislative bodies have steadily passed harsher laws and longer mandatory sentences while the courts have dutifully imposed the draconian laws and turned a blind eye to selective enforcement and prosecution. The portrayal of “crime” by the corporate media feeds the process. Since prisons on local, state, and federal levels have become multi-billion dollar industries, an increasing number of individuals and institutions are dependent on their continued existence.

Prison slavery infects all of us, whether we make ourselves aware of its use or not. Prisons are off the beaten path for most people. Middle and upper class people have very little reason to know anything of prisons or prisoners except when it becomes a local issue. Just a few years ago, communities could be quickly whipped into a frenzy to keep a new prison from being built “in our neighborhood.” But with the frequently decimated economic base of small towns and rural areas and the increased “marketing” of prisons as an economic boon to small communities, many of these counties and municipalities now hire professionals to lobby the legislature and Departments of Corrections, begging them to put the next new prison in their area.

This marriage made in hell of racial polarization and discrimination with corporate greed has formed the bottom line of the Prison Industrial Complex and its devastating consequences.

The damage done to the human family by this unchecked pattern is inestimable. When a breadwinner is taken to prison her/his children often become wards of the state-by foster care or welfare. More often than not, prisoners are assigned to prisons far from family and community ties, so that relationships are usually at least damaged and sometimes completely broken. Because prisoners earn nothing, or nearly nothing; for their labor, there is no possibility of helping to support their own families or making reparations where appropriate. Millions of men and women and children are being “disappeared” from their communities, losing their families, their access to education and decent employment, and even the right to

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vote when they are released. The situation becomes more complex by the day as we allow the prison industrial complex to be woven into our social, political, and economic fabric.

Pretending to be untouched by systems of degradation and dehumanization can only be a self-defeating game. Perhaps we had to come to this point to begin to face the futility and self-destructiveness of our corporate behavior. Perhaps it took this level of abuse of the system to make us stop and see that our basic document-namely the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution-is wrong as long as it allows penal slavery to replace chattel slavery.

It is time for a movement to take up the unfulfilled agenda of the nineteenth Century Abolitionists. The slaveholders who fought to maintain penal slavery in the Constitution understood that the criminal control system would be a lynchpin in the political economy of the post-Reconstruction South. It was later a basic underpinning of the Jim Crow system. In our day, the system of police, prisons, and courts are basic to any consideration of racial justice. We will not honestly confront race in our society until we take it on. Prison slavery must and will someday be abolished. Until then we will not even begin to take an honest look at how we might move toward fair labor practices, a living wage, and the ongoing task of dismantling the racism that infects our common life. It is the least we can do to be about the task of seeking human dignity and liberation for all of God’s children.

Rev. Murphy Davis is a partner at the Open Door Community, an Atlanta community of Christians who minister with the homeless and prisoners. Davis is coordinator of the Southern Prison Ministry.