Lizzi’s Reviews > The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness > Status Update

•convicts have no legal rights/“slave of the state”-> court costs that need to be worked off for release-> convict leasing
•Populist Party (black and poor whites against elite class) offered AA the most promise and achieved great success, yet was deliberately destructed by elite class like Bacon’s Rebellion. History repeated itself and class consciousness was always successfully oppressed.

•the language of the Constitution was deliberately “colorblind”. Federalism and Electoral College were designed to keep federal gov’t weak and protect the institution of slavery in southern states.
•Black codes: Vagrancy laws—criminal offense to AA over age of 18 without a job, another way of forced labor bc they’re forced to work for little or no pay/prisoners sent to plantations and private companies

•Indentured servants of all races united during Bacon’s Rebellion against planter elites; planter class started “racial bribe” to poor whites to drive a wedge between poor whites and blacks—birth of slave catchers. They extended privileges to poor whites to raise their personal stakes in race-based slavery. THIS ALL HAPPENED BEFORE 1770. Racial caste system predates our democracy.

•War on Drugs was declared as illegal drug use was on the decline, soon after arrests of AA for drug crime spiked unnaturally.
•US has highest incarceration rate in the world.
•people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at similar rates, white youth more likely to engage in drug crime than POC. Black men charged with drug crime 20-50 times more than white men.