OF GREED AND GLORY

A cogent study of how racialized abuse of justice is a feature—not a bug—of American life.

“Several hundred thousand Americans are caged in American jails every single day, not because they are necessarily guilty of a crime but because our wealth-based justice system targets those who don’t have the money to post bail….And the vast majority of those caged are poor, Black, and brown.” So writes Plant, editor of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon, providing an example in her brother, who is now in Angola state prison in Louisiana, a state that, a legal scholar notes, “has some of the toughest sentencing laws in the country.” It’s no accident that those who cannot afford first-rate lawyers wind up in such places—or that some of these prisons sit on the sites of former slave plantations. Much of Plant’s advocacy focuses on an amendment to remove the constitutional qualification that slavery and involuntarily servitude are forbidden except in the punishment of crime, meaning that Angola’s prisoners, among others, are de facto enslaved. Again, this is no accident: The state’s penal economy of agriculture and manufacture depends on a steady supply of people who are “duly convicted,” often by “Black Codes” that excessively punish infractions such as vagrancy or being a public nuisance, most of which, like the presumption of the inherent criminality of Black citizens, are wholly subjective on the part of the justice system. Plant’s argument is somewhat repetitive but always on point. Interestingly, she extends the realm of involuntary servitude to include women in the post-Dobbs era who “are now subject to the same kind of criminalization that re-enslaved and colonized Black citizens have suffered. ‘The law’ has been weaponized to bring women back under due subjection to their ‘masters.’”

A compelling argument against the systemic abuse of justice as a weapon of oppression.