> However I disagree that slavery still exists in the form of incarceration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Yes, making a criminal - who has committed a crime, been convicted and sentenced to jail time - do work is not equivalent - morally or otherwise - to racialized slavery.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee (Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...)

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

-- John Ehrlichman, Nixon domestic policy chief (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...)

What if the policies can be shown that a distinct criminalization was made to expressly target a specific demographic? Or what if we can show that health and infant mortality trends mirrors that of the 18060's map of slave county census? We have more than a smoking gun - we have the blood spatter and the bullet, and the gun in the person's hands still smoking. 150 years later, and it's still going strong.

BTW, how's that water upgrade going on in Flint, MI? I'll give you a hint: they're a bunch of black people who live there. It's already out of the news.

>--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee

I highly recommend you listen to that entire interview to understand why it's important. He said it while he was a campaign strategist for Reagan and was talking about historical campaign strategies of the 50s and 60s.

The 13th Amendment explicitly legalises slavery as the punishment for a crime, and its used all the time.

And when we talk about slavery it's usually in the sense of racialized, bondage-from-birth slavery rather than penal labor.

The two are very different, and using the word 'slavery' to refer to both conflates meaning and disguises the important differences between the two.

I think the term you may be looking for is "Noncentral Fallacy"

http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

Exactly. Thank you

Penal labor is coerced, unpaid labor which is by definition slavery.

What you're referring to is chattel slavery.

I agree with the sentiment behind your comment, however I would also consider how the legal system seems to work. If you can’t afford a lawyer then the likelihood of “breaking the law” seems to be higher than otherwise. Also, slavery had plenty of detractors and apologists had arguments in favor of slavery. Some of those arguments were pretty rational sounding (pretty wrong to)

Sure, but that's why it's important to ensure competent public defenders are available to all people accused of a crime. I'd be very interested to hear suggestions on how we can improve the public defender system.

Your second point may be true, but that's the case for almost everything. Doesn't mean that everything is right or wrong. We need to judge things on a case by case basis.

> because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws.

Not correct. Blacks don't disproportionally break laws. The problem is that non-violent crimes in America are disproportionally enforced. Several Thousand, probably close to a million cases of illegal white collar crime go unenforced every year. Stuff like insider trading, corruption, fraud, laundering, etc. Crimes that white people are more likely to break simply are not regularly enforced. Non-violent crimes like drug possession in Black urban areas are highly enforced, while whites in suburb areas use drugs at the same rate, are not enforced. There is a bias in the enforcement laws

Don't the statistics show that violent crime is much higher among blacks than other racial groups?

I'd be interested to see statistics on white collar crime, but I know that there are significant resources put towards catching and sentencing white collar criminals.

>The black community, because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws

This is so simplistic that it borders on a racist falsehood. Increased police presence, inadequate legal representation, racially motivated jury-selection and expansions of prosecutorial power are huge factors.

Educate yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66F3WU2CKk

http://newjimcrow.com/

I'm not sure why you would call that statement racist.

Poverty tends to beget crime, this is very hard to deny. Because the black community - as a result of the slavery of its ancestors in this country - suffers disproportionately high rates of poverty, it also suffers from disproportionately high rates of crime.

> "This is so simplistic"

> "Educate yourself."

The topic at hand is highly contentious. Regardless of how wrong you think the other party may be, it behooves us to strive to be even more civil in our discourse in such circumstances.