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Slavery in the Texas Prison System How a 17-year old became enslaved by the state By Ernesto Salinas Slavery is alive in America. I first experienced it in the summer of 2005 when I was sent to the Clemens Unit in Southeast Texas. A smaller prison of around 1,000 inmates it is nevertheless surrounded by six or seven thousand acres of farmland. It is on this land that I was put to work. Watching me and the other men were armed guards on horseback. These guards were more than mere guards; they were also our boss, our manager, our slave driver. They had control over not only our life and death but seemed intent on owning our mind and spirit. As a young man I had always been interested in history and loved to learn. In those fields as I pounded on hard ground with dull aggie, with power-intoxicated guard mocking and insulting me, history and irony were never far from my mind. For I knew that in antebellum Brazoria County over half of the population had consisted of slaves. In those day before Emancipation, there were more enslaved people than free in the whole county; and it was highly probable that those guards now driving me were direct descendants of the enslaved. The state was now using these people to administer the huge Texas Department of Criminal Justice along with its de-facto slave apparatus. In the span of a year at the age of 17, I had gone from attending 12th grade history classes and learning about thousands of slaves brought to this country, to living like them. History was now laughing in my face and the state seemed intent on adding insult to injury. As youth offenders, the great majority of us had been living lives of violence and criminality. We had ended up in the position that we were because we had broken the trust of society. And now the state was giving us a taste of our own medicine. We accepted our now situation because everything around us told us that we deserved it. The courts and society communicated to us that we were guilty and so a real man accepted his lot. There was to be no discussion. As time passed and education ensued, I began to analyze motivations behind some of the actions that the state was undertaking. The state wanted to communicate to its citizens and the rest of the world that those who broke the law in Texas would be dealt with accordingly. The The sureness and harshness with which this dealing would be handed out has come to be a matter of identity for many politics. And citizens who have not tasted it also speak for it in a positive light. This mindset and the harsh policy that results from it are a natural but simple, almost infantile, attempt to make oneself feel safe. IT is a reaction against a world that has been deemed dangerous. The people who have created and nourished this mindset are of an old and dying breed. They are the ones who for decades have believed and led others to believe that marijuana and rap music are the products of the devil. They are overwhelmed by the sense that society is getting worse (despite all manner of evidence to the contrary) not better and that the police and the laws that they enforce are the best and surest way of controlling those segments of the population which they have identified as troublesome. What we have in Texas is a classic situation in which and old guard refuses to die quietly. Despite signs all around them that many of the methods which they practice do not work in the long-run, they continue to practice them. They do this because they are ignorant or refuse to acknowledge the underlying natural laws that come into play when you practice these policies on a people. It is impossible to police and enslave a people into submission. It is impossible because violence breed further violence. When the state breaks, or attempts to break, someone's will it is admitting legitimacy to many of the same mindsets that it purports to be attempting to correct in those facing the "correction." It is at this time that those in the crosshairs of the state police apparatus will see and understand what our founding father understood so well. It was George Washington who said, "Government is not reason. It is force. Like fire, it's a dangerous servant of a fearful master." It is difficult, if not impossible, for those who have not experience this fire to understand it. It is even harder for one to take action against it. Those who have taken advantage of the state police apparatus have benefited form the fact that those more vulnerable to its power are least able to act against it. Most of us who are feeling this fire are completely ignorant about what it means to possess political power. We are taught at an early age, through multiple sources, that we are powerless against larger society. A victim stance is created and this victim stance permeates one's whole life. Once one sees themself as a victim, the powerlessness that accompanies it is further ingrained. When a person has no sense of their political power, then he or she is incapable of having a part in government. They are politically impotent. They may still be able to feed and clothe and shelter themselves and others but they are completely at the mercy of others when it comes to government decisions. These people are in essence living in little bubbles and have zero input into the society at large. Government, politics, civic duty and responsibility are foreign terms. All that matters is one's immediate bubble. It is this alienation that fosters criminal thinking more than anything else. And it is the subject that is completely absent from Texas prison efforts at rehabilitation. This is no accident. In fact it is entirely rational. Why would the slavemaster teach the slave the best and surest way to freedom and power? The paradigm is that it is this empowerment and reintegration into society that is precisely that which stands the best chance of keeping the prisoner from re-offending and breaking the laws of society. When a person is powerless and alienated from society their life loses value. In the eyes of that person it is just that much easier to risk their freedom and injure a society that he/she cannot relate to, a society that reduced them to a statues of slavery and rejected them in the midst of their worst mistake in their life. The people of Texas and other states must decide what they want their prison systems to accomplish. They have to decide what the top priority is. Do we want to punish those who break our laws? Do we want to tear them down and so disenfranchise them that when they do return to society their ability to reintegrate has been destroyed? Or do we want them to make the effort at true rehabilitation? The Texas prison system is caught somewhere in the middle. Those who administer it understand the effectiveness of education, trade skills and other aspects of rehabilitation in helping people stay out of prison. And yet those same prison authorities and the legislators who oversee them are mired in the quicksand that is the desire to be "tough on crime." The refusal to pay Texas prisoners even a modest hourly wage is a result of this desire. To keep prisoners in a state of slavery/peonage for years upon decades is a policy that is completely counter-productive to rehabilitation. A large portion of prisoners (possibly a majority) and especially youth offenders have never known what it is to be gainfully employed. They have never known the satisfaction and joy that results from putting effort into your work and actually earning something for it. The sense of empowerment and control over one's life and their environment. The ability to sustain themselves once released. What is happening, whether intentionally or not, it that prisoners are developing a deep-seated reliance on other for sustenance. After years of reinforcing this reliance, the state is releasing people into the street with a $100 check and zero ability to navigate the real world where self-reliance and improvisation are the most important tools of value in keeping them from reoffending. Today, I am a 31 year old man. I have been a slave of the state since I was 17 years old. I was paroled in 2012 and thrown out into the world with the aforementioned $100 check. I was sent back to prison for a technical violation in 2016 and have been incarcerated ever since. I was devastated to learn that because my charge involved a weapon I had been denied credit for the time I had spent on parole. 3 years and 2 months were added to the back of my sentence resulting in the movement of my discharge date from 2019 to 2022. This policy alone had been so arbitrary, confusing, discriminatory, and unjust that it has caused me to question everything about the Texas criminal justice system. What are the reason, the motivations, the causes for these harsh and liberty-damning policies? The policies that serve to extend people's sentences and deny them credit for time served to the state. The policies that extend people's reliance on welfare from the state and the taxpayer money that funds it. These policies that say justice is not blind, because you are this type of offender you must pay double what other offenders do. After two-plus years of analyses I have come to the conclusion that two primary motivations are at play. By denying people credit for the time spent on parole, those people will be incarcerated longer resulting in the need to keep prisons open, along with the necessary budgets and jobs. Secondly, is the desire to punish. No one less than Friedrich Nietzsche himself understood and summed up this motive when he stated, "Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong! They are people of a bad breed and a bad descent; the executioner and the bloodhound peer from out their faces. Mistrust all those who talk much about their justice! Truly, it is not only honey that their souls lack. And when they call themselves 'the good and just' do not forget that nothing is lacking to make them into pharisees except-power!" Jan. 14, 2019 Ernesto Salinas