The Nebraskan Slave State

I had a conversation with a typical, awful Nebraskan today on Facebook about how mass incarceration is a continuation of slavery in several key ways: it’s goal is to disrupt, destroy, disarm, and disenfranchise the Black community. Certainly, its surface features have changed since the passage of the 13th Amendment, but enslavement is alive and well. After the Civil War, the South pioneered many techniques for circumventing the spirit of the 13th Amendment while satisfying the letter. The 13th forbids slavery except for punishment for a crime. Clever by one Southerners quickly criminalized “idleness”, “vagrancy”, “dice rolling” and other equally absurd “crimes” because their cotton still needed picking and they were not interested in hard work themselves.

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

U.S. Const.  amend.  XIII

While Nebraska was not part of the war of Southern treason, they, like other states post-Reconstruction through the modern era, quickly saw the economic and political value in these other forms of slavery (convict-lease, debt peonage, the Drug War/mass incarceration) without the reputation hit of the clear-cut evil of chattel slavery in the eyes of the masses or the costs of chattel slavery (like feeding & clothing the very old or very young). The States are able to get these “criminal” slaves to:

• Work their own industrial shops: print shops, wood crafting shops, license plate factories, and sewing shops, etc.
• Farm out their slaves to private industry for cheap and guaranteed never to ask for time off, like Millard Lumber, Sillosocks, and other well-connected Nebraska businesses.
• Generate income from those with families who are desperate to minimize the suffering of their enslaved loved ones and “fortunately”, the state and prison-adjacent industries (who corrupt officials own stock in or have elaborate multi-step kickbacks from) step up and provide all manner of “upgrades”, like food without mold or not pre-chewed by rats or marked “not fit for human consumption” on the box, deodorant, shampoo, aspirin, cold medicine, books to read, communication with the outside world, and countless fees and fines
• Milk the taxpayers for more and more money for prisons, prison employees, and food (a non-trivial amount of the food taxpayers buy ends up in the bellies of prison staff, like Kitchen Manager Belinda England from Lincoln Community Corrections, in Lincoln, NE
• Income from devices, fees, fines, and bribes during the slave’s onerous secondary sentences (additional “post” sentence or parole after the first prison sentence is complete.
• Corrupt officials can get jobs for their otherwise unemployable friends and family in the prison industry: the morbidly obese, those with several psychological problems (like Ofc. Kelsie Charrlin), rapists (like Ofc. Michael Dermody) , medical professionals on second-chance licenses, and other deplorables.

They get away with this form of slavery by making it seem as if the crime-based slaves deserved their punishment (even though the crimes are false ones that a free and moral state has no legitimacy enacting: how a free person spends their social time alone or with other consenting adults or what a free person ingests for their own recreation) coupled with some cover that there are actual criminals also in their gulags who need correction and time for self-improvement, there is very little resistance from the average citizen. If you add poor Whites as further cover to the slavery program, you can keep it going for a century (and counting).

As I started to have this conversation with an authoritarian-follower named John Wilson, the State of Nebraska was already censoring my comments. Thankfully I have previous experience with their tactics of propaganda (removing any comments, which do not paint them in a positive light) and so I had several screenshots and will include them below. There is never a clearer sign of guilt by a morally bankrupt state than censorship of arguments that criticize it.

These comments can be found on Facebook “Nebraska Department of Corrections”, originally posted 10-AUG-2023 at 20:00. (Those that aren’t censored, of course.)