California voters just decided that making rapists and other convicted felons work while incarcerated is not slavery. Good call!
On Election Day, Bear Flag Republic voters confronted — along with referenda on increased bond funding for public schools and in-state colleges, the creation of a constitutional right to marriage, and an increase in the $16 per hour minimum wage — a proposal to eliminate so-called involuntary servitude, the California Department of Corrections’s practice of forcing prison inmates to work.
According to the official summary on California’s voter guide website, the measure would not only “amend the California Constitution to remove the current … provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work),” but also “prohibit the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation from punishing incarcerated persons from refusing a work assignment.”
Voters wanted none of this: As of Nov. 23, 53.3% of all ballot casters had said “No” to the proposed amendment, while just over 45% had said “Yes.” The referendum, “California Question Six,” failed in 48 of the state’s 58 counties.
California Democrats reacted loudly, often invoking the specter of antebellum black history. “It’s disappointing that our measure to remove slavery from California’s constitution was not approved by the voters,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Lori Wilson. “But this setback does not end the fight!”
Cheryl Grills, a tenured psychology professor at Loyola Marymount and a member of California’s unique Reparations Committee, which proposed the bill, sounded even more pained. “At what point, California, will you see us?” quoth she. “How much did [voters] understand the context of over 200 years of forced labor put on black people? And where’s the humanity and compassion for the pain and suffering of the people whose ancestors endured that, and whose current generations are living with the legacy of that?”
And so on. Poignant stuff. But, in Reality World, there are several obvious problems with the claim that California has a 200-year legacy of slavery and that prison labor today is a continuation of that dark past. Perhaps most notably, the state of California is only 174 years old and has almost no legacy of slavery at all. Despite what sometimes seem like rather desperate attempts to link the state to the peculiar institution, California entered the Union as a fully “free soil,” non-slave state in 1850.
The state constitution explicitly says: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this state.” Not only was this rule followed almost to the letter, but the Golden State had virtually no slave or free black population for most of her history. Even today, the California resident population is only 5% African American — vs. 40% Latino, 35% white, and 15% Asian — with most of these citizens descended from voluntary Great Migration refugees who gladly left the far more oppressive Deep South.
Most California prison inmates aren’t black, either. Latinos make up 46% of the in-state prison population and are the dominant racial group within it. Whites and Asians make up 26% of the same system, and blacks 28%. The latter figure is an overrepresentation to be sure, which may correlate with racism and poverty, but also tracks closely with the much higher black rates of serious violent crime in most states and nationwide. At any rate, many or most of the most notorious California inmates are nonblack — the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia both began here — and it is a bit absurd to prevent bearded Hell’s Angels or Barrio Azteca warriors from making license plates because “that would be black slavery.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
That last sentence brings up a final point that is likely the most important of all. Captured sex pests or firebugs, forced to work to pay off some portion of their astonishing $132,860 annual cost, are not oppressed slaves. Anyone can avoid a hard 7.5-hour day in the plate shop or pecan groves just by not committing rape or arson. And, those are the sort of crimes that tend to land folks inside state prison. For all the public chatter about “nonviolent drug offenders” stuck in the joint, almost no one is actually sentenced to a year or longer for possession of a personal bag of marijuana (a product legal in California). Across all races, the most common crime for which male felons are currently incarcerated is murder.
People long to live in a time of heroes: Advocates of many causes compare them to abolitionism or the civil rights movement, for obvious reasons. A recent campaign focused on allowing adult males to enter all-ages women’s bathrooms invoked Jim Crow laws as an allegory for the situation of “trans women.” But, any thinking citizen and certainly any good Californian should be able to distinguish true gold from fool’s gold. If a state with almost no actual history of slavery has so far opted not to pay “reparations,” and has rejected the claim that low-wage work in the prison shop is “slavery,” this is a very good thing.
Wilfred Reilly is a professor, author, and senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
