#LivingMonumentsToJimCrow

This op-ed essay was first published in The Advocate on Friday, July 24th.

Time to Restore Justice for Louisianans Convicted by Split Juries
by Mercedes Montagnes and Jamila Johnson

As the nation moves to remove the monuments to racism throughout the South, consider the largest monument of all: hundreds of people locked inside prisons throughout Louisiana without the unanimous consent of a jury.

One of Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws allowed nonunanimous juries to disenfranchise black jurors. The practice was codified at an 1898 constitutional convention with the explicit purpose “to establish the supremacy of the white race in the state.”

Workers Work and Sometimes Die to Make the Bosses Rich

As incarcerated citizens make plans to initiate a worker's strike from sea to shining sea in the United States on August 21st (the day George Jackson was shot to death by guards in San Quentin in 1971), the Southern Poverty Law Center has released a night-marish report concerning the use -- and abuse -- of immigrants and incarcerated workers at chicken processing plants.

I first learned about the chicken processing industry because there's a plant near the small town where I live and I was talking to a guy who had gone to work there when he was released after doing 28 years in the Louisiana Department of Corrections for a $74 robbery. He explained what it was like to work there and by the time he finished telling me about standing in guts, blood, and slime; about being pressed to work rapid fire with sharp knives; about the Mexicans who were not allowed to speak to anyone else and were whisked away on a bus somewhere at 5 pm, I was stunned.

"That's not a job," I said. "It's a sentence."

"Pretty much," he responded.

And the next day, I saw a photo in the paper of a broadly smiling blonde (representing the family who owns the plant) handing a check to a local charity. Hmmmm....

So when I saw the SPLC article I'm re-posting today, I wasn't surprised that the prison-industrial complex has started skipping the part about waiting until people are released. Why bother? If it's good enough for Victoria Secret and Starbucks, why should chicken processing plants not climb on the gravy train?