Misdemeanors: A Gateway To Violence [Video]

America’s Misdemeanor Problem exposes how our country’s history of racial injustice evolved into an enormous abuse of criminal justice power. 13 million people a year – most of them poor and people of color – are abused by this system.

Through first-person accounts of those charged under the Black Codes of the Reconstruction era paralleled with the outrageous stories of people trapped in the system today, the film brings to light the unfolding of a powerful engine of profits and racial inequality. With the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, this film provides historical context and examines America’s history of racist oppression.

After the civil war, and after abolition, Southern states repurposed their misdemeanor systems to criminalize and control the African-American labor pool. They arrested them and charged them with minor crimes, punishing them with fines they could not pay in order to lock them up and sell them back to private industry.

The mechanism that they used is one that we still see today, that private industry acted as a surety.

Southern legislatures tried to re-inscribe a form of slavery through a system of laws called black codes. These codes essentially tip the hand of the South with respect to how it’s going to use the criminal justice system over the course of the next century, to coerce black people back to labor.

By creating laws that criminalize and create convictions for Blacks, they were allowed to enslave them again through the practice of convict leasing. Convict leasing allowed plantation owners and in many cases, corporations, to lease incarcerated people from the state government or county government for forced labor.

These new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. If the specific Black Code could not be proven, victims would be charged with the catchall “vagrancy.”

Transcript provided by YouTube: