The modern prison was devised by American reformers who believed that people should not be tortured and that criminals could be "reformed" by incarceration, labor, and "penitence." But with the rise of industrial capitalism, unpaid prison labor became a source of superprofits, a trend accelerated by the Civil War, and the "penitentiary" became the site of industrial slavery conducted under the whip and other savagery.

Prior to the Civil War, the main form of imprisonment--African-American slavery--was, like the penitentiary, not to be regarded as torture. Slavery, indeed, was never legitimized by any claim that the slaves were being punished for crimes or anything else. A main cultural line of defense of slavery even maintained that the slaves were happy. This changed in 1865 when Article 13, the Amendment that abolished the old form of slavery, actually wrote slavery into the Constitution--for people legally defined as criminals: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,......

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Title: America
Approximate Word Count: 649
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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