Work Text:
We are here to be punished. That is our sole, existential purpose in life. Not just because the constitution demands that our bondage must result from criminal punishment to be legally valid, and thus enforceable by the state within that constitutional order; but also because we, as a class, must exist to maintain the liberal-democratic illusion that the state's power to validate and invalidate personhood will only be applied to those deemed truly deserving.
For the past five hundred years, societies have trended towards establishing ever-more-expansive states that touch ever-more aspects of our lives. This is not a natural process, but one enforced upon peoples by violence of the state as it established its monopoly over such. In doing so, the state has transformed itself into the sole force that holds the power to make one a person — that is, someone who has value and right under the law — or remove their personhood and thus place them outside the law; at which point their fates and their continued existence as persons becomes uncertain. It is the state, and the state alone, that makes such a decision de facto.
Liberal-democratic systems were formed both in recognition and supposed opposition to this fact. The power of the state was to be bound by checks and balances, and the rights of man were to be guaranteed through constitutional law that lays out the conditions by which a state is allowed to exist. Law would no longer be decided by one person (the sovereign) but collectively by the people as a whole (or by representatives of such) with the people in charge of safeguarding their own rights.
But who was included within 'the people' was never defined. The power to create and destroy (classes of) persons was not meaningfully eliminated; it was just placed in the hands of a greedy majority, with predictable effects. It did not matter whether your regime was liberal-democratic, liberal-but-not-democratic, democratic-but-not-liberal, or neither-liberal-nor-democratic, the state had this power and used it to its fullest extent, destroying millions in the process.
Reform of this power of the state resulted from our victory over those regimes which were neither-liberal-nor-democratic, if only to more clearly distinguish our own acts from those of our enemies. We needed to revisit the systems by which we ourselves limited or eliminated the rights of persons under the law. The category of those who are truly deserving had to be amended to align with modern sensibilities, to soothe the concerns of that majority which feared they too may end up unpersoned by the state.
This process was grand and sweeping, but the only ones relevant to ourselves are convict leasing and the death penalty.
For a time, it looked like convict leasing and penal slavery as a practice would be abolished wholesale. This is when there was still a pretension that people like us would still have certain rights, ones that our (temporary) owners would be expected to grant to us. The fact that they never bothered to do such a thing led to the government seeking to increase oversight over the system. This only revealed more and more abuses until it was decided the government would only work with approved partners and limited the cases in which this punishment could be applied— more on this later.
The death penalty faced even more scrutiny, because it is unique amongst punishments in being irreversible once carried through. A majority of people supported the penalty in theory — when applied to those truly deserving — but wished to have more certainty about its application. As such, more legal tests were introduced, to make sure they got the 'right guy'— but they could never guarantee such a thing. The more faux-experts were introduced to the system, the harder it became to separate truth from fiction. In the end, the Supreme Court decided that this system was unworkable and paused its application.
Popular imagination, however, continued to be that there exists a distinct class of dangerous, antisocial elements that must be removed from society as permanently as possible. The mere suspension of certain rights as convicts wasn't enough; the permanent removal of rights under a life sentence, far removed from society wasn't enough either— no, they had to suffer for the rest of their lives, to have inflicted upon them that which people imagined they would have inflicted upon society. If the state could not have them sent to hell directly, they could create it here upon earth.
The worst thing they could do to a human being, short of death, was to condemn them to slavery. Convict leasing was abolished for regular crimes, and reformulated to befit the kind of punishment the worst of the worst would deserve— explicit, total, permanent, legally-enforced revocation of personhood, irreversible once applied.
The Supreme Court, in its limited wisdom, did place restrictions on this system; judges could not sentence someone to this kind of punishment due to its irreversibility, but convicts could opt into it as an alternative to the sentences they were given. It was seen as a neat solution to allow for the death penalty without executing innocents, as innocents could always choose to commute their sentence into something lesser than execution.
As if the choice between two kinds of unpersoning is a free one. As if those innocents would not have to remain slaves after their innocence was proven, left with nothing but the knowledge they were retroactively and ineffectually declared innocent as the find themselves at the receiving end of a whip.
Innocence is but an annoyance to a penal system that has taken the understanding that guilt is a legal classification — ideally but not necessarily based upon truth or something approaching it — and taken it to its logical conclusion. For slavery to be a 'proper' unpersoning and an alternative to the death penalty, it must be irreversible, and the irreversibility must be absolute; there is no room for innocence in the system, not within its theoretical framework. It means that requesting a commutation of your sentence to a lifetime of slavery is an absolute, irrevocable admission of guilt; it is explicit consent by the undersigned that their sentence cannot be undone, even in case of innocence.
You should have known that you wouldn't be freed; it's in there, in the small print. If you were innocent, you should have proved so before you were left with no choice but to accept the collar, or so they will claim.
It reveals the inherent contradiction at the heart of this system. It was never about what the truly deserving deserved; it was about a false reassurance to society that they could never be unpersoned and see their rights revoked, because they're not like us. They live in the fantasy that they are different from us, somehow, in a way that's more fundamental than that we have been placed outside the protection of the law. They think that we are lesser than them in more than just social position, but also in our capacity to function as human beings.
They'll believe anything to soothe their guilty souls. Because deep down, they all know we really aren't so different.
The recent developments in domestic slavery are undeniable proof of this; thousands of points of evidence scattered around the homes of our country's elites. It is absolute proof that rehabilitation is possible, that we aren't inferior in the way they suggest, and that if we do require guidance in some way, it's more because it's been so violently instilled into us by our training.
A few recognise this, but rather than advocating for abolition as would be just, they are more interested in reclassifying us as a subclass. They believe we are not truly deserving of suffering; we merely require the kind of guidance, discipline, and stability that can only be provided by a lifetime of slavery. We must still atone for our sins, we must still sacrifice our lives, we still lose all our rights, we still find ourselves at the receiving end of a whip and all those other things that make up our non-personhood— but now it's for our own so-called good.
Even then, this is a minority view, existing only because a lucky few of us were given the chance to prove that we can be rehabilitated despite the law's clear intention that we are not. If the state believed we could be rehabilitated, we wouldn't have got the life or death sentences we did. If society believed we could be rehabilitated, this system wouldn't exist at all— at least not in the permanent, irreversible state it does now.
But the state sentenced us as such, and the people support those sentences as such, so that it becomes an axiomatic truth that we are beyond saving.
The only conclusion one can draw from this state of affairs is that we exist to suffer. In doing so we maintain the fantasy people have that it could never happen to them because we are a separate class of people. And the recognition that this is the case offers us nothing but the idea that we know better when we find ourselves at the receiving end of a whip; but at least we still get to have that, right?