I came across this excellent post by Stacey Patton. She writes about BP’s use of prison labor to clean up the oil spill and makes the appropriate historical connection to the convict leasing system.

Patton writes:

Since Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the country – of which 79 percent of its 39,000 inmates are black – it ’s no surprise to hear that BP is using prison labor to clean up the largest oil spill ever in U.S. history.

A recent report by reveals that in the days after the Deepwater Horizon wellhead explosion, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words “Inmate Labor” printed in large red letters. Costal area residents were rightly outraged given that they had seen their livelihoods disappear and are now desperate for work.

For me, the key passage in her blog posting is this one:

Black Codes or Jim Crow laws helped create the post-emancipation prison industrial complex in the South that was driven by profitability, racism and corruption. Black men, women and children were habitually arrested for violating Black Codes, failure to pay fines or on trumped up charges so they could be secured as labor convicts. Charged for trivial offenses, blacks were often handed heavy sentences served out in mines, railroads and farms where they endured brutal beatings, harsh working conditions and high mortality.

For a terrific book about the history of the Black Codes and Convict Leasing, read Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon.

Interestingly today’s New York Times has an article suggesting that the Delta’s Black Fishermen are being left behind by BP. BP’s racism and exploitation knows no end. On the one hand, they are using cheap black prison labor for the clean up while discriminating against black fishermen. People of color in this country need to BOYCOTT BP, for real. I for one have stopped buying any gas from them and will begin to research other products that they make so that I can boycott those too.