Concept or Rhetoric of Slavery Essay

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Rhetoric of Slavery

The term "slavery" evokes forced labor where people are captured and made to work without being paid, where people are given barely any clothing and barely enough to eat, where families are broken apart and where those labeled as slaves are denied any rights that they should have as human beings. Specifically, the idea of slavery is applied to pre-Civil War American or to the Jewish people when they were enslaved by the Egyptian pharaohs. However, the same ideas described can also be applied to those incarcerated in the penal system, at least according to those who are seeking to improve the lives and opportunities for those who are currently behind bars. This reevaluation of incarceration as "modern slavery" is a rhetorical device used by those with an agenda interested in promoting and improving conditions within the prison system but does not take into consideration the feelings of those who are not interested in improving prison conditions; thus the opposing sides would argue as to the validity of this terminology.

Whenever a historically negative term is taken out of its original context and applied to a different idea, it is an intentional allusion to the original usage of that term, such as the modern colloquial tendency to refer to adamant individuals as Nazis. This term has decidedly negative connotations as it refers to the government of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s who carried out the genocide of European Jews and Gypsies, as well as the large-scale murders of numberous homosexuals and those considered mentally slow. Of course, the modern usage of the word is often ironic and has little if anything to do with the German National Socialist Party.

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However, the villainy of that group is meant to be understood and applied in the modern context as something both devout and wholly negative. The purpose of relabeling imprisonment in the American penal system as a form of modern slavery is to create a visceral response in the reader or listener depending upon the mode in which the message is delivered. It is an intentionally hyperbolic analogy which is meant to force the person who comes into contact with this label to thereby associate the modern prison system with what they know to be facts about the institutions of slavery, particularly the inhumanity and brutality which is closely associated with slavery.

The concept of prison as "modern slavery" is presented only by individuals promoting prisoner's rights because of the violent reaction such an association creates. There are aspects of the prison system which have similarities to the slave system. Most inmates have little control over their daily lives; everything is scheduled for them from their work assignments to their living arrangements. Also, the prisoners are forcibly separated from loved ones and made to obey the orders of those in authority or face serious, potentially dangerous repercussions for not doing so. In the documentary motion picture The Farm: Angola, USA, the filmmakers performed an investigation into the American prison system by a close examination of one prison in particular, a maximum security prison in Angola, Louisiana. At "The Farm," six prisoners explain what daily life is like behind bars, focusing on the misery of living in this way.….....

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