Exclusive: Is Slavery Really Over? ‘America Amended’ Traces the Roots of Milwaukee’s Mass Incarceration Crisis
America’s reckoning with slavery did not end with emancipation, and few places bring that contradiction into sharper focus than Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Black men experience incarceration at the highest rate in the nation. In Episode 4 of The Root’s six-part docuseries, America Amended, host Trymaine Lee heads to the city to explore the connections between America’s history of racial oppression and its modern-day prison system. Watch the full episode right here.
The episode takes a closer look at the 13th Amendment’s punishment clause and how its exception became a tool for maintaining racial hierarchies long after slavery was formally abolished.
“It’s that exception that opens the door,” says Melissa Murray, NYU School of Law professor and author, explaining how Southern states sought to reestablish racial control in the aftermath of emancipation. The provision, she says, offered a powerful means of doing so.
For Lee, mass incarceration represents one of the most enduring reminders of that history. Racial inequality, he notes, can be seen in everything from the wealth gap to police brutality and residential segregation. But the country’s reliance on incarceration is among the most visceral legacies of enslavement.
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Milwaukee offers a sobering case study. According to research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin has the highest Black male incarceration rate in the country. Through a conversation with Margo Kirchner of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, the episode examines how the 13th Amendment’s exception enabled practices such as convict leasing, chain gangs and forced labor to continue after slavery.
The journey also takes Lee to America’s Black Holocaust Museum, where the city’s Black history, population growth and legacy of racial terror provide important context for understanding its present-day realities.
Robert “Biko” Baker, an educator and scholar of African diaspora studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, speaks candidly about the generational trauma of incarceration. Recalling that he is the only man in his family who has never been convicted of a felony or spent time in prison, Baker describes growing up with the constant fear that an encounter with law enforcement could change his life.
“None of that is by accident. None of this is by accident,” he says. “It created a situation where I realized that at any time in my life, I could be killed or go to jail.”
Lee also visited Project Return, an organization working to help formerly incarcerated people navigate life after prison.
By connecting the history of slavery to the realities of mass incarceration, America Amended challenges viewers to reconsider what emancipation actually meant and whether the promise of freedom has ever been fully realized for Black Americans. Watch the full episode right here.
