"...%30 of African Americans can’t vote in Florida because of their dealings with the “justice” system..."

I'm not a southerner. I'm certainly no Floridian. But I strongly suspect that's not a "coincidence". I think the current system was likely set up as a political "gimme" meant to appease Southerners.

I would advise being careful about treating this as just a north/south thing. For example, the exact mechanisms by which it happens might not be quite the same, but the disenfranchisement rate among black voters in Wisconsin is about the same as what GP reports for Florida.

Oh it's the exact same mechanism.

The only difference is that here in Wisconsin we know that our government is corrupt, and because of the corruption here there is little we can do to combat that corruption. I mean we have everything from Walker, to little boys being used for sex at Lincoln Hills, to out and out DA's who are crime lords. (Literally, a few years back there was a DA who would take "donations" to "charity" from drug runners. They would actually divert shipments to go through his jurisdiction because if you get caught all you had to do was pay the "donation". It was really bad.)

I'm pretty sure if you were to ask the average Wisconsinite, they would openly admit much of the corruption up here. Not only with crime, or blacks, but with money, with land, with everything basically. Why do you think we have protests with hundreds of thousands of people showing up? It's not just Walker, at least in my opinion it's not. It's the system that people feel he represents and defends.

By contrast, in Florida, I get the sense that people think that's the way things are supposed to work. They believe they have a good system and that the system works the way God intended.

> By contrast, in Florida, I get the sense that people think that's the way things are supposed to work. They believe they have a good system and that the system works the way God intended.

It depends who you ask. I've only lived in Florida for 40 years but I find it split in thirds with 1/3 willing to tolerate Tallahassee corruption and crumbling infrastructure as the price of low taxation while the other 2/3 are appalled but don't or can't vote.

I think from an outside POV the sorts of divides are more in your face and more geographically dispersed in the south.

There also seems to be more political homogeneity.

It's a state-by-state system. Whatever is set up in the South wasn’t set up to appease Southerners, it was set up by Southerners to give effect to their desires.

I'm referring to Federal laws and Constitutional underpinnings.

For instance, the loophole in the 13th.

Which, but for it's existence, would not have allowed "...Southerners to give effect to their desires..."

Penal enforced labor was not a uniquely southern thing (or a uniquely “slave state” thing) before the Civil War, and not abolishing it along with chattel slavery was not a sop to the South.

The South really exploited that allowance as a replacement for chattel slavery, though, but they did that with every power state governments were not explicitly denied (and, because of the lack of substantive enforcement of much of the 14th Amendment for nearly a century after the Civil War, many which they were explicitly denied.)

???

Are you seriously proposing that the loophole in the 13th was not placed there as a consolation to Southerners? I mean let's be frank here, the entire issue of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance was a compromise to Southerners. It wouldn't have passed otherwise. Fast forward to the end of the Civil War, and they chose the compromise in the Northwest Ordinance instead of the Sumner Amendment for the same reasons. Sumner's Amendment didn't even make it out of committee.

I don't see how anyone can say that slave states have not had an outsized influence on the slavery question as it is practiced in the US. They've had that influence, in my opinion, since our inception. It, (slavery), really was almost one of the original questions we had to answer at the founding of our Republic.

Yes: the "loophole" you're referring to is no such thing. It's language directly aimed at enabling felons (white, black, or otherwise) to be put to useful work. That's what everyone, everywhere, was doing at the time the law was drafted.

Imagine if Britain had been the one drafting the 13th amendment, at the same point in history. Removing this language would have meant giving up on the penal labor colony known as Australia. America was—not as famously—doing exactly the same thing.

???

Why would we have cared what Britain was doing?

They were our cold enemy during the Civil War. (At least, they were the cold enemy if you were on the Union side.)

What the rest of the world was doing was irrelevant to how the 13th was drafted. The war would be won. Slaves would be freed. The only questions we were considering was how to put that all down on paper. And for that question, the only thing that mattered was domestic politics.

Uh? I think you misread. I was pointing out that every major nation-state was running—and relying on the productive output of!—penal labor colonies in the 1800s. I brought up Britain as a well known example: everyone knows that Britain ran penal labor colonies. But the US was also running—and depending on—penal labor colonies.

The "loophole" is, to put it in modern terms, a concession to the American penal-labor-colony industry lobby. (Well, not really, since we didn't have private prisons back then. All the work being done by US penal labor colonies was directly to the productive benefit of the US government.)

Only it wasn't. The Northwest Ordinance was written the way it was specifically to appease slave states. It was calibrated so that slave states would outnumber free states by three even in the worst case. Everything from the slavery question, to the question of conditions under which territories would enter the Union, was settled in a fashion meant not to anger slave states. (Except, of course, for a few questions settled for what we, today, suspect were generous sums of money. But those were things like education. ie-where and how a university would be established.)

In fact, even a review of the Congressional Record, which I had the misfortune of having to do on these very two questions for a Capstone project back in undergrad, makes that very clear. It's obviously been a very long time, and the material involved was voluminous, but I can't recall offhand any mention of the penal labor industry. The debate was dominated by appeals to interests and even feelings of slave states.

Penal labor was very common in the 1860s. The UK, and its colonies, didn't ban penal labor until about 1950s. France didn't ban it until 1987. The statement was added to the Northwest Ordinance and the 13th Amendment, not as a sop to the Southerners to reintroduce slavery by backdoor means, but to ensure that someone couldn't look at the text and decide that the customary practice of penal labor would be considered outlawed.

A popular theory is that mass incarceration was the replacement for segregation when it was outlawed.

Ahh yes the old Three Fifths Compromise is still in effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

A webcached version of your article, since orlandosentinel.com blocks visits from European countries because of the GDPR: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pI5zTYk...

A constituent group that removes rival constituents from the voter pool... wow, talk about a conflict of interest

You can't vote if you're in prison..?