My film, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, looks at the privatised prison system as a sanitised slave system. And in it, I ask whether America is heading towards another race war. It is not, as some have said, fanciful agit pop. What we have seen in Missouri over the past couple of weeks shows what is bubbling close to the surface. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, along with Eric Garner, Ezell Ford and John Crawford III all men who have been killed by the police, is another victim of the race wars in America.

And America’s race tragedy is, in part, the legacy of slavery. Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, one in 10 black men in their thirties is in jail or prison on any given day. As Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow, more black men are in “prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850”. Slavery never ended in America, it just changed its face.

Why does a country seemingly so concerned with liberty, have such a high rate of incarceration (2.3 million and counting)? Because it pays to imprison. Prisons are increasingly owned by corporations that profit from incarceration. These private companies are either paid by the state, or they put the inmates to work thus creating a cheap and constant work force. If a product is “Made in America”, chances are it was made in a US prison. Ninety-three per cent of household paintbrushes in the states are made in US prisons, 30 per cent of consumer electronics. Companies such as Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Starbucks, Microsoft and Nintendo have products made in prisons (often via subcontractors) and states attract business by boasting about large prison populations which can be put to work as cheap labour. The first prison in America, after all, was formulated by a Texas governor in the year that slavery was abolished (at the end of the day, who was going to bring all that cotton and crops back in?). This eventually led to the chain gangs and Jim Crow laws which continued to criminalise and incarcerate black people in America well into the Sixties.

Ironically, prisons don’t seem to do much to reduce crime. Studies suggest that very substantial increases in imprisonment will produce only a modest reduction in crime. Worse, there is evidence that prison acts only to increase recidivism. Locking up people in the States doesn’t make a safer society. But it is a profitable business made off the backs of mostly African-Americans (and increasingly Latinos and other migrants).

America has never formally broken its relationship with slavery – and black communities still live in its shadows. America needs to re-examine it’s past in order to be able to move forward. Missouri is not the beginning, nor will it be the end.

As Dr Martin Luther King, Jr said, “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”

Source: Tina Ghavari. “America’s racist penal system is slavery by another name.” The Telegraph. August 20, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11046113/Americas-racist-penal-system-is-slavery-by-another-name.html.