Hip-hop has been telling this story for years. From Tupac’s Changes to Common’s Letter to the Free to Killer Mike’s Reagan, the culture has consistently connected America’s history of slavery to the modern prison system. Now, a leading civil rights attorney is adding legal weight to what the music has been saying all along.
The Talk That Connected the Dots
Rahsaan D. Hall, CEO and president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, delivered a Black History Month lecture at Cabot Park Village in Newton that drew a direct line from chattel slavery to mass incarceration, according to The Heights.
Hall, a former ACLU of Massachusetts Racial Justice Program Director and ex-prosecutor, didn’t mince words. He pointed to a loophole most Americans never learned about in school: the 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” That exception became a blueprint.
“Many Southern states began enacting Black codes, or state laws that criminalized the conduct of Black people with the aim, at worst, or the consequence, at best, of incarcerating Black people who would subsequently be leased out by correctional institutions to farms and plantations,” Hall told the audience, as reported by The Heights.
In other words, slavery didn’t end. It got rebranded.
What the Culture Already Knew
Hall referenced Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name, which documents how convict leasing turned prisons into a labor supply chain for the same plantations that enslaved people had just been freed from. This is the same history Ava DuVernay unpacked in her 2016 documentary 13th, where Common performed Letter to the Free inside a prison.
Jay-Z and Meek Mill co-founded the REFORM Alliance specifically to fight the criminal justice policies Hall described. Killer Mike has testified before Congress on these issues. Kendrick Lamar’s Alright became a protest anthem at Black Lives Matter marches. The thread connecting slavery to policing to prisons isn’t new to hip-hop listeners. It’s the foundation of conscious rap.
What’s significant here is a legal professional with prosecutorial experience validating the framework. Hall spent years as an Assistant District Attorney in Suffolk County before moving to civil rights advocacy. He’s seen the system from the inside.
Why This Matters Right Now
Hall also connected the historical dots to present-day fights. He flagged ongoing battles over voting access, school curriculum censorship, the right to protest, escalating ICE enforcement, and efforts to remove slavery exhibits from national parks and educational materials, per The Heights.
Today, the United States incarcerates roughly 2 million people, according to The Sentencing Project. Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans. The system Hall described isn’t history. It’s current policy.
Hall made his case personal, too. He traced his paternal ancestry to the 1870 Census, the first to record Black Georgians after emancipation. Before that date, his family simply didn’t exist in the official record. Understanding that erasure, he argued, provides “inspiration, conviction, hope, and salvation.”
The Takeaway
When rappers talk about the school-to-prison pipeline, the 13th Amendment loophole, or convict labor, they’re not exaggerating. Experts like Rahsaan Hall are confirming the receipts. The question isn’t whether the connection between slavery and mass incarceration is real. The question is what we do about it.
Know your history. Support organizations like the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts and the REFORM Alliance. And keep listening to the music. The culture has been the messenger all along.
