Just before the Civil War, some 4 million men, women and children were owned, comprising nearly one-seventh of the total population. We fought a savage civil war for four years, the cause initially for the union, with the issue of slavery predominating by the end of 1862. In the twenty-first century, we are experiencing a more visceral, less brutish form of slavery but one which in many ways carries its own oppression and cruelty.

We are not speaking of actual ownership of people as chattels which slavery entailed, but we are speaking of a certain depravity that a managed economic and social system has helped to fashion. How many, in effect, are owned today, maybe not in the same respect as slaves, but what we might call virtual ownership – the weak under the control of all manners of authority around them.

Poverty has its own flavor of a modern slavery, involving a state of deprivation, or a lack of the usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions, this with the denial, scarcity and societal dispossession that accompanies it, socially and politically. Accordingly, if your mind and body are not captive, your hope and your prospects are.

All experience higher levels of harassment at home or work, whether coming from employers, landlords, or public authorities who exist to protect property, something the impoverished do not own. Their children suffer from learning deficiencies, wrought by substandard schools, food deprivation, or environmental scourges of various kinds. Their offspring often languish in prison.

Many small cities dependent on fines for revenue are traps for the poor. The impoverished live in places like Ferguson, Missouri where the little money they have is forfeited to fines from white police traffic stops for things such as broken tail lights which often mushroom into heavy fines. Blacks proportionally were stopped and searched much more often than whites, Ferguson black disparity is 1.37, while statewide it is 1.59.

In some southern towns minor civic offenses can turn into a “debtor prison” scenario where privatized contracted collectors have authority to incarcerate for payment, often leading to doubling unpaid fines when interest and penalties are applied.