Last week, The Wall Street Journal published an article about how “[c]ouples looking for something different are choosing a stretch behind bars at former prisons for weddings.” But some are already calling out this new trend as problematic and comparable to a plantation wedding venue.
“So pretty! So much history! The photos will look great! People said the same about plantation weddings, which have been under scrutiny in recent years with wedding planning sites like Pinterest and the Knot promising to stop glorifying them,” The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote.
But is having a wedding at a prison really that problematic? Some would argue yes, because prisons are merely a modern-day reincarnated form of slavery.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has already spotlighted how “modern-day prison labor practices…descend from the enslavement of Black people.”
In an amicus brief, the ACLU documented “tactics used by white-owned business interests to re-capture, incarcerate, and re-enslave Black people after emancipation led to mass incarceration and are connected to the prison labor policies of today.”
The data shows that a racial disparity does exist when it comes to the current make-up of prison populations. Because despite sentencing and corrections policy changes over the last couple decades, according to Pew Charitable Trusts, “Black adults were still imprisoned in 2020 at five times the rate for White adults.”
In addition, some prisons are even situated “on former plantations where workers cultivate some of the same crops as people who were enslaved—for cents an hour.”
And it’s all legal under the U.S. Constitution. Per Section 1 of the 13th Amendment, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
As the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) notes, this “exception clause has enabled slavery to persist for generations through punitive systems.” After the Civil War ended, many states in the south “imposed Black Codes: laws that restricted Black people’s labor by requiring apprenticeships and labor contracts for employment, often with former owners of enslaved people. Black Codes also established systems of convict leasing and vagrancy laws, which incentivized the arrest, incarceration, and subsequent re-enslavement of Black people.”
These laws made conditions such as being homeless, unemployed, or living in poverty a crime, so that former slaveowners could meet their labor workforce needs after emancipation.
Thus, the same critiques that Senior News & Politics Editor at ESSENCE Malaika Jabali wrote in a 2019 piece about plantation weddings also hold true for prison weddings. “Many white Americans insist that they had no role in slavery and that it was ‘so long ago’. Yet they seem quite adamant about defending it. Of course, denying Black Americans’ pain – and preserving and normalizing the symbols of Black subjugation – is just as American as slavery itself.” So, the answer is yes—prison weddings are problematic.