Every year on June 19, Americans have the opportunity to commemorate Juneteenth—the day in 1865 when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas to take control of the state and liberate all enslaved people. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation; a gap between Abraham Lincoln’s pen strokes and actualized Black freedom that illustrates how there is often a pronounced delay between the official declaration of progressive outcomes and their concrete achievement.

Juneteenth offers us the opportunity to think expansively about the gaps between aspirations and reality in our own time. One of those gaps is the distance between our national commitment to the ideals of liberty and freedom and the brutal reality that the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, with 1.8 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails.

We need to ask ourselves what it means to celebrate Juneteenth in an age of mass incarceration. In recent years, scholars and activists have highlighted the racist origins of mass incarceration as an outgrowth of slavery and an extension of exploitative labor. Books like Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and documentaries like Ava DuVernay’s “13th” demonstrate that there is a direct line connecting today’s racial injustices in the justice system to the horrors of America’s past.

The 13th Amendment may have abolished slavery, but not for incarcerated people. Instead, it laid the foundation for the convict lease system, through which convicts became a source of revenue for states. The convict lease system made convicts’ condition infinitely worse than under a system of slavery. That’s because enslavers had a financial investment in the people they enslaved, as they served both as a source of labor and a source of capital when sold; for this reason, enslavers had an incentive to exercise a certain level of restraint in the amount of work required and punishment issued. This restraint was not bestowed upon leased convicts, where no right of ownership existed.

Read the full article about mass incarceration by Kristen E. Broady and Anthony Barr at Brookings.