Overview

The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume Two demonstrates the need for a Reform Prison Theology and a Holistic Penal Ethics in the United States and the United Kingdom (England and Wales, and Scotland). As a descriptive, analytic, and prescriptive engagement, it contends that colonialism and penal slavery are the modern vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of chattel slavery also made possible by the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. This book explores the transition from the institution of chattel slavery to colonialism and penal slavery prior to and after 1970 by the superpowers of the transatlantic slave trade, including the US, France, and the UK. It shows the intersections of the economic and racial influences of chattel slavery, the Black Codes, the preservation of the cult of White supremacy on the development of the post-1970 penal industries and their collateral effects of the high rates of prisoner deaths in the US and the UK. Like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Volume Two argues that Immanuel Kant provided the most concise philosophical claims for the emergence of the cult of White supremacy and its militant preservation through the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan against Black humanity.

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Reviews

""The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume Two, is a remarkable and impressive work of scholarship and moral urgency. Walter-Sleyon's command of intellectual history is on full display as he demonstrates the pervasiveness of white supremacist ideas and the through line from slavery to the modern carceral state. His moral clarity is bracing but humanizing, as he brings the reader into an encounter with the human toll of slavery and its legacy."" --Andrew Hayashi, Nancy L. Buc '69 Research Professor of Democracy and Equity, University of Virginia School of Law ""The enslavement of Africans, and the wealth generated by it, remains the essential source behind American penal exceptionalism into the twenty-first century. Black Diamonds provides an essential genealogy of the ideas that have sustained this engine of wealth and punitiveness and a critical starting point for any effort to escape this legacy."" --Jonathan Simon, Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law, University of California Berkeley School of Law

Author Information

George Walters-Sleyon teaches applied ethics, introduction to philosophy, and world religions at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He is the author of Locked Up and Locked Down: Multitude Lingers in Limbo Revised Edition (2017); Nuggets from the Night: An Anthology of Poetic Expressions (2020); Prison Chaplains on the Beat in US and UK Prisons (2021); God in the Name of Jesus Christ (2022), and several articles.

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