Rep. Nina Milliken, D-Blue Hill, is a member of the Maine Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee.

I was recently invited to a Juneteenth celebration hosted by the Maine State Prison branch of the NAACP. The gathering was both powerful and infuriating.

Four members of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) are housed in a general population unit. The night before the celebration, a thunderstorm knocked out power to the unit. Because the cell doors operate electronically, the men remained locked in their cells. Although a manual override exists, prison staff chose not to use it. Without electricity, they also lost access to functioning plumbing.

Many of these men share cells. Imagine preparing to celebrate Juneteenth — a holiday commemorating Black liberation — trapped in a cell with no functioning plumbing and no escape from the smell of your cellmate’s waste. Imagine knowing that prison officials have the ability to open the doors and allow movement to another area, yet choose not to. 

As of this writing, they remain confined after nearly four full days.

The irony was impossible to ignore. As we gathered to honor the delayed promise of freedom for Juneteenth, four of the event’s organizers remained locked away, denied basic human dignity.

On Juneteenth, we celebrate the liberation of Black slaves in Galveston, Texas, two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The challenge here for me is that the U.S. never abolished slavery. We provided a constitutional pathway for it upon ratification 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.” 

This amendment permits slavery as punishment for a crime. Crime isn’t a moral standard, but one defined by legislatures and in the aftermath of the ratification of the amendment, legislatures passed laws that specifically created criminals of Black people — the “Black Codes.” While this explicit practice isn’t permitted anymore, in practice there are many ways that we criminalize Black people and punish them more harshly. 

As an example: last legislative session, I passed a law eliminating the final gaps between how Maine criminalized crack and powder cocaine.

Crack, a drug historically associated with Black communities, has carried with it a heavier sentence than powder coke, a drug historically associated with wealth and affluence, despite them being effectively the same drug. Up until the passage of that law, you would receive a longer prison sentence for some crack offenses than you would for the same cocaine offenses. 

The reason is simple. We as a nation built our entire history on the backs of Black slave labor and we continue to build economies on a criminal legal system that is deeply flawed and profoundly racist. It is working exactly as it was intended to work, though — as a system intended to preserve slavery in the U.S. 

I ask us all to see Juneteenth as a call to action. One-fifth of Black men in this nation will spend time in prison. Two million people are currently incarcerated in the U.S. and another 3.7 million are on probation or parole — able to be returned to prison at any time. This is more than any other nation. This doesn’t make us safer.

In his 1852 speech “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July,” Fredrick Douglass stated, “Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.” 

What to a prisoner is Juneteenth? Over the sounds of jubilation that I heard from across our beautiful state and nation, I heard the hard slamming of metal prison doors, and that was for the lucky prisoners whose doors would open. 

While I love the occasion of Juneteenth because I want to see my Black friends and community members rejoice in their powerful and rich histories, I also want to call to our attention that we celebrate an occasion that hasn’t materialized — the occasion of our total and collective liberation.