Troy Thompson
English 102
3/22/13
Stuck in the Past Corruption is something that has damaged our political and legal systems since the beginning of this country. Groups like the Mafia, crooked politicians, and corrupt police officers are the types of people who continue to allow “the system” to be corrupted. Is there a way to stop this corruption? Possibly, but it’s going to take a lot more effort from the people in charge to put this issue in our past. The Southeastern states are the main reason why corruptness still exists within our local governments and police departments. Mississippi has always been polluted by corruption and there reputation as a state has suffered tremendously from it. For example, Mississippi didn’t officially abolish slavery until February of 2013. It’s been reported that the state government mistakenly overlooked the laws against enslaving persons in their state (Mitchell). The fact that it took one-hundred & forty-eight years to correct this mistake poses many questions about the issue. Another valid example of corruption in the South comes from a drug raid carried out on the campus of the University of Alabama. Seventy-four students of the university were arrested for multiple marijuana related charges, which all happened on February 19th of 2013 (Dethrage). Not that the students weren’t breaking the law, but the way these arrests were handled happened to be extremely corrupt. Many people outside the university never took the time to investigate the details of the drug raid any farther than what the media posted on the day of the raid. Therefore, not many people realize that both the students and the police department were in the wrong in this situation. Further research lead to a story about two county commissioners from Washington County in Georgia. These commissioners were accused of theft in office, obstructing official business, tampering with county records, and vandalism. However, they were never charged of these crimes, even though the police department found strong evidence against them. Even the sheriff recommended they be charged, but yet, no action towards the issue has been taken by the Washington County police department (Bauer). The sense of possible corruption within this Georgia county just further proves to the point of this argument. When will the “Deep South” do away with their corrupt ways that have been holding the rest of America back for decades? Slavery was an issue that damaged the United States for many years, starting at the beginning of our country’s existence. After a long, fought Civil War between the Confederate states and the Union states, slavery was finally abolished. Well, almost finally abolished, considering just one state took a little longer than the rest of the states to finalize the abolishment. The last state to ratify the 13th amendment was Kentucky in 1976, or so we thought. It turns out that Mississippi just happened to overlook the fact that they hadn’t ratified the amendment until 1995. However, even then they didn’t take all the steps to making it official. State Senator Hillman Frazier proposed a resolution to abolish slavery in 1995, and the resolution passed through the Mississippi state Senate and House of Representatives. Apparently, the vote was unanimous because there was no one that voted against the idea of ratifying the amendment, but some people didn’t even vote on the issue either. Well even though this deeply rooted southern state had taken steps to fixing this problem, they still didn’t bother to finish out the process. So the amendment stayed in the laws of Mississippi, since proper action wasn’t fully taken to officially ratify it. On February 7th of 2013, the 13th amendment was officially recorded as ratified in the state of Mississippi. Luckily, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi happened to go see the new movie Lincoln one