This chapter focuses on the prison industrial complex in the United States to ask again about what gets remembered and how, to take us back to the question of what happens to a manumitted slave, and to revisit the figure of the slave as an uncanny object in the blind spot of modernity. Do the patterns and practices of mass incarceration suggest that the exercise of despotic power is regarded as legitimate if its objects are considered to have put themselves outside civil society? Are the processes of transforming humanity into moral beings reversible, so that prisoners can de-create themselves through civil and social death? One of the key problems with the discourse of modern slavery and its insistence on the rupture between past and present and the ‘newness’ of the slavery lurking in the shadows and in our nail bars is the way that it brings slavery into the present. For its core message of abolition to work, ‘old’ slavery has to be comfortably assigned to the past, where it was abolished by the high-minded, incorruptible and conscientious few who came to realise how fundamentally wrong it was, and the actions of like-minded consumers and activists who worked tirelessly to shine a light on the immoral activities of the slave traders and holders and to expose the inhumanity of their commerce. When slavery is brought into the present out of this story, it is often as part of a grand redemptive narrative, from the history of slavery to the future of abolition through a present in which today's slavery is invisible, a ‘hidden crime’, and slaves themselves are ‘locked away’ in obscurity. As Joel Quirk has pointed out, the literature on contemporary slavery tends either to ignore the history of slavery or to posit ‘a sharp divide between past and present’. Contemporary issues such as child sexual exploitation, trafficking and servile marriage are framed as distinctively modern problems associated in particular with globalisation and the disposability of labour (Quirk 2006, 566). This approach raises a whole set of questions about what slavery really means, and also about how to connect the past to the present.