Convict leasing
Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor that was practiced historically in the Southern United States before it was formally abolished during the 20th century. Under this system, private individuals and corporations could lease labor from the state in the form of prisoners, nearly all of whom were Black.
As the Vera Institute of Justice has documented, this practice continues in all but name: “Mass incarceration and the criminalization of poverty have created a modern-day abomination—nearly two million incarcerated people in the United States have no protection from legal slavery. A disproportionate percentage of them are Black and people of color. Every day, incarcerated people work—under threat of additional punishment—for little to no pay. Estimates suggest that a minimum of $2 billion and as much as $14 billion a year in wages is stolen from incarcerated people, to the enrichment of private companies, state-owned entities, and correctional agencies.” Prisoners today produce products that have been bought by companies like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.
The state of Louisiana leased out convicts as early as 1844. The system expanded throughout most of the South with the emancipation of enslaved people at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. The practice peaked about 1880 and persisted in various forms until it was abolished by President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Francis Biddle’s “Circular No. 3591” of December 12, 1941.
The system was highly lucrative for both the lessees and state governments. For example, in 1898, 73% of Alabama’s annual state revenue came from convict leasing. Corruption, lack of accountability, and violence resulted in “one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history”. African Americans, mostly adult males, due to “vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing”, comprised the vast majority—though not all—of the convicts leased.
While states of the Northern United States sometimes contracted for prison labor, the historian Alex Lichtenstein notes that “only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical “penitentiary” become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored”.
The writer Douglas A. Blackmon described the system: It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.
