Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor that was practiced in the Southern United States, where private individuals and corporations could lease labor from the state in the form of incarcerated people, nearly all of whom were Black.
The state of Louisiana leased out convicted people as early as 1844.Punishment in America: A Reference Handbook, by Cyndi Banks, page 58 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 gradually phased out following Francis Biddle's "Circular No. 3591" of December 12, 1941. Whilst not having been explicitly abolished, the practice became politically untenable. As a result other forms of prison labour remain legal in the United States, under the Thirteenth Amendment's penal exemption clause.
The system was highly lucrative for both the lessees and state governments. For example, in 1898, 73 percent of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing, whilst contractors were able to lease people at costs as low as $9 a month. 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 convicted people leased.Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, (1998) , p. 271
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 incarcerated people labored".Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, Verso Press, 1996, p. 3
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.Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, (2008) , p. 4
Origins Convict leasing in the United States was widespread in the South during the Reconstruction Period (1865–1877) after the end of the Civil War, when many Southern legislatures were ruled by majority coalitions of African Americans and Radical Republicans, and Union generals acted as military governors. Farmers and businessmen needed to find replacements for the labor force once their slaves had been freed. After many African American politicians were forced out of state and local positions, many Southern legislatures passed Black Codes to restrict free movement of black people and force them into employment. For instance, several states made it illegal for a black man to change jobs without the approval of his employer. If convicted of vagrancy, black people could be imprisoned, and they also received sentences for a variety of petty offenses. States began to lease convicted labor to the plantations and other facilities seeking labor, as the freed men were trying to withdraw and work for themselves. This provided the states with a new source of revenue during years when their finances were largely depleted, and lessees profited by the use of forced labor at less than market rates.
Black Codes, pig laws, and vagrancy laws, intended to restrict the movement and freedom of Black people across the South, functioned by criminalizing unemployment, homelessness, and changes in employment. These laws were coupled with increasing sentencing, and harsher penalties for minor offences across the South. In doing so, statutes created a new criminal class made up of newly freed people, rapidly expanding the numbers of people subject to imprisonment. As this happened, states across the South would begin to codify convict leasing within statute books. Alabama, as one example, did so in 1875 by amending several aspects of the Revised Code "to employ or hire out the convicts, to be used without the walls of the penitentiary, either upon public or private work, within the State". Whist prison labour had existed prior to the Civil War, the rapid expansion of incarcerated populations gave way for a reorganisation of carceral labour systems from internal state motivations to external economic and racial motivations.
The criminal justice system worked closely with private planters and industrialists to supply prison laborers, the overwhelming majority of whom were Black. The constitutional basis for convict leasing lay in the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment, which ostensibly abolished slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime". In several states, such as Alabama, the practice would be implemented following fiscal crises, with the purpose of the practice to provide financial profits to the lessees, and to the government agencies that sold convicted labor to the lessees. The practice became widespread and was used to supply labor to farming, railroad, mining and logging operations throughout the South.
Although convict leasing became most widespread throughout the post-Civil War South, similar systems of contract prison labour had existed earlier in Northern states as well. For example, the New York State prison at Auburn, Auburn Prison, implemented a system of silent prison labor which resulted in profits generated for the prison as early as 1823. Although prison manufacturing had initially focused on manufacturing goods intended for use within the prison, such as uniforms and buckets, that practice changed in 1821 when principal keeper, Elam Lynds, took over prison administration, and used incarcerated laborers to produce goods to sell on the market. Lynds' approach, known as the Auburn system, or "silent system", expanded across the United States becoming the dominant model of prison discipline by the 1830s. Initially conceived as a "regime of moral discipline", rather than explicitly driven by a profit motive, the costs of implementing the system were offset by the profits generated by prison-made goods. In the south and west of the United States carceral labour systems would disproportionately rely upon Black incarcerated people.
Economic motivations Following emancipation and the Civil War, Southern states were economically devastated with many state treasuries facing fiscal crises and insolvency. Additionally, with the loss of enslaved labourers, private enterprise would also struggle to sustain Southern economies without a rapid evolution. This economic motivation to keep economies built on forced labour afloat, led states and businesses to turn toward incarceration, and incarcerated people, to support both government spending and private sector profits. With the sudden growth of incarceration as a labour source, corruption would follow with companies lagging behind on payments, states aiming to maximise revenues, and both losing track of exactly who was incarcerated.
Incarcerated, overwhelmingly Black, people were a source of revenue for states from the onset of convict leasing, viewed as a cheap and disposable workforce, and this view would persist as prison labour transitioned away from convict leasing and toward prisons as state operated self-sustaining plantations, farms and factories, like Angola Plantation which operates to this day. The state would, in effect, become the lessee.
The economic rationale of convict leasing was inseparable from its racial motivations and roots. Following slavery, incarceration and carceral labour were utilised to rebuild economies with the newly criminalised Black citizens. Contemporary sociologist Frank Tannenbaum observed that incarceration was not solely an economic alternative to slavery, but a reorganisation to preserve racial hierarchy and provide a flow of cheap labour for industry.
Lived experiences and gender By the 1880s, Black people made up between 80 and 90% of those incarcerated in the South. The lived experience of two Black men—Ezekiel Archey and Ambrose Haskins—who were leased to the Pratt Mines by the state, was documented in their petition to Reginald Dawson, the then president of the Alabama Board of Inspectors of Convicts. Their letter describes persistent discrimination and physical abuse based explicitly on their skin colour, as well as a refusal to allow them family visitation. They also describe food shortages, and excessive work quotas. They observed that Black people "who do the work" were being routinely punished for the misconduct of incarcerated white people, whilst also denied the same privileges afforded to the white people. At no point do they plea for freedom, but they write to show the harsh treatment of incarcerated Black people as compared to incarcerated white people, as delays and missed quotas were out of their control.
Whilst the majority of people subjected to convict leasing were Black men, Black women were also incarcerated and forced into labour within the system. Women’s experiences were both gendered and racialised, reflecting an intersection of punishment, exploitation, and social control. In the post-Emancipation South, Black women were also criminalised through the same mechanisms that men were with charges of vagrancy, petty theft, and "crimes against morality." These charges often masked efforts to regulate behaviour, enforce economic dependence, and maintain social control over Black women.
One example of the intersection of race and gender with convict leasing is the life of Ella Gamble who, whilst pregnant, was incarcerated for murder in 1884 by an all white male jury, based on circumstantial evidence. Whilst incarcerated she spent two decades leased out to many private companies, performing a range of industrial, agricultural, and domestic labor tasks ranging from brick-making to cooking, "under the sting of the lash." Toward the end of her incarceration she had physically deteriorated under the cumulative strain of forced work, repeated floggings, sexual abuse, childbirth injuries, and untreated medical conditions.
Another example is that of Carrie Massie, a teenaged incarcerated victim of extreme physical and sexual violence in Georgia. Leased to the Rising Fawn furnace, upon arrival she was subject to cruel and unusual punishments known as "water cure" and "blind mule", before sexual violence and repeated rape at the hands of the whipping boss. Though camp operator Joseph Brown had built the female barracks separately from the male barracks ostensibly to prevent sexual assaults, women were routinely victimised by guards. Black women were not only perceived as promiscuous and "unrapeable", but their labour was considered the "property" of camp officials. Officials acted as though they "owned" sexual access to incarcerated Black women. Sexual abuse and harsh punishments acted as functions of prison hierarchy, exploited to maintain control over Black women.
The system in various states