A system, used across the South from the end of the Civil War until 1928, in which states and counties rented prisoners, mostly Black, to private employers.
Convict leasing was a system in which Southern states and counties rented out prisoners to planters, lumber companies, railroad builders, and mine operators. The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” and within a few years of the Civil War, states with ruined budgets and prisons realized they could lease their convicts to private employers, turning the cost of punishment into a source of revenue.
The people leased were overwhelmingly Black. Black Codes and, after 1877, vagrancy statutes, contract-labor laws, and Pig Laws that turned petty theft into a serious crime swept freedpeople into jails. In Alabama the penitentiary population changed from 99 percent white to 90 percent Black within a decade of the war. Under the state’s leasing system, which ran from 1875 to 1928, more than 95 percent of county prisoners and 90 percent of state prisoners were African American.
Employers had little money invested in any one prisoner and little incentive to keep leased workers alive. Alabama sent most of its convicts to coal mines operated by companies such as the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and Sloss Iron. Whipping was the accepted punishment, used to enforce work quotas as well as to punish escape attempts. Annual death rates among state prisoners ran 4 to 5 percent, and at the Coalburg mine in 1895 county prisoners died at a rate of 90 per 1,000. In 1911 an explosion at the Banner Mine killed 123 African American prisoners. By 1912 prison mining earned Alabama more than $1 million a year.
Public outrage slowly ended the practice. Many Southern states stopped leasing and instead worked prisoners on public projects in chain gangs. Florida abolished leasing in the early 1920s, and Alabama, the last state to do so, ended it in 1928. Critics at the time and historians since have called the system a new form of slavery.
See also: Black Codes, Sharecropping, Jim Crow, Emancipation, Reconstruction
Sources
- Encyclopedia of Alabama, “Convict-Lease System.” Link
- National Park Service, “Alabama Penitentiary: Prison Labor before and after the Civil War (Teaching with Historic Places).” Link
- PBS, Slavery by Another Name, “Convict Leasing.” Link
- National Archives, “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865).” Link
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