A closer look

Convict Leasing in the South

How did politicians and private business owners profit from the imprisonment and abuse of African Americans in the South?

by Julian Ehsan, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Georgia Prisoners Strike Against Inhumane Conditions

On July 12, 1886, 109 men working in U.S. senator and former governor Joseph E. Brown’s Dade County mines in Cole City, Georgia, barricaded themselves in their living quarters and went on strike. They demanded the dismissal of a cruel overseer, better food and rations, and the abolition of corporal punishment at the camp. Strikes are serious for all workers, but these men risked brutal physical punishment as retaliation. They were not free laborers but convicted prisoners leased to the company to work for no pay.

Criminalizing the Black Body: The Beginnings of Leasing

These striking prisoners were part of the system known as convict leasing, and it was by no means limited to Georgia. Beginning during Reconstruction and extending into the early twentieth century, state governments across the southern United States created programs to lease convicts to local business owners and planters instead of housing them in state penitentiaries. Leased prisoners worked in industrial and agricultural settings (many in enterprises financed in part by northern capitalists) in every southern state, including coal mines, turpentine farms, lumber camps, plantations, factories, and railroads. This extremely cheap forced labor was integral to the economic recovery and development of the South in the decades after the Civil War.

Lessees (the people who leased the prisoners to work for them) were responsible for feeding, clothing, and disciplining the prisoners for a fixed number of years and could use them for whatever labor they wanted. In addition to providing low-cost labor to industry, leasing allowed southern state governments to save money by not building prisons while simultaneously receiving a steady source of revenue from the lessees. After the Civil War, southern states adopted laws to limit the freedom of movement, occupations, and civil rights of free African Americans. Incarceration dramatically increased under these “Black Codes,” as those arrested received harsh prison sentences for petty crimes, including minor theft and vagrancy. As a result of these aggressively enforced laws, and the concurrent rise of the convict leasing system, convict populations became both much larger and overwhelmingly Black. As the Principal Keeper of the Georgia Penitentiary reported, 88 percent of the 303 convicts working at Senator Brown’s Dade County mines in 1882 were Black, such as twenty-five-year-old Arnold Robt (serving ten years for “simple larceny”) and twenty-three-year-old Cezard Alford (serving twenty years for “burglarly” [sic]). By 1900, approximately 90 percent of the state’s 2,258 leased convicts were African American men, while another 3 percent were African American women. Mexican, Native American, and Chinese convicts across the South were also forced into leasing.

Living and Working Conditions in Convict Camps

Living and working conditions were abysmal in convict labor camps across the South. People who “rented” the convicts had no financial incentive to treat them humanely. Indeed, the reverse was true. The less money spent on food, clothing, medical care, even guarding the prisoners, the greater the profits. If the convict died, the lessee simply “rented” another one. As a result, death rates among leased convicts were approximately ten times higher than the death rates of prisoners in nonlease states. State senators investigating the Dade County mines in 1881 described unreasonably cold temperatures, vermin-infested beds, and “insufficient and unwholesome” food. A similar state report from 1886 reported that a convict, David Nash, was brutally wounded by falling rock in the mines at Rising Fawn, another of Brown’s ventures. Mine collapses were just one of many deadly workplace disasters that convict laborers faced due to lessee neglect of infrastructure and worker-safety provisions.

The striking convicts at Senator Brown’s Dade County mines also decried cruel treatment at the hands of an overseer. The government committee from 1886 confirmed these claims, writing that they received “unanimous complaint” that the whipping boss at the Cole City camp “is inhumane in inflicting punishment” and that he “oftentimes inflicts punishment when not deserved.” The committee ultimately recommended his removal, a demand made months earlier by the striking convicts. As historian Alex Lichtenstein notes, whipping was a tool of labor regulation and labor extraction used to force prisoners to meet their daily mining goals. But as Senator Brown remarked in an 1887 public hearing, whipping was also necessary to stifle “insubordinate” convicts who were emboldened by “erroneous ideas of sympathy and support” from the public and members of government. Were they not quelled, Brown warned, convicts would unleash violence on the (white) public. Even though convict leasing predominantly benefited wealthy and politically connected white men, Brown shrewdly stoked the widespread fears at the heart of white supremacy to defend its violence.

Convict Resistance and the End of Leasing

In the face of dangerous working conditions and barbaric treatment, convicts fought back. Sometimes prisoners staged strikes, like the one at the Dade County mines. More often, they sabotaged everyday operations. Prisoners working in mines, for example, loaded slate into coal carts to trick overseers about how much coal was being hauled, thereby lessening the day’s work. Sometimes they feigned illness, a tactic known as “betting the doctor.” When caught purposefully slowing down work, resisters often faced punishment. Reports from Senator Brown’s mines indicate that over half of the thousand whippings administered there between 1901 and 1904 were given for circumventing work and other labor-related infractions.

A number of reformers tried to end the convict leasing system in the South. Muckraking journalists decried the system’s brutal nature as in conflict with the goal of moral rehabilitation, and government committees sporadically investigated and exposed reprehensible conditions at convict camps. Labor unions and populist political parties likewise sought to expose abuses and end leasing, in large part to remedy the negative impact of prison labor on free workers. In addition to depressing the wages of free laborers who competed with a ready supply of prisoners, convict leasing eroded the power of unions to strike without fear of replacement. But it took more than grassroots resistance and government committees to end the practice. According to historian Matthew Mancini, Southern states only ended convict leasing when the system’s profitability declined. As industries forced unskilled and untrained convicts into intense labor, the prisoners resisted through sabotage, slowdowns, and work stoppages. As the quality of leased work fell, so did the profits of industry and of state governments.

In Georgia, convict leasing ended in 1908. Yet despite the end of leasing, prisoners in Georgia, and across the country, continued to be coerced into state-run manufacturing and agricultural work, as well as the building of public roads. In the words of historian David Oshinsky, “The South’s economic development can be traced by the blood of its prisoners.” The exploitation of prison labor and the Black Codes created the framework for mass incarceration and use of prison labor in the twentieth century. The legacy of criminalizing Black people, giving them harsh prison sentences, and forcing them to work for private industries or state governments remains as a form of institutionalized racism today.

Reflection Questions

Some historians have compared the convict lease system to a new, or worse, form of slavery for African Americans. What did these systems have in common and how did they differ?

In what ways did convict leasing diminish the rights of African Americans during the 1880s through the early twentieth century?

How did convicts resist inhumane treatment?

Why does convict leasing matter today?

Additional Reading

Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

Alexander C. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso Books, 1996).

Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

David Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

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Radicals and Reformers in the Progressive Era, 1900-1914