Convict leasing
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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. 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.
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".
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.