THE CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM was a system of penalized labor practiced in the Southern United States. It began with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil war in 1865, peaking around 1880, and ending in Alabama, in 1928.
Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to plantation owners and corporations. It is considered “one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history.” African Americans, due to selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing, made up 67% of the convicts leased.
The prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes. They were punished for working too slow (ten lashes of a whip), ”Ugly planting” (five lashes of a whip), and not picking enough cotton” (five lashes of a whip). Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and “shackled poisoning” (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare). Convicts who tried to escape were whipped till the blood ran down their legs.
Writer Douglas Blackmon stated “It was a system of slavery 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.”
The Things That Are Left Out In School…SMH
