"In studying about a year ago, the practice of letting out public convicts to Private lessees to serve out their sentences under private management, I found that it does not belong to all our once slave States nor to all our once seceded States. Only it is no longer in practice outside of them. under our present condition in the South, it is beyond possibility that the individual black should behave mischievously without offensively re-arousing the old sentiments of the still dominant white man. As we have seen too, the white man virtually monopolizes the jury-box."
"Add another fact: the Southern States have entered upon a new era of material development. Now, if with these conditions in force the public mind has been captivated by glowing pictures of the remunerative economy of the convict-lease system, and by the seductive spectacle of mines and railways, turnpikes and levees, that everybody wants and nobody wants to pay for, growing apace by convict labor that seems to cost nothing, we may almost assert beforehand that the popular mind will-not so maliciously as unreflectingly-yield to the tremendous temptation to hustle the misbehaving black man into State prison under extravagant sentence, and sell his labor to the highest bidder."
"After the erroneous takings of the census of 1880 in South Carolina had been corrected, the population was shown to consist of about twenty blacks to every thirteen whites...what is to account for the fact that in 1881 there were committed to the State prison at Columbia South Carolina, 406 colored persons and but 25 whites? The proportion of blacks sentenced to the whole black population was one to every 1488: that of the whites to the white population was but one to every 15,644. In Georgia... there were 115 whites and 1071 colored... Yet of 52 pardons granted in the two years then closing, 22 were to whites and only 30 to blacks."
"This system springs primarily from the idea that the possession of a convicts person is an opportunity for the Sate to make money... The mitigations that arise in its practice through the humane or semi-humane sentiments of keepers and guards, and through the meager est of legislation, are few, scanty, and rare: and in the main the notion is clearly set forth and followed that a convict, whether pilferer or murderer, man, woman, or child, has almost no human right that the state is bound to be at any expense to protect."
"(The system) is not intended to imply that the long-term convict inside the prison is likely to serve out his sentence. while among a majority of commitments on shorter periods, men, women and children are frequently sentence for terms of 15, 20, 30, 40, and sometimes even of 50 years, a prisoner can rarely be found to have survived ten years of this brutal slavery either in the prison or in the convict camp. In Alabama, in 1880, there were but three who had been in confinement eight years, and one nine; while not one had lived out ten years' imprisonment. In Mississippi, December 1, 1881, among 77 convicts then on the roll under 10 years' sentence, 17 under sentences of between 20 and 50 years, none had served 11 years, only two had served 10, and only 3 others had served 9 years. There were 25 distinct outside gangs, and their average annual rate of mortality for that and previous year was over 8 percent... in Louisiana, in 1881, 14 percent perished."
"If anything may be inferred from the mortal results of the Lease System in other States, the year's death-rate of the convict camps of Louisiana must exceed that of any pestilence that ever fell upon Europe in the Middle Ages. And as far as popular rumor goes, it confirms this assumption on every hand. Every mention of these camps is followed by the execration's of a scandalized community, whose ear is every now and then shocked afresh with some new whisper of their frightful barbarities... it kills like a pestilence, teaches the people to be cruel, sets up a false system of clemency, and seduces the State into the committal of murder for money."
-George Washington Cable
The Convict Lease System in the Southern States
The Century; a popular quarterly. / Volume 27, Issue 4
Publisher: The Century Company, New York, Feb. 1884
"Some measure of cruel treatment seems to be an unavoidable element in even the finest systems of penal administration, bu the routine cruelty which characterized the convict lease system in all its years of operation raises important questions of analysis and interpretation. Convict leasing, in fact, is best understood not as part of the history of prisons but as part of the elaborate social system of racial subordination which had previously been assured by the practice of slavery. That is, the lease system was a component of that larger web of law and custom which effectively insured the South's racial hierarchy. Seen in this light, the brutality of convict leasing fits clearly into a more comprehensive pattern of intimidation and violence, and it can be seen as an intrinsic part of that system rather than an aberration."
"In addition to its social usefulness, leasing had numerous and very obvious economic advantage as well :it took the care an d expense of thousands of prisoners out of the direct purview of the state, it provided a large pool of extremely cheap labor, it permitted the easy exploitation of natural resources, and it helped attract northern capital with which business leaders in the post-bellum South were so obsessed. In 1880 Enoch Cobb Wines, the outstanding crusader for prison reform, reported that, barring the states in which convict leasing was practiced, about tone-half of the expenses of penal administration came from prison income. That is, taxpayer were in most states paying part of the burden of incarceration. In states where leasing was practiced, by contrast the average proceeds constituted 372% of costs. These figured represent only the expenses saved by the state governments; they do not begin to tell the story of the profits amassed by mine owners, railroad builders, lumber merchants, and other capitalists in the impoverished South."
"So convict leasing was not just an expedient by which Southern states with depleted treasuries could avoid costly expenditures; it was also one of the greatest single sources of personal wealth to some of the South;s leading businessmen and politicians. The economic and social justifications for the convict lease system were thus mutually reinforcing. for nearly half a century they combined to stave off repeated attempts of abolition."
-Matthew J. Mancini
Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing
The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 339-352
Published by: Association for the Study of African-American Life and History, Inc.
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