Matthew J. Mancini. One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. xi + 283 pp. Index, Bibliography. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-57003-083-9.
Reviewed by Garland Brinkley, Department of Economics, School of Public Health, University of California-Berkeley. Published by EH.Net (October, 1999)
Several economic historians have asserted that African-Americans were better off in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ransom and Sutch's (1977) classic leisure for labor trade-off, for example, suggests that freedmen worked fewer hours and fewer days and that fewer members of the family spent time in the fields after the Civil War with the resultant higher utility (but lower income). What are noticeably absent from previous histories of the South, was the continuation of slavery under the even more brutal conditions driven by economic incentives. While most believe that the thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a loophole was opened that resulted in the widespread continuation of slavery in the Southern states of America -- slavery as punishment for a crime.
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Georgia practiced the most undiluted and typical form of convict leasing of any of the southern states. However, political favoritism determined the issuance and bid price of convict leasing contracts and political pressures ensured no interference in the working and living conditions of the convicts. Average prison sentences lengthened dramatically during this period. Convicts were invariably leased to prominent and wealthy Georgian families who worked them on railroads and in coal mining. Even though reformers exposed the brutalities of the system in Georgia, the demise of convict labor in Georgia came about due to political reform and market forces when the bids that contractors had to pay for convict labor finally became equal to free wage rates.
Alabama used the convict labor system as an enormously successful revenue generating mechanism. Not only did convict leasing last longer in Alabama than in any other southern state, but it was also notable due to the extreme quantity of convicts in the system. Convict leasing began in Alabama in 1846 and lasted until July 1, 1928 when Herbert Hoover was vying for the White House. In 1883, 10 percent of Alabama's total revenue was derived form convict leasing while in 1898, 73 percent of total revenue came from this same source. Death rates among leased convicts were approximately ten times the death rates of prisoners in non-lease states. In 1873, for example, 25 percent of all black leased convicts died. Possibly the greatest impetus to the continuance of convict labor in Alabama was to depress the union movement.
Arkansas was notorious for the brutality of its convict leasing system resulting from the lack of official monitoring of convict laborers. Economically different from other southern states, Arkansas actually paid companies to work their prisoners for much of the time the system was in place. Arkansas' system of convict leasing was also quite political in terms of issuance of contracts and oversight or lack of oversight of convicts. No state official was empowered to oversee the plight of the prisoners and businesses had complete autonomy in the disposition and working conditions of convict laborers. Mines and plantations that used convict laborers commonly had secret graveyards containing the bodies of prisoners who had been beaten and/or tortured to death. Convicts would be made to fight each other, sometimes to the death, for the amusement of the guards and wardens.
full: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=6957943393384
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