Convict-Lease System

[MrScorpio]

http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1346

Between 1875 and 1928, the state and counties of Alabama profited from a form of prison labor known as the convict-lease system. Under this system, companies and individuals paid fees to state and county governments in exchange for the labor of prisoners on farms, at lumberyards, and in coal mines. Following their convictions, prisoners were transported directly to the work site and remained there for the duration of their sentences. State prisoners deemed unable to work were sent to the state penitentiary in Wetumpka in Elmore County; after 1888 all women convicts were sent to Wetumpka as well. The Wetumpka site held relatively few prisoners, however.

A vast majority of Alabama convicts worked for private enterprises and generated substantial amounts of revenue to the state and counties. By the 1880s, nearly all of the several thousand state and county prisoners working under the convict-leasing system labored in coal mines located around Birmingham.

The origins of the system are complex. Since antebellum times, prisoners in Alabama had been put to work under the authority of a state warden. After the Civil War, social and political conflicts, poverty, and a racist legal system led to a growing number of African American prisoners in county jails and the state penitentiary. County prisoners convicted of misdemeanors were put to work in factories in the 1860s and at a state-owned farm in the 1870s. State prisoners convicted of felonies worked on railroads, where they suffered extremely high rates of death. Railroad companies did not pay the state for the prison labor they used, although they did save the state money on housing and feeding them. Neither the state nor the counties profited from leasing prisoners until a fiscal crisis in 1875 compelled Alabama to look for new sources of revenue. The state's warden, John G. Bass, implemented a new policy by which the state leased individual state prisoners to various coal mines, farms and lumberyards in exchange for monthly payments. Bass ranked prisoners into three classes according to their physical abilities and levels of skill and set fees accordingly. Revenue immediately jumped, and the state made a profit of between $11,000 and $12,000 in the first year. Seeing the financial windfall to be had, county governments began negotiating their own lease agreements with industries. In addition to serving the time imposed as punishment for their crimes, county convicts also had to pay all of their court costs, usually by serving extended sentences. Typically convicted of misdemeanors, these county convicts often served long periods of hard labor in abhorrent conditions because they could not afford to pay the costs of their arrests and trials. In the vast majority of cases, such convicts lived in utter filth, were poorly fed, suffered torture and cruel punishments, and had no protection whatsoever from the labor contractors who hired them. Many of the state's female convicts performed forced labor on state-run prison farms.

http://aphoticoccurrences.tumblr.com/post/20358921211/photos-from-the-convict-leasing-system-of

[Skittles]

1. .

[mopinko]

2. no doubt

" Many of the state's female convicts performed forced labor on state-run prison farms."

where they were raped.

[Egalitarian Thug]

3. There is a significant number of Americans that will never, ever, never

turn away from slavery. The only solution I see is to rid ourselves of this faction.

[countryjake]

4. K&R!