convict leasing
Renting incarcerated workers
Convict leasing was a system in the American South after the Civil War in which states leased prisoners—predominantly Black men arrested under discriminatory laws—to private businesses for labor.
Conditions were often brutal, with high death rates in mines, railroads, and plantations.
The system persisted until the 1920s in some states.
The coal company acquired workers through convict leasing.
- peonageDebt-based forced labor
- debt bondageCoerced labor repaying loans
- Jim CrowRacial separation laws
- 13th AmendmentConstitutional slavery prohibition
- slaveryOwnership of people
chain gangs · Angola · vagrancy laws · judicial corruption · turpentine · prison labor · state prisons · plantation economy · racial inequality · industrialization · Civil War · mining operations · penal codes · sharecropping · profit motives · systemic racism · Emancipation Proclamation · agricultural labor
- imprisonmentprison, jail, prisoners, cells, captivity
- Jim CrowJim Crow laws, separate but equal, segregation laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, whites only
- labor systemsbonded labor, chattel slavery, child labor, compulsory labor, contract labor
- oppressionoppression, tyranny, racism, repression, secret police
- racial injusticesystemic racism, institutional racism, racial profiling, racial bias, discrimination
- Reconstruction Southsharecropping, tenant farming, freedmen, Freedmen's Bureau, carpetbaggers
convict leasingunionized labor
Workforce with collective representation
collective bargaining · fair wages · self-employment · at-will employment · salaried work
convict leasingprisoner rehabilitation
Reforming inmates for society
restorative justice · prison reform · abolition · decarceration · parole
convict leasingemancipation
Release from legal bondage
abolition · Reconstruction · civil rights · Juneteenth · Thirteenth Amendment