Convict Lease - The System in Various States

The System in Various States

In Georgia convict leasing began on April 1868, when the newly appointed provisional governor Thomas H. Ruger issued a convict lease for prisoners to William Fort for work on the Georgia and Alabama Railroad. The contract specified "one hundred able bodied and healthy Negro convicts" in return for a fee to the state of $2500. In May the state entered into a second agreement with Fort and his business partner Joseph Printup for another 100 convicts, this time for $1000, to work on the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad, also in north Georgia.

Georgia did not end the convict lease system until 1908. Its businessmen struggled with free labor. Two years later, in 1910, the Italian government protested about treatment of its immigrant laborers, who struck at a mine owned by James English, Jr. He called on the governor to use the military to break up the strike, and had the miners transported out of the area.

In Tennessee, the convict leasing system was halted on January 1, 1894 because of the attention brought by the Coal Creek War of 1891, an armed labor action lasting over a year. At the time both free and convict labor were used in mines, although workers were kept separated. Free coal miners attacked and burned prison stockades, and freed hundreds of black convicts; the related publicity and outrage turned Governor John P. Buchanan out of office. The end of convict leasing did not mean the end of convict labor.

The state sited its new penitentiary, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, with the help of geologists. The prison built a working coal mine on the site, dependent on labor done by prisoners, and ran it at significant profit. These prison mines closed in 1966.

Texas began convict leasing by 1883 and officially abolished it in 1910.

This lucrative practice created incentives for states and counties to convict African Americans, with the result that prison populations in the South became predominately African-American following the Civil War. Data for Tennessee prisons demonstrates this change. African Americans represented 33 percent of the population at the main prison in Nashville as of October 1, 1865, but by November 29, 1867, their percentage had increased to 58.3. By 1869 it had increased to 64 percent, and it reached an all-time high of 67 percent between 1877 and 1879.

Prison populations also increased overall in the South. In Georgia prison populations increased tenfold during the four-decade period (1868–1908) when it used convict leasing; in North Carolina the prison population increased from 121 in 1870 to 1,302 in 1890; in Florida the population went from 125 in 1881 to 1,071 in 1904; in Mississippi the population quadrupled between 1871 and 1879; in Alabama it went from 374 in 1869 to 1,878 in 1903; and to 2,453 in 1919.