4
" Like prison systems throughout the South, Texas's grew directly out of slavery. After the Civil War the state's economy was in disarray, and cotton and sugar planters suddenly found themselves without hands they could force to work. Fortunately for them, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, left a loophole. It said that 'neither slavery nor involuntary servitude' shall exist in the United States 'except as punishment for a crime.' As long as black men were convicted of crimes, Texas could lease all of its prisoners to private cotton and sugar plantations and companies running lumber camps and coal mines, and building railroads. It did this for five decades after the abolition of slavery, but the state eventually became jealous of the revenue private companies and planters were earning from its prisoners. So, between 1899 and 1918, the state bought ten plantations of its own and began running them as prisons. "
― Shane Bauer , American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
8
" By 1890 some twenty-seven thousand convicts were performing some kind of labor in the South at a given time. States had enacted new laws that ensured that thousands of black men were being sent to labor camps. In 1876 Mississippi passed its “pig law,” which defined theft of any property over ten dollars in value, or cattle or swine of whatever value, as grand larceny, with a sentence of up to five years. After its adoption, the number of state convicts quadrupled from 272 in 1874 to 1,072 three years later. Arkansas passed a similar law, as did Georgia, whose numbers increased from 432 in 1872 to 1,441 in 1877. Nearly all of these “new” convicts were black. Some states ensured more years of work by charging convicts for the “cost of conviction. "
― Shane Bauer , American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
20
" In 1884 the editor of the Daily Picayune wrote that it would be 'more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years,' because the average convict lived no longer than that. At the time, the death rate of six prisons in the Midwest, where convict leasing was nonexistent, was around 1 percent. By contrast, in the deadliest year of Louisiana's lease, nearly 20 percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James's regime. Before the war, only a handful of planters owned more than one thousand slaves, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die. The pattern was consistent throughout the South, where annual convict death rates ranged from about 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. Some American camps were far deadlier than Stalin's: In South Carolina the death rate of convicts leased to the Greenwood and Augusta Railroad averaged 45 percent a year from 1877 to 1879. In 1870 Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40 percent of their convicts had died in their mining camps. A doctor warned that Alabama's entire convict population could be wiped out within three years. But such warnings meant little to the men getting rich off of prisoners. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, eleven years before Samuel L. James's death, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: 'Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don't own 'em. One dies, get another. "
― Shane Bauer , American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
