Convict Lease System: 1870s to 1930s
If slavery is the grandparent of today’s PIC, then the convict lease system is its parent. Although defeated in the war, Southern plantation owners still needed cheap labor and a way to divide the growing alliances between poor people of color and whites. Their answer was the Black Codes, a set of laws which criminalized African-American existence. Everyday activities of Blacks – like standing on a street corner – were deemed criminal. Additionally, sentences for other "crimes" were extended for African-Americans. Finally, those convicted served their sentences doing manual labor for counties, the state or private companies.
The system actually proved to be more cost-effective for owners than slavery. Since companies paid for a mass of convict workers, rather than individual slaves, the death of one of the prisoners did not affect profits. A new convict would replace a dead worker without economic impact on the company. This system also created a population that could be used to beat down worker resistance. As the Tennessee miners’ strike of 1891 showed, employers would not hesitate to use convict labor to break strikes.
Learning Lessons from History: 1960’s to Present
The state (e.g. police, military and the criminal injustice system) and its laws serve those who own society’s wealth and run the society. But it is the race, class and gender interests of the time that determine what form the control will take. For example, at a time when people of color were defined by law as being less than human, slavery was considered appropriate. The form of social control changes over time, but its essential nature remains the same. Although it has been about 70 years since the convict leasing system was abolished, we still live with its legacy. Its essential qualities – criminalizing a targeted population, undermining worker strength and subsidizing cheap labor for private corporations – exist today in the prison-industrial complex.
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http://www.projectsouth.org/resources/pic2.htmlHistorical Perspectives on Prisons, Slavery, and Imperialism
It is important to recall that many of the first settlers of the "New World" were actually British, Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Dutch convicts sold into indentured servitude. Selling "criminals" to the companies exploring the Americas lowered the cost of maintaining European prisons (since they could remain relatively small), enabled the traditional elite to rid themselves of potential political radicals, and provided the cheap labor necessary for the first wave of colonization. Indeed, as detailed in both Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged and A. R. Ekirch's Bound for America, there is a strong historical relationship between the need for policing the unruly working classes, fueling the military and economic needs of the capitalist class, and greasing the wheels of imperialism with both indentured servants and outright slavery.
An early US example of this three-pronged relationship occurred in Frankfurt, Kentucky in 1825. Joel Scott paid $1,000 for control of Kentucky's prison labor to build roads and canals facilitating settler traffic westward into Indian lands. After winning this contract, Scott built his own private 250-cell prison to house his new "workers." In a similar deal in 1844, Louisiana began leasing the labor of the prisoners in its Baton Rouge State Penitentiary to private contractors for $50,000 a year. California's San Quentin prison illustrates this same historical link between prison labor and capitalism. In 1852, J.M. Estill and M.G. Vallejo swapped land that was to become the site of the state capital for the management of California's prison laborers. These three antebellum examples are not typical of pre-Civil War labor arrangements, however. The institution of slavery in the South and the unprecedented migration of poor Europeans to America in the North provided the capitalist elite with ample labor at rock bottom prices. This left prison labor as a risky resource exploited by only the most adventurous capitalists.
Prison labor became a more significant part of modern capitalism during Reconstruction because the Civil War made immigration to America dangerous, left the U.S. economically devastated, and deprived capitalism of its lucrative slave labor. One of the responses to these crises was to build more prisons and then to lease the labor of prisoners, many of whom were ex-slaves, to labor-hungry capitalists.
Burdened with heavy taxes to meet the expenses of rebuilding the shattered economy, and committed to the traditional notion that convicts should, by their labor, reimburse the government for their maintenance and even create additional revenue, the master class, drawing on its past experience with penitentiary leases, reintroduced a system of penal servitude which would make public slaves of blacks and poor and friendless whites.
-- J.T. Sellin
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http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/hisprislacap.htmlA new American slave trade is booming, warn prison activists, following the release of a report that again outlines outrageous numbers of young Black men in prison and increasing numbers of adults undergoing incarceration. That slave trade is connected to money states spend to keep people locked up, profits made through cheap prison labor and for-profit prisons, excessive charges inmates and families may pay for everything from tube socks to phone calls, and lucrative cross country shipping of inmates to relieve overcrowding and rent cells in faraway states and counties.
Advocates note that the constitution’s 13th amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, but provided an exception—in cases where persons have been “duly convicted” in the United States and territory it controls, slavery or involuntary servitude can be reimposed as a punishment, they add. The majority of prisoners are Black and Latino, though they are minorities in terms of their numbers in the population.
According to “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008,” published by the Pew Center on the States, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20-34 are incarcerated compared to one in 30 other men of the same age. Like the overall adult ratio, one in 100 Black women in their mid-to-late 30s is imprisoned.
“Everyone is feeding off of our down-trodden condition to feed their capitalism, greed and lust for money..."
The chain gang was re-established in 1995. Becoming one of the first convicts in perhaps a half-century to break rocks, William Crook, 28, of Gadsden, Ala., takes a swing with his 10-pound sledge hammer. Shortly after sunrise, 160 inmates at the Limestone Correction Facility marched a half-mile in leg irons from their dormitories to the rock pile.Prison watch groups note corporate-owned prisons feed job-starved communities where businesses have disappeared. By incarcerating so many people, America deals with warehousing them and not finding out why they are incarcerated in the first place, advocates said.
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http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_4475.shtmlAny thoughts on the above articles?
Advocates note that the constitution’s 13th amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, but provided an exception—in cases where persons have been “duly convicted” in the United States and territory it controls, slavery or involuntary servitude can be reimposed as a punishment.