Convict Leasing
By Abby
Convict Leasing System went from the time period 1880 through 1920. A lot of people thought the Thirteenth amendment abolished slavery. It didn’t. A loophole was found by the southern states that made slavery a punishment for a crime. In 1846 convict-leasing began in Alabama, and ended on July 1, 1928. It ended while Herbert Hoover was in office. There were many deaths that were involved in convict-leasing, ten times more than of prisoners in non-lease states. The convict-leasing system is a system of penal labor or free labor that was instituted in the South after the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Convict-leasing has disappeared, but there are still plantations, industrial prisons, and “chain gangs.”
A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work, such as mining or timber collecting, as a form of punishment.When the Civil War had ended, social and political conflicts as well as a racist legal system and poverty, led to more African-American prisoners in state penitentiaries and county jails. They made the prisoners work in mines. This was a dangerous situations with falling rocks, high water levels, dangerous gas levels, explosives, and bad elevators.
Citations and Links:
www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fredouconlea.html
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=214
