Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South.

Abstract

This volume is both a study of penal labour in the Southern United States and a revisionist analysis of the political economy of the South after the Civil War. The book reveals that the economic modernization of the South was largely promoted through the use of forced black labour - penal slavery. The new class of modernizers, it argues, did not hesitate to use these leased convicts, thereby ensuring the continuation of racial domination.