Punishment after Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890

Abstract

This paper identifies and analyzes the political and economic functions of the state penal systems in the southern United States after the Civil War. The system of prison administration, discipline, and labor which emerged after 1865—known as the convict lease system—was a functional replacement for slavery. Like the Black Codes, vagrancy laws, and sharecropping arrangements, the convict lease system was a mechanism of race control used to prevent ex-slaves from obtaining the status and rights enjoyed by wage workers. The organization and philosophy of crime control both before and after the Civil War reflected the fact that both slaves and ex-slaves were problem populations. As such, they were a threat to the existing system of class rule but also a useful resource—economically as a pool of cheap labor for southern industrialization, and politically or symbolically as a means to consolidate white supremacy.