Convict leasing

There are state oversight boards that keep trying to clean up like Sing Sing Prison in New York and Auburn.

um but you start seeing the progressive movement you have a lot of muckrakers who start doing you know exposés on uh not only prisons but things like mental asylums and orphanages things like that so prisons were part of this broader uh reform campaign by progressives especially in new york uh which was a big hub of of uh of like prison reform uh fundraising and activism The other thing is, well, I split into the South because you have that going on in the North, but you also have in the South this almost separate system that came up of convict leasing, where after the Civil War and Reconstruction, uh states started leasing convicts to private companies to work for them and it became sort of the predominant mode of of incarceration it was mainly used to round up black people using vagrancy laws and other sort of ticky tacky violations um but like by you know the late 1880s 1890s i think about 88% of Alabama convicts were released to mining companies.

So it was just this massive sort of extraction of labor by the state to benefit private companies.

And the other reason I splendid South is because the the history of slavery there just work their penal systems so deeply.

And my question to you is this.

You know, does does it seem that there is something essential that we see in American prisons that come from this, you know, divergence in stated purpose between the North and the South, but convergence in the outcome and results that we see in these prisons?

I did think it was worth separating out just because the South had the history of convict leasing was such an important part that I felt like separating out.

But you are right that, you know.

But the most important step is to demand for the prisoner the right to work while in prison with some monetary recompense that would enable him to lay aside a little for the day of his release, the beginning of a new life.

It is almost ridiculous to hope much from present society when we consider that working men, wage slaves themselves, object to convict labor.

I shall not go into the cruelty of this objection, but merely consider the impracticability of it.

To begin with, the opposition so far raised by organized labor has been directed against windmills.

Prisoners have always worked.

Only the state has been their exploiter, even as the individual employer has been the robber of organized labor.

The states have either set the convicts to work for the government, or they have farmed convict labor to private individuals.

Twenty-nine of the states pursue the latter plan.

I try to when I can.

The convict lease system, those people who were incarcerated previously.

many of them falsely incarcerated after the Civil War ended and slavery ended in this country up until World War II, just to rebuild the South and be used as slaves, as was called slavery by another name.

And so when we're going into Chain Gang, which is Nina Simone's song, yes, you're going to get a lot of Nina today, and then I'm going to go on the other side of that musical break and talk about the convict leave system slavery by another name and you're going to hear on this show throughout the rest of this show well the chain gang was not something we made up it was not something for the movies no it was real life Real life.

remuneration, and then it's not slavery.

So even today, we have slavery by another name.

But this is the convict lease system we're discussing right now that we're going to hear more about.

And slavery by another name is the documentary film.