Convict labour used in building American roads

TIL: 19th-20th century convict labour and 'chain gangs' in the US

Chain gang street sweepers, Washington, D.C. 1909

I was reading a book recently that mentioned the main character being captured by the police for being a vagrant, and then sentenced to 6 months of labour, released after serving his sentence and then captured again, ad infinitum.

I've been reading up some more on this and every new bit of information pains me more and more, especially knowing that this practice continued supposedly well into the middle of the 20th century. I wanted to put it all down in this post, the way I understood it, so that it's not only helpful in clearing my thoughts on the issue but also acts as a reference to the solid foundation of barbarity that the current state of America rests on.

I would like to begin in pre-Civil war America. This is the America of the 1850s. The fruits of the industrial revolution have spread from Europe to the West, and the world stage is set for some truly massive industrial states. While pre-industrial societies depended heavily on manual labour for their daily upkeep, machines now hint towards a future where human effort would soon be rendered useless, costly and inefficient. This vision however is still nascent and this future is still too far away for those societies. Machines are still not ubiquitous and versatile enough to be used everywhere, and still not automatic enough to replace everyone. Societies still needed people, just like an ant colony needs worker ants.

America, of the first half of the 19th Century, solved this issue through slaves. According to this article, and you will find plenty like it online, much of the early growth of America can be attributed to slaves. Slaves were infinitesimally costly and utterly easy to overwork, which made them infinitely profitable to the slave owners which in turn boosted the economy of not only the southern states but also the entire country. By 1860, enslaved Black Americans made up nearly 13% of the U.S. population and were responsible for the majority of the country's agricultural wealth. Cotton alone accounted for more than half of U.S. exports — the essential fuel of the global industrial economy. Northern banks insured slave owners, Northern factories spun slave-grown cotton, and Northern shipyards built the vessels that carried it abroad. The entire republic was complicit.

Then the Civil War happened. I will not get into the details of the war itself, but the aftermath was he 13th Amendment. It abolished slavery and indentured servitude throughout the nation, *except as punishment for a crime*. 

The second part is important for us here. One can still be turned into a slave, if found guilty of a crime. And one can still be found guilty of a crime, if a law is specifically designed to that purpose. The industrialists were sorely missing their unpaid slave labour but the state came to their rescue through 'convict leasing'. Almost immediately after emancipation, Southern states enacted the Black Codes — laws that criminalized "vagrancy", "idleness," or "insulting gestures." Newly freed men who couldn’t prove employment were arrested and fined. When they couldn’t pay, they were "leased" to private companies to work off their debt. 

The state profited by renting prisoners to railroads, coal mines, brickworks, and plantations. The lessees fed and housed them, but had no incentive to keep them alive. Mortality rates reached 25% in some camps. In 1898, Alabama derived 73% of its total state revenue from convict leasing. Companies paid the state for prisoners and reaped enormous profits.

Chain gang working on a railroad near Asheville, 1915.

Working conditions in these labour camps were unsurprisingly quite brutal. Not only was the work strenuous - breaking rocks, digging railroads through the hills, cutting pine for turpentine, mining coal underground for fourteen hours a day, but failure to meet the standards meant being whipped for slowing down, starved for disobedience, and shackled in iron at night. 

While strong demands for reform in the early 1900s made the state disassociate from and therefore discontinue convict leasing, the practice still continued under a different name. "Chain gangs" was essentially state run convict labour, where groups of prisoners were shackled together by their feet and forced to contribute towards public infrastructure building and maintenance like building roads and draining swamps under the sun. In my opinion, being state-run, chain gangs provided a kind of legitimacy to this covert slavery that convict leasing previously had not provided it.

While convict leasing did officially end in 1928, further reading tells me that it was just replaced with massive prison farms in the south. While the state focus shifted from agriculture to new age produce post-WW2, things didn't much improve as far as the convict labour was concerned. Growing tobacco in the 18th century to growing cotton in the 19th century to laying railroads to then pivoting to mass producing furniture, plastic goods, textiles, and so on and so forth. The system still remains in some form of the other.

Till today, the specific clause in the 13th Amendment stands, and even today the prison industry provides "employment" to prisoners for as little as 0.13$/hr.

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Monocausal explanations for why things are the way they are may make for a good story but are rarely sufficient. Still, when I found out about this, one thing seemed clear: the rise of America as the world’s reigning superpower rests on massive industrial output built upon the barbaric foundations of slavery—explicit or disguised. The Americans inherited—if not outright stole—a vast continent, divided it into farms and industrial plots, and relied on enslaved labor to ensure maximum productivity.

Knowing this, it’s difficult not to feel anger when the United States lectures the world about freedom, democracy, or human rights, or makes racist “third world” jibes toward developing countries. Nations like the U.S. owe their current position to a deeply compromised past and have little moral ground to judge others who may not have reached similar wealth but have not trampled civic liberty and human dignity on such scales.