February 4, 1846 – Alabama Begins Statewide Convict Leasing

Alabama did not have a prison system at first. As the Alabama Department of Corrections recounts:

Surprisingly, especially when contrasted with today’s way of thinking, the people of the 1820’s and 1830’s did not want a prison system. As a general rule of the early Alabama frontiersmen, the administration of justice was best left in the hands of the local citizens, or when available, with county officials.”

Finally in 1839, the state legislature adopted a criminal code authorizing a state penitentiary system.

In October of that year, Governor Bagby laid the cornerstone of the Wetumpka State Penitentiary (WSP) and by 1841 the 208-cell prison surrounded by walls twenty-five feet high was completed. Notably, the first inmate to enter WSP in 1842 had received a twenty year sentence for harboring a runaway slave.

The prison was supposed to have operated self-sufficiently from the tax-payer’s support but that didn’t work out. Thus, on February 4, 1846, this day in history, an act was passed which permitted private individuals to lease WSP’s facilities and convicts.

In 1866, under the Reconstructionist Republican Governor Robert M. Patton, laws were enacted which permitted the convicts to be leased outside the prison facilities. The convict contracting system proved to be especially profitable in rebuilding the war-ravaged railroad system. To keep the laborers coming and to boost the popularity of the system, the convict population changed from the pre-Civil War number of 99% white to the postwar 90% black.

Indeed, the use of black prisoners for forced labor was so successful, and so rewarding for whites who resented having to pay blacks for labor, that the practice spread throughout the South.

In the Pulitzer Prize winning book Slavery by Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon describes how by 1900 the South’s judicial system was wholly reconfigured to accommodate this practice. Thousands of random indigent black men were arrested for anything from unemployment, to not being able to prove employment at any given moment, to changing employers without “permission”, or even loud talk. In other words, they were arrested for being young black men. They were sentenced to hard labor, and bought and sold by sheriffs and judges among other opportunists to corporations such as U.S. Steel, Tennessee Coal, railroads, lumber camps, and factories. The prisoners who were sent to mines were chained to their barracks at night, and required to work all day – “subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners – many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement.” Hundreds died of disease, accidents, or homicide, and in fact, mass burial fields near these old mines can still be located.

Breaking rocks, 1930s, Unknown location

According to ThoughtCo:

As an example of how the states profited from the process, the percentage of Alabama’s total annual revenue generated from convict leasing increased from 10 percent in 1846 to nearly 73 percent by 1889.”

Nevertheless, convict leasing was slowly phased out during the late 19th and early 20th centuries largely due to negative public opinion and opposition from the growing labor union movement. Alabama became the last state to end the official practice of convict leasing in 1928.