5fish
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I watched @Joshism video and learned about this....
vtuhr.org
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Convict leasing allowed local and state governments both to discipline newly emancipated African-Americans whose behavior did not adhere to white standards and to yet again reap the benefits of black labor as they had prior to the Civil War.
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By the 1880s convict leasing had raised millions in revenue and had funded public works, ensuring lower tax rates for the white citizenry.11 Young, illiterate, African-American males were usually the targets of the system, and their innocence or guilt was typically decided by all-white juries. Defendants would often go through trial without a lawyer and faced prejudice from juries who discounted their testimony. Upon sentencing, defendants tended to receive decade-long sentences in the prison system.1
Here is...
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Although slavery was officially ended with the end of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, there were numerous efforts to restrict African-Americans from participating in economic, political, and social spheres, particularly after the end of Reconstruction. One system developed in the late 19th which existed through the mid-20th centuries was convict leasing. Convict leasing was a system in which primarily Southern states leased prisoners for penal labor to private corporations, (such as railways and mining) and still existing agricultural large plantations. While the states profited, prisoners earned little or no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. That system was outlawed in 1908, and the prison work gang system replaced it. Convicts lived in farms or camps, and labored on road construction or agricultural projects, sometimes shacked together as a chain gang. The harsh system brought national attention by the 1930s and was ended in Georgia in the 1940s.
Here is... children were use in convict leasing too... racial capitalism...
Before the Civil War, prisons were made up of mostly white men – considering the fact that nearly all black people were considered property. In his article Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South, Christopher Muller states: “Just 15 years after the Civil War, African-Americans were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. Racial disparity in imprisonment in postbellum Georgia was twice as large as it is in the United States today” [2]. Emancipation posed both immense social and economic shifts in the U.S. South, and this resulted in a great shift in Southern inmate populations, including Georgia. Southerners could not conceive interacting with their former slaves as freedmen. Imprisonment served as a way to relegate former slaves to second-class citizenship and continue to exploit their labor through the prison system.
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Racism and capitalism work together in particularly appalling ways justify the incarceration of children, as depicted in Juvenile convicts at work in the fields. The racialization of black women as detailed by Sarah Haley led to the idea that “that the black female body reproduced criminality and, by extension, a class of subjects that could be made captive and work mercilessly”[4]. Just as racialization has stripped black women of vulnerability and protections associated with white women, it also stripped black children of their childhood. Women could be incarcerated for failures as a parent, and their children could be incarcerated for nothing more than losing their parents. The idea that convict leasing was slavery by another name fails to consider the larger systemic issue – racial capitalism. Capitalism creates an economic system where inequality is imperative, and racism ensures that a hierarchy is created and sustained. Racialization, with the purpose of creating a class of cheap, exploitable laborers, is the process with justifies stripping vulnerable populations of their perceived vulnerability and is ultimately the reason an image like Juvenile convicts at work in the fields exists.
The Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review
Article: Convict Leasing: Justifications, Critiques, and the Case for Reparations
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Convict leasing allowed local and state governments both to discipline newly emancipated African-Americans whose behavior did not adhere to white standards and to yet again reap the benefits of black labor as they had prior to the Civil War.
snip...
By the 1880s convict leasing had raised millions in revenue and had funded public works, ensuring lower tax rates for the white citizenry.11 Young, illiterate, African-American males were usually the targets of the system, and their innocence or guilt was typically decided by all-white juries. Defendants would often go through trial without a lawyer and faced prejudice from juries who discounted their testimony. Upon sentencing, defendants tended to receive decade-long sentences in the prison system.1
Here is...
Convict Leasing · Enslaved People in the Southeast · Enslaved People in the Southeast
This site hosts the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries' shared online exhibit about enslaved people in the Southeast. The items and exhibit were curated from 36 different academic and research libraries in the Southeastern US and are posted to acknowledge 1619 as the first arrival of...
aserlsharedenslavedpeople.omeka.net
snip...
Although slavery was officially ended with the end of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, there were numerous efforts to restrict African-Americans from participating in economic, political, and social spheres, particularly after the end of Reconstruction. One system developed in the late 19th which existed through the mid-20th centuries was convict leasing. Convict leasing was a system in which primarily Southern states leased prisoners for penal labor to private corporations, (such as railways and mining) and still existing agricultural large plantations. While the states profited, prisoners earned little or no pay and faced inhumane, dangerous, and often deadly work conditions. That system was outlawed in 1908, and the prison work gang system replaced it. Convicts lived in farms or camps, and labored on road construction or agricultural projects, sometimes shacked together as a chain gang. The harsh system brought national attention by the 1930s and was ended in Georgia in the 1940s.
Here is... children were use in convict leasing too... racial capitalism...
Before the Civil War, prisons were made up of mostly white men – considering the fact that nearly all black people were considered property. In his article Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South, Christopher Muller states: “Just 15 years after the Civil War, African-Americans were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. Racial disparity in imprisonment in postbellum Georgia was twice as large as it is in the United States today” [2]. Emancipation posed both immense social and economic shifts in the U.S. South, and this resulted in a great shift in Southern inmate populations, including Georgia. Southerners could not conceive interacting with their former slaves as freedmen. Imprisonment served as a way to relegate former slaves to second-class citizenship and continue to exploit their labor through the prison system.
snip...
Racism and capitalism work together in particularly appalling ways justify the incarceration of children, as depicted in Juvenile convicts at work in the fields. The racialization of black women as detailed by Sarah Haley led to the idea that “that the black female body reproduced criminality and, by extension, a class of subjects that could be made captive and work mercilessly”[4]. Just as racialization has stripped black women of vulnerability and protections associated with white women, it also stripped black children of their childhood. Women could be incarcerated for failures as a parent, and their children could be incarcerated for nothing more than losing their parents. The idea that convict leasing was slavery by another name fails to consider the larger systemic issue – racial capitalism. Capitalism creates an economic system where inequality is imperative, and racism ensures that a hierarchy is created and sustained. Racialization, with the purpose of creating a class of cheap, exploitable laborers, is the process with justifies stripping vulnerable populations of their perceived vulnerability and is ultimately the reason an image like Juvenile convicts at work in the fields exists.
