Government · est. 1819
The State of Alabama
After the Civil War, Alabama ran convict leasing as a state business, by 1898 the lease of its mostly Black prisoners is estimated to have supplied around 70% of state revenue.
← Follow the MoneyAlabama turned the convict-lease system into a pillar of its public finances. Under the Black Codes and vagrancy laws, Black men were swept into prison on minor or invented charges, then leased by the state to coal mines, iron furnaces, and planters who worked them in lethal conditions, "slavery by another name." The money flowed to the state treasury: the University of Alabama's archives estimate that revenue from convict leasing rose from about 10% of Alabama's state income in 1883 to nearly 70% by 1898 (figures that trace to historian Robert Perkinson and are best read as estimates). Alabama was among the last states to abolish the lease, in 1928. Its prisoners' labor is a direct ancestor of today's prison labor.
Documentation
The web
Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from·ThreadConvict Leasing & Debt Peonage
By 1898 convict leasing supplied an estimated ~70% of Alabama's state revenue.
- builds on·ThreadMass Incarceration
The state's convict-lease business is a root of mass incarceration.