Convict Leasing System Begins Re-Enslaving Black Southerners

Southern states began leasing Black prisoners to private companies, railroad contractors, and planters under the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for criminal punishment. Black men arrested for trivial offenses — vagrancy, loitering, failing to show proof of a labor contract — were sentenced to months or years of unpaid forced labor in conditions often worse than antebellum slavery, with no incentive for employers to preserve workers' lives. The system persisted in some states until the 1940s.