Convict Leasing Expands Across the South as Neo-Slavery

By the 1880s, every former Confederate state had leased convicts — overwhelmingly Black men convicted under vagrancy and Black Code statutes — to private companies including Tennessee Coal and Iron, the Pratt Mines of Alabama, and turpentine camps throughout the Deep South. Death rates in some camps exceeded 25 percent annually. The system generated enormous profits for states and corporations while re-enslaving Black labor.