Convict leasing killed at higher rates than slavery because prisoners were replaceable

Evidence

Even before Reconstruction ended, white Americans countered the emergence of Black elected officials and entrepreneurs with mob violence. After Reconstruction, rejection of racial equality intensified with convict leasing, a scheme in which white policy makers invented offenses—congregating after dark, vagrancy, loitering—that could be used to arrest Black people, who were then jailed and “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. An 1887 report in Mississippi found that six months after 204 prisoners were leased to a white man named McDonald, dozens of them were dead or dying, the prison hospital filled with men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment…so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.” The death rate in some of these prison camps was close to 45 percent. As historian Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book documents, it was Slavery by Another Name. But unlike slavery, in which enslavers at least had a financial interest in keeping enslaved people alive and functional, convict leasing stripped imprisoned people of any protection and made them completely replaceable and easily discarded. In that sense, convict leasing was, as the sociologist David Oshinsky titled his book, Worse Than Slavery. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 848

Categorization

• QUESTION: The death rate claim (close to 45 percent in some camps) is a specific empirical number worth verifying against Blackmon and Oshinsky when distinguishing contested claims from the reframing thesis.
• SEED: Angle: ‘worse than slavery’ — convict leasing inverted even slavery’s crude economic logic of keeping labor alive, a stark case study in how institutions can preserve a hierarchy while shedding its stabilizing incentives.
• XREF: connects to: Southern convict-leasing camps killed convicts at catastrophic rates — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3468