Convicted prisoners were leased to private companies to rebuild the postwar South

Evidence

The end of the war saw a crumbling South, both literally and figuratively. Southern state budgets were broken along with their infrastructure and buildings. In need of cheap labor, convict leasing—an institutional practice whereby states leased prisoners to private companies and plantations—played an important role in rebuilding the South. W.E.B. Du Bois described convict leasing as “a new slavery and slave-trade.” According to Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History, at Columbia University, what began small before the war quickly expanded afterward into a widescale system to “provide employers with a supply of cheap labor.” … Which behavior constitutes a crime in our society often has racialized roots. It was once a crime to teach an enslaved person to read, but not to enslave, buy, or sell that very same individual. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 274

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines convict leasing as an institutional practice whereby states leased prisoners to private companies and plantations.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the saturated-system harm architecture: the same reconstruction economy that rebuilt the South did so on Black penal labor.