Post-leasing peonage operated as private slavery with police and federal complicity.

Evidence

Convict leasing by prisons eventually led to the return of private forms of slavery. Individual actors began illegally detaining black people and putting them to work, while evading the criminal justice system, with the complicity of the federal government. For instance, two sheriffs in Mississippi in 1929 reported receiving between 20,000 and 30,000 each for “procuring black laborers and selling them to local planters.” In 1932 police in Macon, Georgia, arrested “sixty black men on ‘vagrancy’ charges” and turned them over to J. H. Stroud, a plantation owner. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 285

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow through-line that mass incarceration is a renaming of earlier forced-labor regimes.