Convict Leasing in Florida: Prison Labor After Slavery

In eighteen seventy-seven, the state of Florida began leasing its prison population to private companies. For the next forty-six years, men convicted of crimes in Florida, the overwhelming majority of them Black men convicted of minor offenses, vagrancy, loitering, petty theft, violations of contract labor laws, were handed over to turpentine operators, phosphate mines, and railroad construction crews who paid the state a fee and then put the men to work.

This was legal. It was policy. It was, in practice, slavery with a legal structure built around it.

The conditions in the Florida convict camps were documented by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported death rates in those camps exceeding the casualty rates of Civil War battlefields. Men died from disease, from violence by guards, from heat, from the chemicals they were forced to work with in the turpentine operations. If they ran, they were hunted. If they resisted, they were beaten. They were paid nothing: their labor extinguished days from their sentences, a formula identical to what California called industrial peonage when it operated the same system on its road camps.

The arrests that fed the system were not random. Florida's vagrancy laws, which made it a crime to be unemployed or in public without demonstrable means of support, were applied almost exclusively to Black Floridians in the decades after the Civil War, in a deliberate effort to reconstruct the labor relations that emancipation had technically ended.

Florida formally abolished the convict lease system in nineteen twenty-three. That was the same year as the Rosewood Massacre, two events separated by a few months that both point in the same direction about where the state stood.

A county road camp system replaced convict leasing and operated, under different legal arrangements, into the nineteen sixties.