Page 44 - Middle Georgia State University - Knighted 2019

The Prison-Industrial Complex and its Roots in the Convict-Lease System
Morgan Delk

Most would agree that slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. But
little is spoken of the laws put into place following the Civil War that reinstated a life of
servitude for African-Americans via the reformation of the criminal justice system. And in a
society today that maintains the assumption of a “colorblind justice system,” we rarely make
the connection between the current prison-industrial complex and its roots in the
Reconstruction-era convict-lease system. The prison-industrial complex of today is a system
founded in racism that utilizes modernized tactics of the past to mitigate social, economic, and
political threats of a demographically changing society within America.

Directly following the Civil War, ex-confederate states were in a state of economic
turmoil. State governments were essentially penniless, and after the passing of the Thirteenth
Amendment, plantation owners were forced to pay for labor they previously relied on slaves
for (Raza 164).

Despite the milestone that the Thirteenth Amendment represented for racial equality in
America, it contained one major exception: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except
as a punishment for a crime…shall exist within the United States.” (US Const. amend. XIII,
sec. 1). Dennis Childs, in his book Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the
Penitentiary, refers to this exception clause of the Thirteenth Amendment as a “loophole of
state repression” (64). Additionally, punishment worthy of involuntary servitude was never
outlined in the Thirteenth Amendment, thereby leaving it to the discretion of state
governments (Raza 163), (Childs 61).

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