THE CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM IN AMERICA.
APAMPHLET on the convict system established in many of the Southern States of America (by Clarissa Olds Keeler ; the Pentecostal Era Company, Washington) has reached us, and is as painful to read as anything of the sort that has ever come under our notice. One's first impulse is to say : "But this is an exaggeration. It is incredible that such inhuman cruelties and hideous wrongs should be tolerated in a generous, free, and civilised country like the United States." If all that is written here is true, there are districts where the word " Emancipation " is nothing but an empty mockery, for under the convict lease system there are men and women, both white and coloured, who are the victims of injustices and tortures which could not have been exceeded in the days of slavery before the American Civil War. Unhappily, experience proves that when once the vicious principles which under- lie slavery and quasi-slavery are admitted anything may follow. Responsibility is distributed among the staffs of the institutions which depend for their prosperity on the magnitude and punctuality of the labour tribute. A man, perhaps humane in his instincts, may become a monster of inhumanity because he is not strong enough to resist the operation of a great machine. He blames others who are at the same time blaming him, and the collective conscience becomes whittled away to vanishing-point. This may happen even when inhumanity is not to be explained by the remote- ness from all decent influences which sometimes causes a man, or a handful of men, endowed with authority in lonely parts of the world to return to primitive practices of savagery. Again, apart from either of these cases, there is the deliberate granting of authority over prisoners to men who are " useful " because they are "strong,"—man who turn out to be much greater criminals than the criminals whom they supervise. The guilt of the officials who, through greed in getting money out of leased convict labour or through supineness in their supervision of the system, lend themselves to the appointment of overseers who are simply murderers is terribly deep. Even if we do not take the cases described in the pamphlet before us as typical, there is still enough which is outside the possi- bility of dispute to make one ask how any self-respecting State can possibly consent to the existence of a system in which a premium is put on crime (and if crime runs short, on wrongful imprisonment), because those who lease labour from the State make handsome profits out of it. If other evidence than that of this pamphlet is asked for, it may be found in a paper called "Peonage in the United States" in the new number of the 'Nineteenth, Century by Mary Church TerrelL Prisons are scanty in the Southern States, and one State after another drifted into the practice of hiring out the labour of convicts to companies. Twelve States now employ this system. Take Tennessee for example :— "The felony convicts were first leased in 1870. Some years after the adoption of the system, the convicts were leased for a term of years to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, one of the wealthiest corporations in the South with, as was alleged, two influential politicians of the North at its head. The State received annually $101,000 from the labour of the convicts, and the profits realised by the corporation were estimated to be about the same amount In February, 1889, the Legisla- tive prison committee investigated the prisons at the mines where the male convicts were worked, and the buildings where the men were housed at night were reported by members of the committee to be 'rough board shanties unfit for the habitation of human beings.' They were constructed of rough board planks, spiked up and down, and unplastered and unsealed. The beds were ticks filled with filthy straw, and the covering scant and filthy. Rough boards formed the platform for the continuous rows of beds. They reported 'cruel and inhuman whippings with a heavy strap on the naked backs of the convicts for failure to get out tasks,' and for nearly everything.' Convicts were poorly fed and scantily clothed, some having on no socks in winter The method of punishment was to lay the convict flat on his stomach and whip him on his naked back with a heavy leather strap attached to a handle. The number of licks varied from ten to sixty laid on sometimes with both hands, by a stalwart guard. The punishment was inflicted for all breaches of rules and for failure to do the task assigned, which was about four tons of coal per day?'
The New York Sun of September 11th, 1891, said :— " Sickness is not counted as inability to work. The policy is to work him [the convict] until he drops and then cure him if possible; if not, let him make way for some other, for there is
never a lack The guard curses, kicks, clubs or kills at Pleasure, The company oaks no questions ; the State has meagre chance of finding the truth and would be slow to act unless public indignation should be aroused. To make a dash for liberty
is simply a way of committing suicide convicts fre- quently Court death by making this bold dash. The rifle rings
ont A hole is dug and the dead zebra is put out of sight speedily. Any guard can tell you many a tale, and the chances are he will boast and laugh a good deal."
In Alabama in 1889 an inspector reported that during the first two weeks of June, when the average number of convicts was one hundred and sixty-five, there were one hundred and thirty-seven floggings. In 1890 the Peni- tentiary Committee in the same State declared "the con- vict lease system is slavery in its worst aspects." Dr. Bragg, in a Report to the Governor of Alabama as recently as last January, says :— "The county convict system is worse than ever before in its history. The demand for labor and fees has become so great, that most of them go now to the mines where many of them are unfit for such labor, consequently it is not long before they pass from
earth If the State wishes to kill its convicts it should do it directly and not indirectly If the convict develops tuberculosis or any other disease he has to stay in camp until it means death to a large proportion."
Dr. Bragg adds that "many of these poor defenceless I creatures ought never to have been arrested at all." In 1901 an Alabama paper told of seventeen white men and three negroes who had been sent tied together to the Pratt Mines. Not one of the twenty had been tried. Among them was a doctor from New York. They had been arrested for unlawfully travelling in trains, but every one professed to be innocent. They had been captured by a man who was paid two dollars for every person he arrested on that charge. Judge Emery Speer of Georgia said in Court in 1904 that the whipping " boss " among one set of convicts ran down the line flogging indiscriminately :— "At times," he said, "the convicts on the gang are called on
the 'dog lot' called to the stable door, made to lie face downward across the sill, a strong convict holds down the head and shoulders, and the boss lays on the lash on the naked body until he thinks the sufferer has been whipped enough."
In March, 1904, a hundred and forty-nine persons in one district were sentenced for such "disorderly conduct" as walking on park grass. Their aggregate punishment amounted to nineteen years in the Bibb County chain- gang.
The following extract from the pamphlet is among those which we can only hope are too bad to be true :—
"The Waycross (Ga.) Journal, dated June 5, 1903, tells of a colored girl, Lulu Frazer, who was arrested by a professional crime hunter' and accused of bigamy. She was tried in court and found to be innocent. To pay her lawyer's fee, which was $50, she was sent to a convict camp owned by a member of the Georgia State Legislature and his brother, to work fourteen months. She was locked up at night, whipped with a leather strap, and although then a wife and mother, she was compelled to marry a prisoner in the camp."
Another case of a clergyman makes one feel that his is a, fate which might overtake any one :— " The North American of February 28, 1901, gives the awful experience of Rev. Jonas H. Price, of Pleasant Valley, Penna., who was chloroformed by two strange men while on a P. W. & B. train. He was carried away in spite of his protestations and put in confinement in a stockade, herded with sixty negro convicts in a pine forest in South Carolina. He was forced to dress in convict garb, toil from dawn to dark in phos- phate rock with the negro convicts, guarded by armed men, fed on bread and water only, and treated with the utmost brutality. He says : "If a man uttered a word to his neighbor one of the overseers would bring down his stick upon the fellow's back I have seen men unmercifully flogged for the slightest infraction of rules. I have seen men scarcely able to stand driven to work with blows. Often during the night the bloodhounds would bay and set me to shuddering.' At the end of three months he was assisted to make his escape and arrived at home in an almost dying.condition. In a private letter whieh lies before me, written several months after his return, he says; May God in his mercy give you wisdom, and strength, and sufficient information so that you may be the means of opening up a, way by which a most cruel and hellish practice may be brought to naught. From having ouce been a healthy man I am now a physical and mental wreck.' " In another place we have expressed our opinion on the issues which are laid, bare by the Idaho trial. The convict lease system reveals many of the same difficulties. Alt these matters lead us to the same conclusion,—that though justice may be perfectly enshrined in theory in the -United States, it can only with the utmost difficulty be procured in practice. We question whether most Americans in the Northern and Eastern States have even heard of the abominations under the convict lease system. Even in the twelve States where the system exists it is needless to say that every decent person utterly abhors it. But how to remove The toughest of all vested interests have taken root ; vicious principles were allowed to become prevalent perhaps before it was so much as guessed to what results they would lead; and now even the law cannot accomplish what we may hope the law at least desires. In our opinion, it would have been well for the United States if the Federal Constitution, like the Canadian Constitution, had placed criminal jurisdiction in the most important cases, or, at all events, the power of supervision over all criminal law, in the hands of the central Government. "State rights" are at present an impenetrable stockade against which even an upright President may lead the forces of righteousness in vain. The subject of dispute becomes instantly obscured ; the State, which is defending its right to be responsible only to itself, forgets everything but that an outside influence is trying to intervene. That the Federal Government should get certain defined rights of intervention seems to us desirable, if not inevitable, not only for the sake of domestic reform, but in order to eliminate the danger of reckless and irresponsible affronts to foreign Powers. In any case, every friend and admirer of the United States will look eagerly for the day when stronger influences than exist now shall sweep away the convict lease system, though we still trust that it will be possible to disprove some of the terrible charges made in the American pamphlet from which we have quoted.
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