Locking Down an American Workforce

Posted on Apr 19, 2012

flee the cities (CC-BY)

By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

(Page 3)

The Kansas Wagon Company, for example, signed a five-year contract in 1877 that prevented the state from raising the rental price of labor or renting to other employers.  The company also got an option to renew the lease for 10 more years, while the government was obliged to pay for new machinery, larger workshops, a power supply, and even the building of a switching track that connected to the trunk line of the Pacific Railway and so ensured that the product could be moved effectively to market. 

Penal institutions all over the country became auxiliary arms of capitalist industry and commerce.  Two-thirds of all prisoners worked for private enterprise.

Today, strikingly enough, government is again providing subsidies and tax incentives as well as facilities, utilities, and free space for corporations making use of this same category of abjectly dependent labor.

The New Abolitionism

Dependency and flexibility naturally assumed no resistance, but there was plenty of that all through the nineteenth century from workers, farmers, and even prisoners.  Indeed, a principal objective in using prison labor was to undermine efforts to unionize, but from the standpoint of mobilized working people far more was at stake.

Opposition to convict labor arose from workingmen’s associations, labor-oriented political parties, journeymen unions, and other groups which considered the system an insult to the moral codes of egalitarian republicanism nurtured by the American Revolution.  The specter of proletarian dependency haunted the lives of the country’s self-reliant handicraftsmen who watched apprehensively as shops employing wage labor began popping up across the country.  Much of the earliest of this agitation was aimed at the use of prisoners to replace skilled workers (while unskilled prison labor was initially largely ignored).

It was bad enough for craftsmen to see their own livelihoods and standards of living put in jeopardy by “free” wage labor.  Worse still was to watch unfree labor do the same thing.  At the time, employers were turning to that captive prison population to combat attempts by aggrieved workers to organize and defend themselves.  On the eve of the Civil War, for example, an iron-molding contractor in Spuyten Duyvil, north of Manhattan in the Bronx, locked out his unionized workers and then moved his operation to Sing Sing penitentiary, where a laborer cost 40 cents, $2.60 less than the going day rate.  It worked, and Local 11 of the Union of Iron Workers quickly died away.

Worst of all was to imagine this debased form of work as a model for the proletarian future to come.  The workingman’s movement of the Jacksonian era was deeply alarmed by the prospect of “wage slavery,” a condition inimical to their sense of themselves as citizens of a republic of independent producers.  Prison labor was a sub-species of that dreaded “slavery,” a caricature of it perhaps, and intolerable to a movement often as much about emancipation as unionization.

All the way through the Gilded Age of the 1890s, convict labor continued to serve as a magnet for emancipatory desires.  In addition, prisoners’ rebellions became ever more common—in the North particularly, where many prisoners turned out to be Civil War veterans and dispossessed working people who already knew something about fighting for freedom and fighting back.  Major penitentiaries like Sing Sing became sites of repeated strikes and riots; a strike in 1877 even took on the transplanted Spuyten Duyvil iron-molding company.

Above and below the Mason Dixon line, political platforms, protest rallies, petition campaigns, legislative investigations, union strikes, and boycotts by farm organizations like the Farmers Alliance and Grange cried out for the abolition of the convict-lease system, or at least for its rigorous regulation.  Over the century’s last two decades, more than 20 coal-mine strikes broke out because of the use of convict miners.

The Knights of Labor, that era’s most audacious labor movement, was particularly exercised.  During the Coal Creek Wars in eastern Tennessee in the early 1890s, for instance, TC&I tried to use prisoners to break a miners’ strike.  The company’s vice president noted that it was “an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers.” 

Strikers and their allies affiliated with the Knights, the United Mine Workers, and the Farmers Alliance launched guerilla attacks on the prisoner stockade, sending the convicts they freed to Knoxville.  When the governor insisted on shipping them back, the workers released them into the surrounding hills and countryside.  Gun battles followed.

The Death of Convict Leasing

In the North, the prison abolition movement went viral, embracing not only workers’ organizations, sympathetic rural insurgents, and prisoners, but also widening circles of middle-class reformers.  The newly created American Federation of Labor denounced the system as “contract slavery.”  It also demanded the banning of any imports from abroad made with convict labor and the exclusion from the open market of goods produced domestically by prisoners, whether in state-run or private workshops.  In Chicago, the construction unions refused to work with materials made by prisoners.

By the latter part of the century, in state after state penal servitude was on its way to extinction.  New York, where the “industry” was born and was largest, killed it by the late 1880s.  The tariff of 1890 prohibited the sale of convict-made wares from abroad.  Private leasing continued in the North, but under increasingly restrictive conditions, including Federal legislation passed during the New Deal.  By World War II, it was virtually extinct (although government-run prison workshops continued as they always had).

At least officially, even in the South it was at an end by the turn of the century in Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi.  Higher political calculations were at work in these states.  Established elites were eager to break the inter-racial alliances that had formed over abolishing convict leasing by abolishing the hated system itself.  Often enough, however, it ended in name only.

What replaced it was the state-run chain gang (although some Southern states like Alabama and Florida continued private leasing well into the 1920s). Inmates were set to work building roads and other infrastructure projects vital to the flourishing of a mature market economy and so to the continuing process of capital accumulation.  In the North, the system of “hard labor” was replaced by a system of “hard time,” that numbing, brutalizing idleness where masses of people extruded from the mainstream economy are pooled into mass penal colonies.  The historic link between labor, punishment, and economic development was severed, and remained so… until now.

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