At the same time there developed a still more vicious system. Immediately after the war legislation enacted in the South made severe provision with reference to vagrancy. Negroes were arrested on the slightest pretexts and their labor as that of convicts leased to landowners or other business men. When, a few years later, Negroes, dissatisfied with the returns from their labor on the farms, began a movement to the cities, there arose a tendency to make the vagrancy legislation still more harsh, so that at last a man could not stop work without technically committing a crime. Thus in all its hideousness developed the convict lease system.
This institution and the accompanying chain-gang were at variance with all the humanitarian impulses of the nineteenth century. Sometimes prisoners were worked in remote parts of a state altogether away from the oversight of responsible officials; if they stayed in a prison the department for women was frequently in plain view and hearing of the male convicts, and the number of cubic feet in a cell was only one-fourth of what a scientific test would have required. Sometimes there was no place for the dressing of the dead except in the presence of the living. The system was worst when the lessee was given the entire charge of the custody and discipline of the convicts, and even of their medical or surgical care. Of real attention there frequently was none, and reports had numerous blank spaces to indicate deaths from unknown causes. The sturdiest man could hardly survive such conditions for more than ten years. In Alabama in 1880 only three of the convicts had been in confinement for eight years, and only one for nine. In Texas, from 1875 to 1880, the total number of prisoners discharged was 1651, while the number of deaths and escapes for the same period totalled 1608. In North Carolina the mortality was eight times as great as in Sing Sing.
At last the conscience of the nation began to be heard, and after 1883 there were remedial measures. However, the care of the prisoner still left much to be desired; and as the Negro is greatly in the majority among prisoners in the South, and as he is still sometimes arrested illegally or on flimsy pretexts, the whole matter of judicial and penal procedure becomes one of the first points of consideration in any final settlement of the Negro Problem.[1]