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Money was the problem, or one of the problems. Austere, silent prisons were expensive; it was cheaper to let them get noisy and crowded. Even worse, states could not resist the temptation to make money off prisoners, which was difficult in the classic penitentiary. Illinois passed a law in 1845 leasing the penitentiary at Alton “and the labor of the convicts” to Samuel A. Buckmaster. Buckmaster was to pay a bonus of $5,100, the “usual fees of the inspectors,” and furnish “at his own expense, the necessary guards and food, clothing, beds and bedding, and necessary bills of physicians for the convicts.” He could use convicts to manufacture “hempen articles.” Buckmaster continued as lessee until 1857, when he was replaced by S. A. Casey. Only in 1871 was the leasing system discontinued.33 California tried a leasing system, too, in the 1850s;34 and it became standard practice in the South.

There had been flirtations with leasing in the South before the Civil War; but the golden age of leasing came afterward. Before the Civil War, most prisoners in the South were white, not black; blacks were overwhelmingly slaves, and they were whipped and sent back to work (or hanged in more serious cases). After the war, the prisons filled with blacks—to be precise, young black men. In Virginia, in 1871, there were 828 prisoners in the state penitentiary; 609 of these were black men, 63 were black women; there were 152 white men, and 4 white women.35 In Georgia, as of October 1, 1899, there were 2,201 state prisoners; no less than 1,885 of them were black men (68 were black women); only 3 white women were in prison, and 245 white men.36 The ages of prisoners ranged from eleven to seventy-three-there were twelve boys and one girl under the age of fifteen—but the bulk of the prisoners were in their late teens and twenties. Half of the prisoners were completely illiterate. 37

Racial facts powerfully influenced southern penal policy. In many parts of the South, it was not the prison that was put in private hands to manage, but the prisoners. Contractors got bodies, to be housed in work camps and made to slave away in mines, or swamps, or on the railroads. These prisoners were, of course, overwhelmingly black. Conditions were harsh and brutal. They slept at night in “filthy shacks. Men with capital, from the North as well as the South, bought these years of convicts’ lives. The largest mining and railroad companies in the region as well as small-time businessmen scrambled to win the leases.” In extreme cases, the “crumbling antebellum penitentiaries” were abandoned except for a few white murderers, black men too sick to work profitably, and women of both races.38 Meanwhile, in the camps, men died like flies. In 1881, in Virginia, the death rate inside the penitentiary was 1.5 percent per year; in camps run by contractors for the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad, the death rate was 11 percent.39 Even worse death rates, as we have seen (chapter 4), occurred on some southern chain gangs.

The leasing system was in local use as well. Throughout the South, prisoners convicted of petty crimes sweated their lives away in work gangs, laboring either for the county or municipality, or for private contractors. Crime, as Edward Ayers put it, became a kind of asset to the counties. They made money on the deal.40 Conditions were, as usual, subhuman. One month in 1893, 160 black males (men and boys), along with 26 black women—and only 11 whites, 2 of them women—were working “from dawn to dark building a canal” for Chatham County, Alabama, slaving in the muck of the ditches, buried up to their knees. No wonder so many prisoners died; or that a young man (a white), who had been caught stealing a hat in a barroom, tried to cut his throat with “an old piece of iron barrel hoop” after three days on the chain gang.41

In the North and West, the prisons were still purveying, in theory, a stem, relentless system of discipline; they were supposed to be a kind of reformatory for the criminal class, severe but just. There was