“Worse than Slavery” is a very insightful book that personally I was never aware of occurring in history. Throughout all my years of education I cannot remember once being told about convict leasing and the hardship prisoners faced while in these programs. Slavery, emancipation, “Jim Crow Laws”, and desegregation were the only topics I ever remember learning in grade school. Convict leasing was different from slavery but also the same in many ways. Although slaves were emancipated they were not entirely free and the “White man” constantly looked for loopholes to ensure African Americans were not completely free; convict leasing was just one of the many ways Caucasians used to maintain superiority to African Americans. African Americans were …show more content…
It was a business opportunity for wealthy plantation owners, mining companies, railroad systems, and other industries to use the prison system as a way to profit off of cheap labor. The prison system became a way to legally implement slavery by restoring the practices of slavery thru convict leasing. During this time period of reconstruction laws known as the “Pig Laws” were used in order to imprison African Americans for seemingly petty crimes that had unreasonable sentencings that targeted young African Americans and sometimes children. Thus, Convict Leasing resulted in an increase of African Americans imprisonment that was contradicting to the population rate of the …show more content…
However, comparing prisoners to slaves where the owner of the slave would be more reluctant to kill the slaves because the slave was seen as the owner’s property and cost him/her a lot more to replace compared to convict leasing. In convict leasing there would be little remorse for the harsh treatment or death of the prisoner because the private company would not be at a loss. Prisoners were basically seen as a tool in a factory used to get a job done, if that tool breaks a person orders a new one and continues on getting the job done. Once a prisoner was assigned to Convict Leasing the chance of them coming out of prison alive was very