Chuck

You'd be taken to jail.

And then you could be leased out as a slave to a local plantation owner doing the work you were doing before you were freed by the 13th Amendment legally because of that loophole in the 13th Amendment.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

And that still happens today.

I mean, not quite to that dramatic a degree.

But when people die in custody in prison, there's not a lot that the prison's held accountable for.

So that's essentially a longstanding thing in the United States.

People like prisoners dying, even though they haven't been sentenced to death.

So I think you said that Georgia was making some pretty good money off of this starting in the 1860s.

I read this started to, like other states were like, oh, that's a really good idea.

By 1898, convict leasing made up 73% of Alabama's state revenue.

Yeah.

Which is really saying something.

Right.

And then when Reconstruction ended, the federal government just basically said, hey, we really just want to be on good terms with the Southern elite again, so we're just going to leave you on your own.

and withdrew from the South.

Black people were in really terrible positions, really vulnerable positions.

And at that time, prison labor stepped up.