The infamous 19th century use of convict labor, consisting mostly of African Americans, to provide pliable low cost labor to corporations has made a reappearance in our 21st century. This is an excellent report on both the earlier history and what is happening today.
Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance -- unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide. Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system. More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy -- at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.An excellent film on the 19th century use of African American convict labor was recently broadcast by PBS: entitled, "Slavery by Another Name". The DVD can be purchased here.