"Before 13th: The Origin of Convict Leasing"

This paper challenges the scholarly consensus that convict leasing begins with the 13th Amendment and that it was explicitly conceived as a strategy to keep African Americans trapped in a predicament approximating enslavement, demonstrating instead it began several decades prior when a wealthy textile manufacturer introduced the manufacture of hemp into Kentucky’s first penitentiary though it was almost exclusively managed by enslaved farmers until that juncture.
Inspired by native son Thomas Jefferson’s interest in using the penitentiary as a substitute for most serious crimes, settlers migrating from Virginia to Kentucky in the years following the American Revolution quickly constructed a penitentiary as an explicit effort to foster progressive liberal reform. But when Joel Scott persuaded the state legislature to lease the penitentiary to him to run as a private enterprise, Kentucky would become the site of a gruesome new form of capital accumulation.
Convict leasing took root in Kentucky because of three related developments: the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the birth of the domestic slave trade, and the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment. The framers of the US Constitution, drafted a document that would embolden the federal government to levy taxes and tighten the monetary supply to enhance the financial position of creditors. Meanwhile, the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In the process, new protocols for debt emerged in tandem with a new geography of enslavement that facilitated a new mode of criminal justice.