People | Thesis
Freed slaves were sentenced to hard labour The abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865 caused great difficulties for southern plantation owners. One way of continuing to obtain cheap labour was to use prisoners. By systematically imprisoning African Americans for minor offences when the cotton was ready to be picked, the plantations could keep running. Melissa Rubio’s doctoral thesis, which is based on a unique compilation of census data and various digitalized archives, demonstrates this. AT THE BEGINNING OF the Civil War in 1861, there
were about 4 million slaves in the United States. Their work made the large cotton plantations, which were a cornerstone of the economic system of the southern states, possible. The abolition of slavery meant economic disaster, not only for the plantation owners but for society in general. – In connection with the ban on slavery, the number of African-American prisoners increased in areas where slavery had been common, says Melissa Rubio. One explanation that is often put forward is that the dire financial situation of the emancipated slaves forced them into criminality. However, the crimes African Americans were accused of often involved petty things that had nothing to do with survival. Another explanation is that the plantation owners used the 13th amendment, which admittedly abolished slavery but still permitted its use as a punishment for crimes. This led to emancipated slaves being imprisoned precisely when the need for labour was increasing. However, no major study of this has been done before. My dissertation is the first that systematically, based on a large amount of data, examines the racial differences in the American prison system in order to understand it from an economic perspective.
IN HER RESEARCH, Melissa Rubio has used census data
on prisoners and race from all the counties in the entire United States from 1860–1940. – I then compared this data with information in various archives, such as the US Department of Labor archives, which, among other things, documented the prisons’ activities and profitability. There you can
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unearth facts about the great debate that was going on in the southern states about the relationship between labour that is free and not free respectively, where moral considerations were in direct opposition to the opportunity to make money. For example, having five prisoners carry out work cost the same as employing one free labourer. Melissa Rubio has also examined the archives of the US Department of Commerce. – I already knew that the slave trade was a matter that was handled by the Department of Commerce. But I was quite shocked when I realized that even after 1865, it was the Department of Commerce that archived facts about prisons, the number of prisoners of different races and the type of punishment, including prison, reform school, hard labour and so forth. When Melissa Rubio combined the different data, she came to the conclusion that African Americans were often imprisoned precisely when the plantations needed labour. – THE CRIMES COULD involve petty things, such as noise
disturbance or breach of the peace. Vagrancy, i.e., not having a job, could also result in imprisonment. If it is true that the number of African-American prisoners increased in line with the increasing need for cheap labour, the opposite should also apply: that the number of African-American prisoners decreased when the need for workers declined. To investigate this, Melissa Rubio studied three causes behind a reduced need for labour: increased mechanization, the Mississippi River floodings which destroyed crops, and cotton blight, resulting in reduced harvests. – Interestingly, there is a clear connection between these three examples and the decline in the number of African-American prisoners. The most interesting example is the cotton blight, because it resulted in an even worse economic disaster than the abolition of slavery. If the theory that African Americans committed crimes mainly because of financial hardship, the blight should have led to an increase in the number of prisoners, but the numbers went down instead. The fact that blacks often ended up in prison may have influenced a general perception, which may still persist, of African Americans having more pronounced
