Discuss the difference between the contract system and the lease system including historical context.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Contract and lease systems were both devised to use inmates’ labor. Inmate labor under Southern states’ lease systems was leased by the prison to farmers or other contractors. Inmates under a contract system in northern and Midwestern prisons worked in larger groups under private or public employers. Southern prisons, because of the institution of slavery, developed on a different trajectory from that of other prisons. As indicated by Young’s (2001) research, prisons were little used before the Civil War. In agriculturally based societies, labor is prized and needed in the fields, particularly slave labor, and that served as a rampart for the Southern economy. Once slavery was abolished with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, Southern states in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War began incarcerating more people, particularly ex-slaves, and recreating a slave society in the corrections system. As Oshinsky (1996) documents for Mississippi prisons, blacks were picked up and imprisoned for relatively minor offenses and forced to work like slaves on prison plantations or on plantations of Southern farmers. The North and Midwest, and later the West, built prisons somewhat on the Auburn model, but for the most part abandoned the attempt to completely silence inmates. It was no longer emphasized, as maintaining such silence required an excess of staff and constant vigilance, which were usually not available in these understaffed and overcrowded facilities (Jacobs, 1977). Inmates in such prisons worked in larger groups under private or public employers, and order was maintained with the lash or other innovations in discipline as discussed in Chapter 2 (see also Lawes [1932] regarding the management of Sing Sing). Though there was no pretense of high-minded reform going on in these prisons, their conditions and the accommodations of inmates were thought to be far superior to those provided in Southern prisons of the time. Conditions under both the contract and lease systems could be horrible, but were likely worse under the Southern lease system where contractors were often responsible for both housing and feeding inmates. Such contractors had little incentive for feeding or keeping inmates in good condition, as the supply of labor from the prison was almost inexhaustible.