This institution and the accompanying chain-gang were at variance with all the humanitarian impulses of the nineteenth century.  Sometimes prisoners were worked in remote parts of a state altogether away from the oversight of responsible officials; if they stayed in a prison the department for women was frequently in plain view and hearing of the male convicts, and the number of cubic feet in a cell was only one-fourth of what a scientific test would have required.  Sometimes there was no place for the dressing of the dead except in the presence of the living.  The system was worst when the lessee was given the entire charge of the custody and discipline of the convicts, and even of their medical or surgical care.  Of real attention there frequently was none, and reports had numerous blank spaces to indicate deaths from unknown causes.  The sturdiest man could hardly survive such conditions for more than ten years.  In Alabama in 1880 only three of the convicts had been in confinement for eight years, and only one for nine.  In Texas, from 1875 to 1880, the total number of prisoners discharged was 1651, while the number of deaths and escapes for the same period totalled 1608.  In North Carolina the mortality was eight times as great as in Sing Sing.

At last the conscience of the nation began to be heard, and after 1883 there were remedial measures.  However, the care of the prisoner still left much to be desired; and as the Negro is greatly in the majority among prisoners in the South, and as he is still sometimes arrested illegally or on flimsy pretexts, the whole matter of judicial and penal procedure becomes one of the first points of consideration in any final settlement of the Negro Problem.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Within recent years it has been thought that the convict lease system and peonage had practically passed in the South.  That this was by no means the case was shown by the astonishing revelations from Jasper County, Georgia, early in 1921, it being demonstrated in court that a white farmer, John S. Williams, who had “bought out” Negroes from the prisons of Atlanta and Macon, had not only held these people in peonage, but had been directly responsible for the killing of not less than eleven of them.

However, as the present work passes through the press, word comes of the remarkable efforts of Governor Hugh M. Dorsey for a more enlightened public conscience in his state.  In addition to special endeavor for justice in the Williams case, he has issued a booklet citing with detail one hundred and thirty-five cases in which Negroes have suffered grave wrong.  He divides his cases into four divisions:  (1) The Negro lynched, (2) The Negro held in peonage, (3) The Negro driven out by organized lawlessness, and (4) The Negro subject to individual acts of cruelty.  “In some counties,” he says, “the Negro is being driven out as though he were a wild beast.  In others he is being held as a slave.  In others no Negroes remain....  In only two of the 135 cases cited is crime against white women involved.”