CONVICT LABOR FOE ROAD WORK. 9 



convicts on public works appears to liave been passed by tlie leg- 

 islature of North Carolina in 1867. Tbis law provided for the em- 

 plo}Tnent of county convicts on county roads in case any county 

 should desire to use them. Subsequently similar laws were passed 

 m North CaroHna in 1873, 1875, 1877, 1879, and 1889. But the 

 first work attempted on a practical scale under these laws was con- 

 ducted by Mecklenburg County, in 1885. 



Previous to this work had been begun by a few counties in the 

 States of Georgia and Tennessee; but, though there developed 

 immediately a considerable sentiment in favor of such employment, 

 the use of convicts on the roads in the South did not become 

 general until about 1890. Even then the convicts so employed 

 were county convicts, and in practically all of the Southern States 

 the State prisoners still were employed in other ways under the 

 lease system. . 



About this time interest in the improvement of the roads of the 

 country having been stimulated largely by the advent of the bicycle, 

 the plan of using State convicts to accomplish the necessary work 

 was widely agitated, and this led to the settled policy in the 

 South of employing the convicts in that manner. For a time the 

 Northern and Western States rejected the idea upon the ground 

 that such labor would entail the degrading exposure of the convict 

 to the pubhc gaze, the same reason that had caused the abolition of 

 the plan in Pennsylvania in 1790. In 1893 the new road law in 

 Delaware provided for the purchase of a stone quarry and the prepa- 

 ration by the prisoners of stone for road work, and shortly after- 

 ward a more elaborate plant of this character was established at 

 Folsom prison in Cahfornia. New Jersey and New York also were 

 among the first of the Northern States to enter into work of this 

 sort. But the employment of prisoners in the actual construction of 

 highways in the North and West is a development of the last ten 

 years; and the reason which ultimately prompted the action in 

 these sections were not economic considerations as in the South, but 

 the desire to relieve the overcrowded condition of the penitentiaries, 

 to furnish employment that would conflict as little as possible with 

 the interests of free labor and to provide a particular form of employ- 

 ment for certain prisoners of the better sort. 



Table 2 shows the number of prisoners and the percentages of 

 the total prison population employed in indoor and outdoor work, 

 and on road construction only, in the years 1885, 1903-4, and 

 1914-15, in a number c)f representative institutions in the United 

 States. The figures for 1 885 and 1 903-4 were taken from the reports 

 of the Bureau of Labor and those for 1914-15 were obtained by cor- 

 respondence. In this table, as in Table 1, the figures for the latest 



