CONVICT LABOR FOR ROAD WORK. 9 
convicts on public works appears to have been passed by the leg- 
islature of North Carolina in 1867. This law provided for the em- 
ployment of county convicts on county roads in case any county 
should desire to use them. Subsequently similar laws were passed 
in North Carolina 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 public 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 California. 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 of representative institutions in the United 
States. The figures for 1885 and 1903-4 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 
