Full Citation
Title: U.S. Convict Labor System and Racial Discrimination
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: After the demise of the slavery and rise of crime after the end of the Civil War, convict labor system evolved in the United States in order to finance state penitentiary institutions. It provided monetary incentives to the police to arrest more people. Black and other minorities became an easy target for a police that used a variety of minor crime laws to increase the supply of coerced labor. Using the geographical variation of convict labor camps in the United States in 1886-1940 I show that counties exposed to a more severe exploitation of convict labor experienced had higher incarceration rates in 1920 and 1930, especially among minorities. After the abolishment of the old convict labor system in 1941, the racial discrimination in policing remained: the same variation of convict labor camps predicts excessive arrests of Black and Hispanic for non-violent crimes (drugs and vagrancy). To show that the results are causal I use the exogenous shock of first massive expansion of the U.S. convict labor system in 1870 that had happened when the National Prison Association was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. I use distance to Cincinnati as an instrument for the value of goods produced by convict labor. It correlates with the likelihood of attending the Congress by the wardens of prisons, and cost of getting information about the profitability of convict labor. I perform a series of sensitivity checks and placebo tests to ensure that results are indeed causal.
Url: http://www.poykerm.com/uploads/9/2/4/6/92466562/cl_persistance.pdf
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Authors: Poyker, Michael
Publisher: Columbia Business School
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity
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