<P> During the Reconstruction Era, the North Carolina legislature authorized state judges to sentence offenders to work on chain gangs on county roads, railroads, or other internal improvements for a maximum term of one year--though escapees who were recaptured would have to serve double their original sentence . North Carolina had failed to erect a penitentiary in the antebellum period, and its legislators planned to build an Auburn - style penitentiary to replace the penal labor system . But graft and shady dealings soon rendered a new prison impracticable, and North Carolina convicts continued to be leased to railroad companies . </P> <P> Freed blacks became the primary workers in the South's emerging penal labor system . Those accused of property crime--white or black--stood the greatest chance of conviction in post-war Southern courts . But black property offenders were convicted more often than white ones--at a rate of eight convictions for every ten black defendants, compared to six of every ten white defendants . Overall, conviction rates for whites dropped substantially from antebellum levels during the Reconstruction Era and continued to decline throughout the last half of the nineteenth century . </P> <P> The Freedmen's Bureau, charged with implementing congressional reconstruction throughout the former Confederate states, was the primary political body that opposed the increasing racial overtones of Southern criminal justice during the Reconstruction Era . The Bureau's mission reflected a strong faith in impersonal legalism, according to historian Edward L. Ayers, and its agents were to act as guarantors of blacks' legal equality . The Bureau maintained courts in the South from 1865 to 1868 to adjudicate minor civil and criminal cases involving freed slaves . Ultimately, Ayers concludes, the Bureau largely failed to protect freed slaves from crime and violence by whites, or from the injustices of the Southern legal system, although the Bureau did provide much needed services to freed slaves in the form of food, clothing, school support, and assistance in contracts . The Greensboro, North Carolina Herald more bluntly stated that the Freedmen's Bureau was no match for the "Organic Law of the Land" in the South, white supremacy . </P> <P> In the rural South, the Freedmen's Bureau was only as strong as its isolated agents, who were often unable to assert their will over that of the whites in their jurisdiction . Manpower issues and local white resentment led to early compromises under which southern civilians were allowed to serve as magistrates on the Freedmen's Courts, although the move was opposed by many former slaves . </P>

Where did our early system of corrections derive from