<P> But many Southern states--including North Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia, and Georgia--soon turned to the lease system as a temporary expedient, as rising costs and convict populations outstripped their meager resources . According to Edward L. Ayers, "(t) he South...more or less stumbled into the lease, seeking a way to avoid large expenditures while hoping a truly satisfactory plan would emerge ." Social historian Marie Gottschalk characterizes these leasing arrangements as an "important bridge between an agricultural economy based on slavery and the industrialization and agricultural modernization of the New South ." This may help to explain why support for the convict lease was altogether widespread in Southern society, Ayers concludes . No single group--black or white, Republican or Democrat--consistently opposed the lease once it gained power . </P> <P> The labor that convict lessees performed varied as the Southern economy evolved after the American Civil War . Ex-plantation owners were early beneficiaries, but emerging industrial capitalism ventures--e.g., phosphate mines and turpentine plants in Florida, railroads in Mississippi (and across the South)--soon came to demand convict labor . The South experienced an acute labor shortage in the post-war years, Edward L. Ayers explains, and no pool of displaced agricultural laborers was available to feed the needs of factory owners, as they had been in England and on the Continent . </P> <P> The lease system was useful for capitalists who wanted to make money quickly: Labor costs were fixed and low, and labor uncertainty was reduced to the vanishing point . Convicts could be and were driven to a point free laborers would not tolerate (and could not drink or misbehave). Although labor unrest and economic depression continued to rile the North and its factories, the lease system insulated its beneficiaries in South from these external costs . </P> <P> In many cases, Edward L. Ayers writes, the businessmen who utilized the convict - lease system were the same politicians who administered it . The system became, Ayers argues, a sort of "mutual aid society" for the new breed of capitalists and politicians who controlled the white Democratic regimes of the New South . Thus, Ayers concludes, officials often had something to hide, and contemporary reports on leasing operations often skirted or ignored the appalling conditions and death rates that attended these projects . </P>

The modern american correctional system had its original in what state