After the civil war, farmers and businessmen in the South needed replacements for the labor force they had lost when their slaves were freed. So, the states began to lease convicts as laborers on plantations and other facilities. This provided cheap labor for the plantations and much needed revenue for the states. 90 percent of these convict laborer were black and it became a lucrative practice where states and counties would be quick to convict African Americans. Prison populations increased all over in the South, In Georgia, prison populations increased tenfold during the 40 year period from 1868 to 1908. In 1893, Frederick Douglas described it this way: "The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand in many of the United States."
President Grover Cleveland was not blind to these issues, in his 1886 annual address, he brought this "matter of very great importance" to congress and urged action. The state prisons were out of control. There was no uniform treatment of prisoners, and Cleveland held the federal government ultimately responsible for this. Grover Cleveland presented federal prisons as the answer to prison reform:
"So far as they are entitled to humane treatment and an opportunity for improvement and reformation, the Government is responsible to them and society that these things are forthcoming. But this duty can scarcely be discharged without more absolute control and direction than is possible under the present system ... With prisons under its own control the Government could deal with the somewhat vexed question of convict labor, so far as its convicts were concerned, according to a plan of its own adoption, and with due regard to the rights and interests of our laboring citizens, instead of sometimes aiding in the operation of a system which causes among them irritation and discontent."
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