“If he dies, it is but a small loss”: whiteness as property and convict leasing in Florida 1875–1925

By the late-nineteenth century, convict leasing was a booming industry in Florida. Characterized by a complex network of bidding on, leasing, and subleasing convict labor, Florida’s fully privatized carceral system reflected the dual interests of the state’s white elites in the decades following emancipation. Seeking to maintain white sociopolitical control across Florida while simultaneously preserving (and often augmenting) their land holdings, Florida’s wealthy white landholders saw incarceration as both an avenue to preserving their social order and property. Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” (1993) provides a framework for understanding this system, describing whiteness as both shaping and embodying property rights. Situating Florida’s Jim Crow carceral regime within Harris’s framework, this paper argues that convict leasing reflected and reinforced the dual nature of whiteness as property, tracing the foundations of modern American carceral capitalism to the Jim Crow convict camp and the racialized conceptions of property it engendered and sustained.