History
| This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. |
Various claims as to the purpose of chain gangs have been offered. These include:
- punishment
- societal restitution for the cost of housing, feeding, and guarding the inmates. The money earned by work performed goes to offset prison expenses by providing a large workforce at no cost for government projects, and at minimal convict leasing cost for private businesses
- a way of perpetuating African-American servitude after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended slavery.
- reducing inmates' idleness
- to serve as a deterrent to crime
- to satisfy the needs of politicians to appear "tough on crime"
The use of chain gangs in the United States generally ended in 1955. Chain gangs experienced a resurgence when Alabama began to use them again in 1995.
Read more about this topic: Chain Gang
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)