$6 per citizen.

"Where the labor unions have not prevented it, society has made the
criminal pay his own bills. In the South where the people are
beginning to show a keenness for money that is not surpassed in the
North, but where, as yet, capital is not gathered into such immense
and usable sums as in the central and eastern States, a new policy has
been adopted with regard to the offender. He is generally a Negro,
hence he is sent back to slavery. He is sold to a farmer, a distiller,
a phosphate miner, or a manufacturer, for a term of years, and his
employer pays considerably less to the State than he would otherwise
lay out in wages.

"In Alabama, if a State prisoner or long-termer escapes from his
employer, he must pay into the public treasury $200, and $100 if a
county prisoner or short-termer escapes.

"When an inspector is present at a whipping, the turbulent convict may
be given twenty-one lashes on his bare back; in the absence of the
inspector, the whipping boss is limited to fifteen lashes.

"The guards are of the poor white class, dull and illiterate, and
receive from $20 to $30 per month and their 'keep.'

"In Florida shackling is seldom practiced except as a punishment for
running away, as it interferes with the work of the convict. Guns and
bloodhounds are much in evidence in the convict camps. Nothing is done
for the betterment of the convicts intellectually or otherwise.
Missionaries are graciously permitted to distribute tracts among them.

"White convicts are generally assigned to offices and cook shops, or
become gang foremen. For the white prisoner, whatever his offense,
there is always a hope of pardon, but the Negro prisoner, unless he be
a crap-shooter or chicken thief, congratulates himself on being
consigned to open air work in the convict's camps, for he remembers
how dreadfully easy in Florida it is for a Negro to be lynched."

Judge M. W. Gibbs of Arkansas said he had known white employers in the
South to be in collusion with magistrates to have colored men
committed on the flimsiest pretext, simply that they might obtain more
free labor on their plantations by means of the convict lease system.

The eleventh census shows that in the United States there were 2,468
county jails and only 44 reformatories. There were no reformatories in
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

Great Britain supports over 400 reformatories