Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as "mischief" and "insulting gestures" as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
african-americans, black-americans, black-history, convicts, criminology, for-profit-prisons, forced-labor, racism, racism-in-america