Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor that was practiced in the Southern United States, where private individuals and corporations could lease labor from the state in the form of incarcerated people, nearly all of whom were Black.

The state of Louisiana leased out convicted people as early as 1844. The system expanded throughout most of the South with the emancipation of enslaved people at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. The practice peaked about 1880 and persisted in various forms until gradually phased out following Francis Biddle's "Circular No. 3591" of December 12, 1941. Whilst not having been explicitly abolished, the practice became politically untenable. As a result other forms of prison labour remain legal in the United States, under the Thirteenth Amendment's penal exemption clause.

The system was highly lucrative for both the lessees and state governments. For example, in 1898, 73 percent of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing, whilst contractors were able to lease people at costs as low as $9 a month. Corruption, lack of accountability, and violence resulted in "one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history". African Americans, mostly adult males, due to "vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing", comprised the vast majority, though not all, of the convicted people leased.

While states of the Northern United States sometimes contracted for prison labor, the historian Alex Lichtenstein notes that "only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical "penitentiary" become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which incarcerated people labored".

The writer Douglas A. Blackmon described the system:

It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.

Convict leasing in the United States was widespread in the South during the Reconstruction Period (1865–1877) after the end of the Civil War, when many Southern legislatures were ruled by majority coalitions of African Americans and Radical Republicans, and Union generals acted as military governors. Farmers and businessmen needed to find replacements for the labor force once their slaves had been freed. After many African American politicians were forced out of state and local positions, many Southern legislatures passed Black Codes to restrict free movement of black people and force them into employment. For instance, several states made it illegal for a black man to change jobs without the approval of his employer. If convicted of vagrancy, black people could be imprisoned, and they also received sentences for a variety of petty offenses. States began to lease convicted labor to the plantations and other facilities seeking labor, as the freed men were trying to withdraw and work for themselves. This provided the states with a new source of revenue during years when their finances were largely depleted, and lessees profited by the use of forced labor at less than market rates.

Black Codes, pig laws, and vagrancy laws, intended to restrict the movement and freedom of Black people across the South, criminalising unemployment, homelessness, and changes in employment. These laws were coupled with increasing sentencing, and harsher penalties for minor offences across the South. In doing so, statutes created a new criminal class made up of newly freed people, rapidly expanding the numbers of people subject to imprisonment. As this happened, states across the South would begin to codify convict leasing within statute books. Alabama, as one example, did so in 1875 by amending several aspects of the Revised Code "to employ or hire out the convicts, to be used without the walls of the penitentiary, either upon public or private work, within the State". Whist prison labour had existed prior to the Civil War, the rapid expansion of incarcerated populations gave way for a reorganisation of carceral labour systems from internal state motivations to external economic and racial motivations.