Beginning in 1877, all Florida State prisoners were to be leased to private businesses as a servile labor force subject to corporal punishment. By the end of the program in 1919 over 10,000 Florida residents and visitors were sentenced to forced labor, the vast majority of them being young black males.

This data was compiled from the Biennial Reports of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the State of Florida, who ran the prison system, and is supplemented with US Census data. The full data set includes county sentencing rates, prisoner demographics (race, gender, place of origin), and prison mortality (annual counts, rates, and age on date of death for select years) as well as county characteristics including population by race, percent of land area in agriculture in 1910, and an indicator for counties in the historic plantation belt.

Donegan, C. 2019. The making of Florida's 'criminal class:' race, modernity and convict leasing program, 1877-1919. Florida Historical Quarterly 97.4: pp. 408-434 PDF [pre-print]