The death rates among convict laborers were appalling. In Mississippi the death rate between 1880 and 1885 averaged 11 percent. It was about the same in Arkansas in the mid-1880s. In Louisiana in 1881 it was 14 percent; in Mississippi in 1887, 16 percent. Of the roughly eleven hundred prisoners brought to the Slope No. 2 mine run by the Pratt Mining Company of Alabama in 1888–89, only forty had prior criminal records.
