Lichtenstein's major argument is that the convict lease was not an irrational regression; it was not primarily a throwback to precapitalist modes of production. Rather, it was a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South. In this sense, he argues, "convict labor was in many ways in the vanguard of the region's first tentative, ambivalent, steps toward modernity."

Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, loc. 71