Although chain gangs were legal in almost every American state during the 18th century, the southern states seemed to be the only region using them. Following the Civil War there was a labour shortage, and it was the place that appeared to need them the most.

By 1875 most of the states in the south had convict labour; an escalation in crime also led to them leasing out convict labour. Many convicts were also hired out to farms in the south to replace the slaves who were freed because of the Civil War. Tens of thousands of convicts - most of them indigent black men - were snared in a justice system rooted in racism and nurtured by economic expedience.

Chain gangs in America were essentially instruments with which to terrorise, control and humiliate convicts, and what they succeeded in doing was embodying a powerful symbol of the country's legacy of racial injustice and institutionalised oppression. Inmates were often controlled by whips and other harsh disciplines and punishments. While the chain gang's historical connection to slavery is inescapable, it soon became seen as a source of cheap labour where convicts were usually put to work on contract, lease or piecework bases for private industries outside prison.

The use of chain-gang labour slowly disappeared, not because of any moral abhorrence but because of competition with non-prison labour. Interstate commerce in the products of convict labour was restricted in the US in 1934; nowadays most of the country's prison industries are devoted to the production of goods used in state institutions.

Although chain gangs no longer exist in most southern states - Maricopa County in Arizona is an exception - Alabama briefly and unsuccessfully attempted to revive the gangs in the mid-1990s. They didn't last.