How They Ruined Our Prisons
Judge Justice is wrong. The governor is wrong. The Legislature is wrong. And the reformers are wrong. The answer to the Texas prison crisis is to run the jails the same way we did twenty years ago.
(Page 2 of 6)
The Quaker experiment was not duplicated in other states and was soon abandoned in Pennsylvania because it was a political and fiscal liability. Quaker prisons were expensive because craftwork produced little income, they cost a lot to build, and feeding convicts in their cells required hired kitchen help. The security and mercy the Quaker system conferred on convicts became a punishment to taxpayers and led, in the early nineteenth century, to the general adoption of a revised prison model developed at a penitentiary in Auburn, New York. In the Auburn prison, convicts were expected to do industrial work to defray the cost of their keep. Every morning they were marched in lockstep to industries established inside the prison walls, where they worked shoulder to shoulder in silence.
The Auburn system was cheaper to administer, but it brought with it a new set of problems. Convicts who walked and worked together sometimes did speak to one another, and sometimes they assaulted each other. When they did, they were punished, usually by the old methods, hanging and flogging, and sometimes by solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. Castigation of the flesh receded as a general punishment in America to become a punishment reserved for convicts. The nation adopted what was, in effect, a two-tiered system of justice. Citizens who committed crimes at large were tried and sentenced to prisons. Convicts who committed crimes in prison were given summary administrative hearings and were punished by capital, corporal, and dietary means.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the cost of maintaining the growing convict populations strained the country’s already exhausted public resources, and Auburn-era standards were allowed to lapse. The Auburn model, which had adopted a rule of silence and single-celling (a one-man, one-cell living space allotment) from its Quaker forerunners, gave way to the penal environment that is familiar today, one characterized by shared cells, dining rooms, and showers. In the more congested, essentially freer setting, convicts had extensive, unsupervised access to one another. While in prison they renewed old outlaw ties, analyzed past crimes, planned and sometimes committed new ones.
In 1829 the Mexican government drew up plans for an elaborate prison in Texas but never got around to building it. The Republic of Texas was impoverished, and many of its citizens thought of it as an unofficial penal colony where men came to escape punishment elsewhere. Being a kind of prison itself, the republic therefore built no prisons; its punishments were those that would have been used in prisons elsewhere. Murder, rape, armed robbery, burglary, and horse theft were punished by hanging. Men convicted of manslaughter were branded with the letter M, and T was burned into hands that thieved. The forty stripes of biblical prescription were emblazoned onto the backs of shoplifters, cattle rustlers, and other minor offenders. The chief drawback to the republic’s justice was that juries, in horror of its penalties, sometimes recoiled from assessing guilty verdicts. And in some counties no one could be found to inflict punishments with the noose, whip, and branding iron.
The lack of a prison system did not stand as a bar to the state’s admission to the Union—an indication that its punishments were not considered terribly cruel or unusual or that penal affairs weren’t important to Congress—and not until 1850 did the Legislature provide funds for the first Texas prison, built on the site of today’s Huntsville, or Walls Unit, where each year the Texas Prison Rodeo is staged. The new state’s prison planners favored the Auburn system, and during the Civil War, prisoners working in a textile mill at the Walls produced large quantities of scarce cotton goods for the Confederate Army and the state’s war widows. But after the war the plant’s products were unwelcome competitors in the free marketplace, and like most other states, Texas began leasing convict labor to private contractors.
In the North, industrialists leased convict labor to operate plants built inside prison walls. Texas experimented with the industrial system by building a lignite-fired smelter at a prison near Rusk. When the Capitol was built, the Rusk plant produced much of the metalwork for the building. But as a leasing venture, the Rusk plant was a failure. The machinery needed to establish the plant and the skilled workmen needed to supervise and maintain it were hard to come by in nonindustrial Texas, and railroad lines for carrying its products to market were non-existent; a rail line between Rusk and Palestine, built to service the prison, was also a commercial failure. The prison system was simply not capable of leading the state’s slow progress toward industrial development.
In Texas and the rest of the preindustrial South, convict leasing took a different form, resulting in a new and lasting prison model. In the South, convicts had to be taken outside the prison walls to find work, usually on plantations, in timber camps, and on road gangs. Conditions in the camps and farms were radically different from those in the Auburn prisons. There were no cells of concrete and steel. Instead, convicts were housed in enclosed trailers, canvas tents, and wooden dormitories, structures not designed with security in mind. Preventing escapes became a preoccupation of guards, of whom there were never enough. Salaried employees constituted a business expense, an item of overhead for the state and its lessees.
In the camps, physical barriers were replaced by eyes, ears, whips, dogs, and shotguns as the chief deterrents to escape. Reliable prisoners were recruited as foremen in the fields and as informants for the guard force. Some of them exploited their positions of trust. They used hoes, axes, and other work implements as weapons to settle scores with enemies, and according to Texas A&M historian Donald Walker, some of them took advantage of their open-air surroundings to operate stills. But though the leasing system was etched with corruption and pocked with brutality, it was financially successful. By the turn of the century Texas had decided, as other Southern states would, to go into the farming business for itself. The state purchased land near Huntsville and along Oyster Creek and the Brazos River, south and west of Houston. The prison farms established there became the heart of the Texas prison system.
From the teens forward, convicts in Texas were nearly self-supporting. They grew cotton, processed it in the system’s gins, and spun it into cloth; the Goree Unit near Huntsville, which housed women prisoners, became the system’s garment shop. The farms produced beef and pork and turned fats into soap; inmates at the Walls Unit shaped brogans out of hides. Convicts planted and harvested the vegetables they ate and put them up in the system’s own canneries. Coffee wasn’t a practical crop for Texas, but the system imported beans, roasted and ground them, and packaged them itself. It fired brick in ovens at the units west of Houston, and convicts built their own prisons, with walls and bars and cellblocks, like prisons anywhere else but with exceptional amounts of dormitory space.
In industrial states, at the insistence of the workers’ movement, convict labor and prison-made goods were often banned from the market, but in Texas, the prison agriculture system could absorb nearly unlimited numbers of unskilled hands. In the Northern states and in the federal prisons, the few convicts with protected jobs—stamping license plates and sewing mailbags, for example—were sometimes paid token wages for their work; but most convicts were left idle, and gang activity, including inmate-on-inmate murder, filled the void. Prisoners in Texas were given only clothing, bedding, meals, tobacco, postage stamps, and envelopes, but they were kept busy and kept safe. Envious penal administrators in Northern and Western states toyed with the idea of farming, but too many of them had already located their prisons inside capital cities and industrial centers.
On paper, at least, the Texas system was nearly ideal. Hard work, study, and obedience were the pathways to a better prison life and a convict’s early return home. All incoming prisoners in good health were assigned to the line, or field work force. Ordinarily, new convicts were assigned to tight, two-man cells too. The system required them to attend part-time prison schools until they could pass a basic education test, and eventually it offered high school, vocational, and college courses as well. After proving themselves in the fields, inmates became eligible for transfer into other jobs, and because field labor was hard and its discipline harsh, “job” in Texas prison parlance came to mean any work assignment other than stoop labor. After a few months on a cellblock, well-behaved prisoners also became eligible for bunks in the barrackslike dorms. At each step up the ladder of prison-house advancement, including the completion of education and training courses, Texas prisoners were rewarded with increased “good-time” rates: according to the plan, exemplary convicts could shorten their sentences by as much as thirty days for every thirty days they actually spent behind bars, and even beginning convicts, fresh on the line, were granted twenty days of additional credit for every thirty in confinement. Liberal good-time and parole policies made it possible for a man with a twenty-year sentence to be free in less than four years.
My Library
