![]() By 1886 the US commissioner of labor reported that, where leasing was practiced, the average revenues were nearly four times the cost of running prisons. Between 18, Alabama’s profits from leasing state convicts made up 10 percent of the state’s budget. ![]() Lessees gave a cut of the profits to the states, ensuring that the system would endure. An Alabama government inspection showed that in a two-week period in 1889, 165 prisoners were flogged. Another punishment was “stringing up” in which a cord was wrapped around the men’s thumbs, flung over a tree limb, and tightened until the men hung suspended, sometimes for hours. One common form of punishment was “watering” in which a prisoner was strapped down, a funnel forced into his mouth, and water poured in so as to distend the stomach to such a degree that it put pressure on the heart, making the prisoner feel that he was going to die. When they died from exhaustion or disease, he sold their bodies to the Medical School at Nashville for students to practice on.Ĭompanies liked using convicts in part because, unlike free workers, they could be driven by torture. In 1871, Tennessee lessee Thomas O’Conner forced convicts to work in mines and went as far as collecting their urine to sell to local tanneries. Lessees went to extreme lengths to extract profits. US Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company, forced thousands of prisoners to slave in its coal mines. Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, controlled all convicts in Mississippi for a period. Former slaveholders built empires that were bigger than those of most slave owners before the war. The 13th amendment had abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime” so, until the early 20th century, Southern prisoners were kept on private plantations and on company-run labor camps where they laid railroad tracks, built levees, and mined coal. The reason for turning penitentiaries over to companies was similar to states’ justifications for using private prisons today: prison populations were soaring, and they couldn’t afford to run their penitentiaries themselves. Prison privatization accelerated after the Civil War. It quickly became the main Southern supplier of textiles west of the Mississippi. Five years after Texas opened its first penitentiary, it was the state’s largest factory. “If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves,” posited the Telegraph and Texas Register in the mid-19th century, “why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?” The head of a Texas jail suggested the state open a penitentiary as an instrument of Southern industrialization, allowing the state to push against the “over-grown monopolies” of the North. Like private prisons today, profit rather than rehabilitation was the guiding principle of early penitentiaries throughout the South. Instead, they deal almost exclusively with the profitability of the prison. One prisoner wrote in his memoir that, as soon as the prison was privatized, his jailers “laid aside all objects of reformation and re-instated the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.” Much like CoreCivic’s shareholder reports today, Louisiana’s annual penitentiary reports from the time give no information about prison violence, rehabilitation efforts, or anything about security. The company, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward ran it as a factory, using inmates to produce cheap clothes for enslaved people. Louisiana first privatized its penitentiary in 1844, just nine years after it opened. His ability to run a prison that put money into state coffers would later attract the attention of two businessmen with a new idea: to found a corporation that would run prisons and sell shares on the stock market. Hutto did such a good job in Texas that Arkansas would hire him to run their entire prison system–made entirely of plantations–which he would run at a profit to the state. In some states, certain inmates were given guns and even whips, and empowered to torture those who didn’t meet labor quotas. It was 1967 and the Beatles’ “All you need is love” was a hit, but the men in the fields sang songs with lyrics like “Old Master don’t you whip me, I’ll give you half a dollar.” Hutto’s family lived on the plantation and even had a “house boy,” an unpaid convict who served them.Īt the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. Before founding the Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan.
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