Introduction
Without a doubt, one can clearly draw a parallel between the punitive system and the system of slavery as it existed in the United States prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. An examination of the history of the penal system as it existed in the State of Texas proves to be the best illustration of the comparisons between the penal system and the system of slavery. Especially since America’s late-twentieth century punitive turn, progressive historians have had to work with blinders on to keep the faith. “Progress,” of course, is a subjective, historically contingent concept. What constitutes betterment for one group may constitute backsliding for another.
For entry-level employees, for example, workplace conditions have clearly improved over the course of the twentieth century. Once required to fill dangerous dawn-to-dusk shifts on subsistence wages, Texas line guards now put in forty-hour weeks and take home sufficient pay to enter the precarious ranks of the lower-middle class. But most advocates of penological advancement base their claims on the lives of prisoners rather than their keepers.
They have proposed various yardsticks to measure prison improvements, from food quality and work load to whipping frequency and educational opportunities. Even according to Progressives’ own criteria, however, prison amelioration has been ambiguous.
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By some measures, day-to-day convict life has surely improved. Prisoners today endure less arduous farm labor and fewer tune-ups or floggings. They are less likely to be shot down in a cane field or spend the night gasping for air in an over-crowded dark cell. They are less likely to starve or drop dead from heatstroke. By other progressive benchmarks, however, Texas’s prisons have deteriorated. During successive reform movements, critics railed against prison profiteering, inhumane conditions, and institutionalized racism. But all of these facets of prison life outlasted their opponents, and they remain alive and well in Texas’s massive punishment complex.
During the lease era, dissidents’ principal complaint was that profit making corrupted every effort at rehabilitation. ‘The great object of reform will be forgotten whenever the chief object is to make money out of men’s bones and muscles,” admonished one legislator. Such critics rejoiced with the abolition of convict leasing in 1910, having achieved a seemingly decisive victory. During the phenomenal prison buildup of the 1980s, however, for-profit punishment rose from the grave. By 1994, thirty private prisons had sprung up in the state, warehousing more Texas prisoners than lessees ever had and importing rented convicts from as far away as Hawaii.
This time around, the contracts work differently—the state pays private prison operators rather than vice versa—but the business incentives are similar. Private prison corporations, most of them southern companies like Texas’s Correll Corrections, make money by maximizing their prisoner head counts and minimizing expenses. They reward stockholders by spending less on guard wages and training and by providing convicts cheaper food, managed health care, and less expensive programming.
It remains to be seen whether this re-privatization will lead to depravities on the scale of convict leasing, but preliminary signs are not encouraging. Riots and multiple killings have already tarnished the carefully tended image of the nation’s largest punishment conglomerate, Nashville’s Corrections Corporation of America. In Texas, corruption scandals eerily reminiscent of the lease era have erupted.
In 1994, for example, TDCJ Director Andy Collins was indicted for conspiring to feed inmates watered-down meat substitute so he could line his pockets with the cost savings. All in all, re-privatization has unfolded as in a leasing opponent’s perverse nightmare. Nearly a century after the abolition of the contract system, well-connected entrepreneurs are once again growing rich off the punishment business, while convicts have regained their dubious status as tradable commodities.
Nor can advocates of progressive prison history take solace in the advancement of reformatory programs. In 1989, Texas stripped the moniker “corrections” from its prisons, thus officially abandoning rehabilitation as a principal rationale of imprisonment for the first time since statehood. The name change signified the triumph of a punitive revolution. Since the early 1970s, federal court intervention notwithstanding, state politicians, prosecutors, and jurists have repeatedly extended prison sentences, reduced paroles to a trickle, created new classes of felonies, eliminated special protections for juvenile defendants, intensified prosecutions while limiting appeals, and expedited the death penalty.
Many would expect institutionalized racism to have diminished since the heyday of the state slavery system. But despite the victories of the civil rights movement, racial disparities have widened since the 1920s. Today’s post-Jim Crow Texas keeps one in three young African American men under criminal justice supervision, a greater proportion than ever endured the tyrannies of leasing. Although the state’s black population has declined to only 12 percent of the total, African Americans make up 44 percent of the prison and jail population, and they are seven times more likely to end up behind bars than their white counterparts.
As a consequence, the fields surrounding Texas’s twenty-first century prison farms look much like their nineteenth-century predecessors. Every morning, gangs of convicts, made up mostly of blacks or Latinos, trudge out to the cotton fields. Watching over them is an armed overseer on horseback, who like generations of squad bosses before him, is almost invariably white.
Scale, of course, is the most dramatic marker of historical change. Between the 1880s and 1960s, reformers promised that penology would reduce recidivism and decrease prison populations, but nothing of the sort occurred. After climbing steadily in the post-WWE years, Texas’s convict population suddenly doubled in the 1970s, then doubled again by 1993, and then again by 1997. At the peak of the buildup in 1995, Texas was opening a new prison nearly once a week. By 2000, the inmate count had topped 150,000, meaning that on any given day, the TDCJ manages more inmates than were ever put to work in forty years of convict leasing.
Federal court orders were to have improved confinement conditions for this swelling convict mass and indeed, Texas’s tanks and cellblocks have become slightly less crowded. But control units have proliferated. Texas has led a national trend toward total incapacitation. Today, nearly one in four ad-seg prisoners can be found in Texas, some 7,000 out of roughly 28,000 nationwide. At Texas supermaxes like Smith, Terrell, and McConnell, methodically isolated inmates endure conditions that psychologist Craig Haney calls “as bad or worse as any I’ve ever seen.” In 1999, Judge Justice reviewed the progress of Texas’s highest security units and pronounced them “virtual incubators of psychoses.”
Conclusion
From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, then, most commentators’ claims to historical progress teeter like a house of cards. A sober-minded assessment renders only equivocal conclusions: Texas’s present-day prisons are more bureaucratic, secure, and less acutely abusive than their predecessors. But today’s lawbreakers are far more likely to land in prison to begin with, more likely to count off months or years in high-tech isolation cages, and more likely to carry such an extended sentence that they face only old age and death behind bars. Despite the historical progress, the remnants of a slavery society still remain evident.
Bibliography
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