but $14.00 hr, is a lot of money for prison labor. Not sure where that figure came from.
The True History of America's Private Prison Industry
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. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. 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.
At the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. In some states, certain inmates were given guns and even whips, and empowered to torture those who didn’t meet labor quotas. 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. 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.
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Prison privatization accelerated after the Civil War. 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. 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. Former slaveholders built empires that were bigger than those of most slave owners before the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, controlled all convicts in Mississippi for a period. US Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company, forced thousands of prisoners to slave in its coal mines. Lessees went to extreme lengths to extract profits. 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. When they died from exhaustion or disease, he sold their bodies to the Medical School at Nashville for students to practice on.
Companies liked using convicts in part because, unlike free workers, they could be driven by torture. 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. 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. Whipping was common. An Alabama government inspection showed that in a two-week period in 1889, 165 prisoners were flogged. Arkansas didn’t ban the lash until 1967.
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This maniacal drive for profits managed to create a system that was more deadly than slavery. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under the lease of a man named Samuel Lawrence James. Before the Civil War, only a handful of planters owned more than a thousand convicts, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die. Throughout the South, annual convict death rates ranged from 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: “Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor…But these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.”
Adapted from AMERICAN PRISON: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Shane Bauer.
https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/
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