Consider the statistics on private prisons with The Sentencing Project. I knew one inmate who committed suicide after repeatedly going on hunger strike to demand mental health services in a prison with only one part-time psychologist. Many of the buyers were prison officials, including heads of the company that ran the penitentiary. The lack of sanitation, coupled with a dwindling diet, led to the usual litany of such diseases as chronic dysentery and scurvy. Between the march and lack of food, many died along the way. American Prison delves deep into that history, starting before the United States was even a country, with Britains dumping of convicts in colonial America, to the post-Civil War era, when businesses used convicts to replace slave labor, and into the 20th century, as states continued to profit from inmates. In 1987, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (now GEO Group) won a federal contract to run an immigration detention center, expanding the focus of private prisons. The reason for turning penitentiaries over to companies was similar to states justifications for using private prisons today: prison populations were soaring, and they couldnt afford to run their penitentiaries themselves. A hoe squad at the Ellis Prison Farm in Huntsville, Texas in 1966. (I was interviewed for the film.). Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and Arkansas are the major cotton producing U.S. states. Good and useful things can be taken from the past to drive positive progress in the present through the benevolent use . There, I met a man who lost his legs to gangrene after begging for months for medical care. The Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Miss., on Aug. 16, 2018. They were cheaper, and because they served limited terms, they didn't have to be supported in old age. Read these Resource Library articles to learn more: Southeast Native American Groups, Native Americans in Colonial America, The United States Governments Relationship with Native Americans, Indian Removal Act, and Native American Removal from the Southeast.The plantation system came to dominate the culture of the South, and it was rife with inequity from the time it was established. Yet while we went through training to become guards, we were taught that, if we saw inmates stab each other, we were not to intervene. The wealthy aristocrats who owned plantations established their own rules and practices. The prison also responds to the job market: opening cafes to train the men as baristas when coffee shop jobs soared outside prison. 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. 1996 - 2023 National Geographic Society. [24], Author Rachel Kushner explained, Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails. It links the agricultural prosperity of the South with the domination by wealthy aristocrats and the exploitation of slave labor. "The soil of the South was favorable to the growth of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, the cultivation of which crops required large forces of organized and concentrated labor, which the slaves supplied," it said of the prevailing practices in the 18th century. Eliminating private prisons still leaves the problems of mass incarceration and public prisons. Travelers to Virginia were appalled by the system of slavery they saw practiced there. Proponents say reparations could resolve giant disparities in wealth left by slavery. When he died, he weighed 71 pounds. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN. The facility is named "Angola" after the African country that was the origin of many slaves brought to Louisiana. Shortly after whipping was abolished, its prison plantations stopped turning a profit. In 2016, the federal government announced it would phase out the use of private prisons: a policy rescinded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the Trump administration but reinstated under President Biden. Watch and read: Is the West's Xinjiang campaign driven by U.S. plans to derail BRI? An Alabama government inspection showed that in a two-week period in 1889, 165 prisoners were flogged. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. 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. [22] [23], Ivette Feliciano, PBS NewsHour Weekend producer and reporter, explained that a report from Michael Horowitz, JD, Justice Department Inspector General, found that per capita, privately-run facilities had more contraband smuggled in, more lockdowns and uses of force by correctional officers, more assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates of correctional officers, more complaints about medical care, staff, food, and conditions of confinement, and two facilities were housing inmates in solitary confinement to free up bed space. "There's a lot of hypocrisy involved with the manufacturing of cotton in the United States. This article was published on January 21, 2022, at Britannicas ProCon.org, a nonpartisan issue-information source. The prison was incredibly violent as a result. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. People of African descent were forced into a permanent underclass.Despite this brutal history, plantations are not always seen as the violent places they were. This saying by American educator Stephen Covey sums up the twisted allegations of "forced labor" with which the U.S. is trying to implicate the cotton industry in China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Convict leasing existed mainly in the Southern United States from 1884 until 1928. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC. The Augusta Chronicle 1787-1799. Other prisons began convict-leasing programs, where, for a leasing fee, the state would lease out the labor of incarcerated workers as hired work crews," The Atlantic reported. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. In 1883, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: Before the war, we owned the negroes. Historians Peter H. Wood and Edward Baptist advocate to stop using the word plantation when referencing agricultural operations involving forced labor. Prison, similar to chain gangs and slavery, has become another kind of receptacle for imperfect creatures whose civil disease justifies containment. Planters often preferred convicts to slaves. Then, in 1837, the bubble burst, sending the United States into its first great depression. Newspaper Accounts of the 1804 Hurricane. The mess hall at the Cummins Prison Farm, 1975. State-run facilities were overpopulated with increasing numbers of people being convicted for drug offenses. Inmates in private prisons in the 19th century were commonly used for labor via convict leasing in which the prison owners were paid for the labor of the inmates. Private prisons offer innovative programs to lower the rates of re-imprisonment. The original penitentiary building in Baton Rouge was demolished in 1918. Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, The United States Governments Relationship with Native Americans, Native American Removal from the Southeast. Because these crops required large areas of land, the plantations grew in size, and in turn, more labor was required to work on the plantations. "Convict guards" at Cummins Prison Farm, 1971. 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 dont you whip me, Ill give you half a dollar. Huttos family lived on the plantation and even had a house boy, an unpaid convict who served them. The company, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward ran it as a factory, using inmates to produce cheap clothes for enslaved people. 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. Slavery. In the backdrop of the bleak and painful history of slavery and forced prison labor in the U.S. cotton industry, Washington's unfounded blitzkrieg targeted at Xinjiang cotton, as per Covey's philosophy, appears to be a desperate U.S. attempt to superimpose its own image on China. Large prisons were established that ended up incarcerating mainly Black men. Vol. 2. It was in this world that a man named Terrell Don Hutto would learn how to run a prison as a business. In 1606, King James I formed the Virginia Company of London to establish colonies in North America, but when the British arrived, they faced a harsh and foreboding wilderness, and their lives became little more than a struggle for survival. Private companies provide services to a government-owned and managed prison, such as building maintenance, food supplies, or vocational training; 2. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 14%. But the U.S. and other Western companies banning the shipment of Xinjiang cotton because of accusations of 'forced labor' is nothing short of hypocrisy," he said. Plantation labor shifted away from indentured servitude and more toward slavery by the late 1600s. Left: 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. ), Copyright 2020 CGTN. The U.S. is perpetuating slavery, by all accounts, under the garb of prison labor. 1996 - 2023 NewsHour Productions LLC. 31, 2017, Mia Armstrong, Here's Why Abolishing Private Prisons Isn't a Silver Bullet, themarshallproject.org, Sep. 12, 2019, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, How to Create More Humane Private Prisons, brennancenter.org, Nov. 14, 2018, Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, Designing a Public-Private Partnership to Deliver Social Outcomes, beeckcenter.georgetown.edu, 2019, GEO Group, Inc., GEO Reentry Services, geogroup.com (accessed Sep. 29, 2021), Serco, Auckland South Corrections Facility (Kohuora), serco.com (accessed Sep. 29, 2021), Curtis R. Blakely and Vic W. Bumphus, Private and Public Sector PrisonsA Comparison of Select Characteristics, uscourts.gov, June 2004, Bella Davis, Push to end private prisons stymied by concerns for local economies, nmindepth.com, Feb. 26, 2021, Ivette Feliciano, Private Prisons Help with Overcrowding, but at What Cost?, pbs.org, June 24, 2017, Scott Weybright, Privatized prisons lead to more inmates, longer sentences, study finds, news.wsu.edu, Sep. 15, 2020, Shankar Vedantam, How Private Prisons Affect Sentencing, npr.org, June 28, 2019, Nicole Lewis and Beatrix Lockwood, The Hidden Cost of Incarceration, themarshallproject.org Dec. 17, 2019, AP, Audit: Private Prisons Cost More Than State-Run Prisons, apnews.com, Jan. 1, 2019, Andrea Cipriano, Private Prisons Drive Up Cost of Incarceration: Study, thecrimereport.org, Aug. 1, 2020, Richard A. Oppel, Jr., Private Prisons Found to Offer Little in Savings, nytimes.com, May 18, 2011, Travis C. Pratt and Jeff Maahs, Are Private Prisons More Cost-Effective Than Public Prisons? Slave quarters became cell units. And yet I dont think that people feel any safer from the threat of sexual assault or the threat of murder. California awarded private management contracts forSan Quentin State Prisonin order to allow the winning bidder leasing rights to the convicts until 1860. 2. The recreation room at the Ellis Unit, 1978. Officers on horseback, armed, oversee the workers," The Atlantic wrote describing the first scenes from its documentary in a report. 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. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the other side of the issue now helps you better argue your position.5. This screenshot from the documentary "Angola for Life: Rehabilitation and Reform Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary" shows prisoners working at the prison farm. Before the Civil War, most prisoners in the South were white. ProCon.org. She or he will best know the preferred format. For some, the word plantation suggests an idyllic past. At the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. Black bodies pepper the landscape, hunched over as they work the fields. By centering the Middle Passage and the plantation as fundamental spaces of racialized punishment in the novel, Beloved , Toni Morrison pushes her readers to reevaluate what "the prison" refers to. Until the transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, over 12 million Africans were transported to the New World, and over 90 percent of them went to the Caribbean and South America, to work on sugar plantations. List two to three ways. We can now see the beginning of the end of this period off in the distance. Performance-based contracts for private prisons, especially contracts tied to reducing recidivism rates, have the possibility of delivering significant improvements that, over the long-term, reduce the overall prison population and help those who are released from jail stay out for good. [16]. Middle Tennessee, where tobacco, cattle, and grain became the favored crops, held the . From Plantations to Prisons Incarceration Has Always Been the New Slave System. Proponents say defunding could reduce violence against people of color. There were simply too many prisoners for field work alone. During the 19th century, the state prison system consisted of a number of prison buildings, several of which had been built prior to the Civil War to house white offenders, and a wide variety of huts or lean-to shelters within stock-ades built on plantations, near coal mines and pine forests where turpentine was extracted, as 4. However, what came to be known as plantations became the center of large-scale enslaved labor operations in the Western Hemisphere.
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