#convict labor

THE BELLY CHAIN WITH HANDCUFFS AT THE SIDES

In a former entry of this tumblr-blog, a few months ago, I already paid attention to the probably most relaxing form of full restraints, used for transport of prisoners, or during a court-hearing: the belly-chain with the (for security reasons always inevitable) two handcuffs now attached separately to the sides, instead of being fixed as a standard pair to the front of such a chain (sometimes with a black box added) or - a very popular solution - with the connecting short chain inserted through the frontal ring D-ring of a thick leather waist-belt. Of course leg-irons are added to make the whole into a set of full restraints.

As I wrote then commenting on a situation as the one in this pic here: "The way those guys wear their handcuffs is the most comfortable of all alternatives: not a pair linked together on the back, or a pair attached to the belly chain at the front, which would leave little room for manoeuvre. Because there are handcuffs attached separately to the side, the prisoners can let their arms hang down next to their upper bodies in a very natural way".

Since a few days I am the happy owner of such a belly-chain with side-cuffs, manufactured by good old Smith & Wesson. I got the stuff from a German mail order-company, specialized in cuffs and shackles of all kind from all over the world. Here's a pic from their site.

To give the most important measurements: The chain from the large O-ring at one end to the place where the short chain with the first handcuff is secured to a small O-ring is about 30 cm long. That short chain is just 7 cm long. The length between the O-rings with the handcuffs is about 35 cm. The remaining chain on the other side until the final small O-ring is about 65 cm long, so all together about 130 cm: so that should be sufficient for more corpulent inmates too.

In my case it turned out that, to prevent the belly-chain from sagging under the weight of the heavy padlock (a Masterlock), I needed to use the most tight position possible. So I had to put the heavy padlock through the first O-ring of the whole range, just some 10 cm beyond the second handcuff. It means that in my case a fairly large part of the belly-chain hangs down folded in half against one buttock.

This belly-chain with side-cuffs is rather comfortable to wear, as it indeed gives much more room for manoeuvre than the most frequent alternatives. To be sure: when the belly-chain is applied in a tight way and both handcuffs are locked securely, escaping from your restraints is just as impossible as with the black-box variant. But you can do much more independently, and that for sure is not only an advantage for the restrained inmate but also - supposing that he is not a violent, but an easy one - in a way for the guards, as he needs less support with some standard physical actions.

Of course I tried out what was possible and impossible, while being restrained this way. In the first place, you can cross your arms in a way. A lot of prisoners do automatically. This pic shows the left cuffed inmate nearly doing the same as his free lawyer next to him.

So, if you have access to the key, you can - what's impossible with a pair of handcuffs attached to the frontal D-ring of a waistbelt, let alone with a black box - free yourself, at least, if you place the handcuffs in such a way that the keyholes are on the inside, so both keyholes pointing to each other. If crossing hands is easy, this too.

Then the short chains connecting the cuffs to the belly-chain turns out to be just long enough to enable you to put the key in the handcuff around the other wrist with one hand and turn it. I didn't dare to see if that would work with the keyholes on the outside. Maybe just about. No doubt a careful guard for that reason would always choose the latter option (and of course make sure the prisoner can't get to any key). Anyhow: much more freedom of movement than in case of the waist-belt with D-ring-plus-handcuffs.

Compare!: the lucky three inmates above can swing their hands rather freely in one or the other direction: crossing hands or keeping them far apart at will, the chain connecting their handcuffs to the belly-chain offering a turning circle with a radius of 10 centimeters.

The inmate who has to wear that leather waist-belt finds his wrists almost immovably fixed to the D-ring of that belt, the supershort chain between both cuffs leaving only very little room for manoeuvre: he can do no more than turn his hands a bit inside the cuffs. He can't lift them, he can't move them apart, he can just fold them to pray.

What’s further possible? The handcuffs allow you with some pains to eat with help of your hands. Drinking is nearly as difficult as with the alternatives - waistbelt and black-box – as you can’t reach high enough with your hands to tip a cup without spilling.

Completely problem-free are all those actions for which you barely have to lift your hands: like unfastening the bottom snap of your striped prison jumpsuit to pee. Also peeing itself is easy. As is signing documents like your confession of guilt during your trial in court - with a black-box that is really much more difficult. Taking an oath seems a bit more difficult to me, because there is no actual raising of your hand; it remains a modest gesture. Compare this pic if two inmates with sidecuffs with that clip of one wearing a black-box

To be sure: forget every attempt to serious resistance. Although you can move your hands rather free around and therefore will not suffer from cramps quickly, you are really no match for any guard. He just grabs you by the shoulder and in case of obstinate behavior pushes or pulls you in the desired direction, without you being able to do anything about it. Thus no guard has to fear real violence by an inmate who is restrained this way.

Prisoners can therefore also do little physical harm to each other; if they all walk around in the common area shackled like this, the guards have much less to worry about; the risk of bloody fights is - as long as no knives have been smuggled in - minimal.

In fact, this kind of belly-chain with side-cuffs could be worn by inmates during most hours of the days without being a huge obstacle to many of their average actions. They can play cards, they can write letters (I myself wrote a large part of this text on my PC while being in handcuffs), and when it’s time for dinner, they can carry a tray and serve a plate. With a little bit of leaning forward you can also get the food into your mouth without making too much of a mess.

And a very big advantage: you can also do all kinds of physical work in it. Not everything of course, but those where you don't have to lift your hands too much, ad/or can keep them a piece apart. Use a shovel or broom, push a wheelbarrow par example. Some other jobs can probably be done very well with two people, with a specific division of labor. In other words: the necessary community work outside the prison walls can be done by inmates who are fitted out with this bellychain with side-cuffs, of course in combination with leg-irons to minimize the risk of escape. That is safe for everybody!

Because: a lot of the community work you see in the next pictures, could be done while staying restrained outside in the way described.

Dragging bags of waste or other contents...Yes, you do have to wear them differently in that case... Like the guys on our very first pic...

Collecting waste - you then can do it together: one inmate holds the plastic bag open, the other scoops up the dirt and throws it in.

Caring for plants, if you place them at the appropriate height.

This would be no problem while sidecuffed - instead of those bins with the laundry you can also push a wheelbarrow with manure.

A shovel, a broom, pruning shears, a rake: using them is no problem.

Most of this work can be done with a belly-chain-plus-sidecuffs too...

And what will they do in the fields that can be done in restraints?

So, let's go for it. Three inmates i n prison stripes ready for transport to work. Will their leg-irons and belly-chain plus side-handcuffs stay on, once arrived at the site where they have to do community-work?

I was told the guy third from the left looks a lot like my Great Uncle Robert. Grandma almost never talked about him but he’s the reason she and her two sisters came north. Slavery may have ended but the conditions in the south got continually worse after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, what had been Plantation Law was now the Law of the Land. There was the Constitution, Jim Crow, and…

The merest thought of Martin's changes must have caused fear and trembling (and steely resolve) in every courthouse ring in the state.It was obvious that reform sentiment on the convict lease system was hardly a match for the deeply entrenched status quo. The issues of society often seem to rest on a seesaw, now heavily weighted at one end and skewed in that direction, now slowly rising as some added pressure moves the issue into equilibrium or on to reversal and change. In early 1911, there were no weights causing the side of reform to rise. The newspapers and the public pressure that they fueled were silent. Crusades are episodic; the attention span for reform is incredibly short as new sensations rise to replace the old.

With the tilt toward inaction, the explosion that ripped the Banner Mine threw the heavy weight of shock and surprise on the side of change. Disaster created an air of immediacy. Reopening the question, a Republican newspaper repeated Moulthrop's arguments and called for a change: "It should not be part of the sentence to put inexperienced men in places of danger. The State cannot afford to take the risk of having its convicts killed. Nor is it a square deal to the experienced miners to be forced into competition with convicts." H. M. Wilson, editor of the Opelika Times and a member of the convict board, believed that the sentiment of Alabamians "is overwhelming against the working of convicts in mines." Another editor wrote that "the spirit of commercialism has eaten too far into the system of dealing with our criminal classes. " The voices of change were in the air.

Even so, invoking the arguments of justice, compassion, and every instinct of humanitarianism was plainly not enough. Echoes of former governor Comer's speech still reverberated within the capitol walls: if the convict lease system was abolished, what would take its place? To confine state and county prisoners to a penitentiary would eliminate the lucrative revenues that leasing provided and would place a continuous burden on the state treasury. The progressives were advocates of putting the prisoners to work on public roads and highways-an answer that satisfied their social consciousness with practical results. The state would receive the full benefit of their labor, and-a most naive thought-the convicts would be better protected because their treatment could be scrutinized by the general public. The lines were drawn between the supporters of convict leasing (and their allies, the doubtful and the undecided) and the reformers. The question was whether the balance would change-or could be changed."

sights outside were enough to tum a heart of stone. The day being Sunday, the crowds flocked to Banner by the hundreds, and a holiday spirit seemed to possess the most of them."

There

clustered about on the hills and under the trees were the crowds of sight-seers. The air was filled with jokes and ribald jests, while the air also was heavy with the odor of mean whiskey.

Deputy Sheriff Dave Kennybrook and his guards strung up rope and patrolled their lines with rifles and shotguns in an overzealous effort to enforce order and to keep a way clear for the rescuers. The guards dispersed neighboring free blacks who were searching through the castaway clothes of the dead - they were unaware that the prisoners had no valuables. Through it all photographer Bert Covell of Birmingham took pictures of the crowd and of the yawning mine mouth - its darkness a testimony to mystery and fear and tragedy.

Inspector Hillhouse's strategy of reversing the fans to clear the mine gradually proved successful, and the rescue teams were able to penetrate farther into the galleries. Now tram car loads of bodies began to arrive at the surface, and a rush order was made to the Green Coffin Company of Birmingham for one hundred coffins. Other coffins and shrouds came from the John's Undertaking Company in Birmingham, but the supply was soon exhausted, and a special shipment was obtained from Nashville, Tennessee. After being cleaned in the prison washhouse, the bodies were embalmed by Echols and Angevin of Ensley. Their task was so great that the morticians had to be assisted by some of the surviving convicts. Unless families or next of kin called for the bodies, they would be buried on the mine's premises. A gang of twenty convicts began the process of digging "a long trench in the convict cemetery."

If there was curiosity and the compelling ambience of tragedy, there were few signs of bereavement and loss. One elderly black woman cried for her dead nephew. Another sorrowing black woman wept for her husband in the prison morgue. (There was mistaken identity here, and she was led away still crying.) People expected friends and relatives to appear on the scene, and the ambulance chasers of the legal profession were on hand to suggest a claim against the company. But there was little business to be done at the Banner. (Also, Pratt Consolidated's own lawyer, R. B. Watts, was there to safeguard the company from the dangers of litigation.) The locale contrasted sharply with the event. As the sun sank behind the Alabama hills, soft green with the beauty of spring, the observer who had been critical earlier was reinforced in his cynicism. "The crowds began to divide," he wrote.

Food was scarce, and so was whiskey, and the crowds left with the feeling of having had a good time. The blind-tigers [illegal liquor stands] did a land office business and so did the Pratt commissary, where a thin slice of ham and crackers cost ten cents.

Given these two serious flaws, charges of the code’s failure were certain and emerged almost immediately. In Louisiana, tomato canners complained that the Angola prison farm artificially depressed the market; where free-market canned tomatoes sold at $0.60 per pound, prison tomatoes sold at only $0.40. Worse, the quality of prison-made cans was so “sorry” that the state Charity Hospital would not even buy the prison-packed tomatoes; the produce was dumped on the open market, where it undercut the fruits of free labor. In Virginia, the operator of a rock company that ground gravel for state roads saw his orders drop by almost 80 percent after the state required that all contracts go to the lowest bidder; his company was undercut by the state penitentiary. “We do not believe you fully understand the situation,” the president of the Belmont Trap Rock Company wrote to the PLA: competing with prison labor meant the end of his business and unemployment for his twenty-two workers. Likewise, in Illinois, strong evidence suggested that the state prison had put the Columbia Quarry Company out of business by selling lime dust at $0.60 per pound, when the minimum cost to even produce that amount was $0.80. Throughout the state, a local field agent found, small quarries “complained to me bitterly” about competition from prison labor.

Problems emerged not only within states, but between them, as well. A Chicago saddle maker realized that sales of his whips were being undercut by the Bardall Company from West Virginia, which utilized convict labor. When the Chicagoan (named Schmidt) traveled to West Virginia to induce his competitor to raise prices to reasonable levels, Bardall did not repent his strategy but instead suggested collusion in producing illegal convict-produced goods — a prospect that would mean the end of Schmidt’s shop and unemployment for his workers. In this case, the PLA was able to sanction the Bardall Company, but it also discovered frustrating loopholes that surely struck some businesses as Kafkaesque. The Trojan Wire Specialty Company, for instance, had operated for years in Troy, New York, but suddenly discovered that it could not match the prices of the Gatch Brush and Wire Goods Company, which operated out of the Baltimore city jail. This seemed to be a clear violation of the terms of the PLC, to which both New York and Maryland were signatories. But, as Linton Collins of the PLA responded, the code only policed labor at state institutions. The seventeen workers at the Trojan Wire Company who faced unemployment apparently had no recourse when confronted by convict labor at a municipal house of correction.

More was at stake than just individual businesses, important though they might have been to the individuals involved. The efforts of reformers to develop a more nationalized approach to prison labor also touched on fundamental philosophical approaches to political economy. And, if the NRA seemed hopeful to progressives and liberals, it struck others as a dangerous, even tyrannical, example of the centralization of power and enlargement of the executive branch. Henry Hanson, a representative of the marking devices industry, acidly made this point to PLA officials. His industry, Hanson observed, had pioneered the production of license plates, “only to see the sentimentalities of pseudo-criminologists combine with the distorted economics of self-serving individuals” who shifted license-plate production to prisons, thus forcing states to duplicate an industry that already existed. This inefficiency hurt both industry and taxpayers, Hanson claimed, and also led to substandard quality. Over 200,000 Illinois motorists were forced to return their prison-produced 1935 license plates after the plates rusted out in a matter of months. The disaster of Illinois’s license plate production was more than an isolated instance of prematurely rusty metal. To Hanson, it also portrayed “one more example of the inevitable economic waste inherent in the attempt of government to exercise the proper function of private industry.” The struggle over the fate of the PLA was therefore also a conflict over the proper function of government and the relationship between the state and the economy.

No dispute illustrated this political conict in starker terms than the virulent opposition the PLA attracted from the cotton garment industry. Federal officials responsible for the PLA felt that the hostility of garment makers to prison labor was vastly overblown and hypocritical; in 1931, only 604 prisoners were counted at work on 15,000 spindles, as compared to the nearly 29 million spindles employing about 330,000 free workers. Still, the textile industry had a potent political voice, and it carried deep historical reverberations. The emergence of the textile industry in the 1810s marked the dawn of America’s industrial age; for nearly one hundred years, the spread of mills from bucolic New England to the resplendent New South propelled the nation’s economic growth and spurred a wave of factory building that quickly outstripped most of Europe. Textile factories had served as the cradle of the American working class, revolutionizing both the experience of labor and the social identity of laborers.

But by the early 1930s, America’s textile industry faced a pivotal moment. The cotton garment trade had been mired in its own depression for nearly a decade before the stock market crash of 1929. Tariffs prevented American manufacturers from selling surplus goods overseas. Shifts in fashion and taste increasingly favored newer products like rayon and nylon. Decentralization led to cutthroat competition and ruinous overproduction, which in turn forced wages ever downward. Technological and market changes were not the only challenges facing textile companies. In the spring of 1934, just as the PLA was being signed into law, over 300,000 textile workers across the country staged a massive general strike — the largest labor conflict ever to rock the industry.

Faced with these challenges, the garment industry responded furiously to the PLA. The opposition from the Cotton Garment Code Authority (or CGCA, the trade group organized under the NRA to regulate textile production) and private manufacturers flamed up just weeks after Roosevelt authorized the PLA. Ideological and material interests quickly coalesced on both sides of the matter. In May, the CGCA filed a formal complaint with Hugh Johnson, Roosevelt’s choice to head the NRA, protesting the fact that prison-made goods would be entitled to their own NRA “blue eagle” badge. The “blue eagle” logo signified compliance with the NRA and was meant to unify business, labor, and the public around the early New Deal; for many, it symbolized the entirety of the first New Deal program. The blue eagle’s “We Do Our Part” motto inspired a patriotic sense of togetherness and collective commitment in the face of the Depression, and signaled to the public that whatever item bore a blue eagle had pledged itself to the wage and price guarantees of the New Deal. 

Granting prison-made goods a blue eagle, in fact, represented a total reversal of nineteenth-century reformers’ efforts to have a “prison made” label stamped like a scarlet letter on all prison-made products. The opposition of the CGCA, then, was both practical and ideological: practical because, without the badge, prison-made goods would be effectively barred from a code-governed marketplace; and ideological because removing the blue eagle would symbolically strip prison labor from the sociopolitical legitimacy that a code would otherwise confer.

....

Assessing this situation, Sanford Bates noted, “We have infinitely more opposition from the manufacturers, who are interested in profits, than from the unions, who are interested in humanity.” But the controversy over the blue eagle threatened a revolt from labor, too. When the PLA met in April of 1934, both Thomas Rickerts of the United Garment Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers agreed that prisons could not possibly meet the standards of the cotton garment code, and therefore prison products could never be given a blue eagle that reflected this code. When the PLA started affixing blue eagles under the Prison Labor Compact code in 1935, the United Garment Workers local in St. Louis erupted in protest. Petitions to remove the blue eagle from prison-made goods flooded in, accompanied by cartoons featuring unemployed workers staring wistfully into a prison; the caption read, “They Have Our Jobs!” Seeking organized labor’s help in resolving this controversy, Linton Collins reached out to Joseph Briegel of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Briegel responded that, in learning of the conflict, he was more committed than ever to end prison competition with free labor. However, recognizing that taxpayers seem to want something for supporting the prisons, he puckishly suggested a solution: “That every article manufactured in prison that would in any manner compete with Free Labor . . . be piled up in a safe spot in the prison yards and burned as a funeral pyre. (The date set for these fires to be on Labor Day, as a reminder to the world that Prison Competition with Free Labor is a sacrilege to humanity).”  

The move away from convict labor and toward a state-use system seems to confirm the broader liberal narrative of American progress; it comforts us with the notion that humanitarian impulses won out in the end. 

The reality is less sanguine. For one thing, prisoners’ working conditions at places like San Quentin’s jute mill, Folsom’s rock quarry, or Texas’s enormous prison cotton plantations remained brutal and dangerous, and reflected harsh hierarchies of racism and violent masculinity. Quite apart from the fact that prisons in the 1930s could hardly be described as cradles of human kindness, the “progress narrative” also obscures the basic centrality of coerced labor to even the most reformist vision of prison discipline. 

In fact, the ascension of the state-use system (and, with it, the Prison Labor Compact) did not mark the end of the idea of prison labor but its entrenchment at the heart of progressive theories of rehabilitation. Louis Robinson’s own attitude toward prison labor was emblematic. All informed thinkers of his time, Robinson thought, agreed that prisoners should not be exploited or abused, nor should their labor threaten the livelihood of free workers. But without productive work, Robinson concluded, the reform of criminals was impossible. Prison work, as documents of the time often framed it, “is primarily therapeutic” and rehabilitative. In the context of the penitentiary, reformers believed that prison labor’s fundamental character was psychological and social, not economic.

From this perspective, the main crisis in the prison system was not labor exploitation but “unemployment.” When the Department of Labor surveyed prison labor in 1932, it estimated that, despite a growth in the inmate population, the proportion of prisoners who worked had shrunk from 75 percent when the department first investigated in 1885 to a mere 52 percent. James Bennett, a leading advocate of prison labor within the federal Bureau of Prisons, averred that the real number was closer to 25 percent in 1934. A 1933 memorandum prepared for the US attorney general argued that prisoners’ unemployment was a “serious problem,” leading to idleness, depression, and discontent. Even the reformist American Prison Association agreed, arguing in 1931 that “without work, there is bound to be a deterioration and breakdown of prison discipline.” As James Bennett emphatically put it in a letter to the Commerce Department, the entire New Deal approach was “built around one fundamental axiom, viz: That prisoners must work.”

New Dealers therefore pursued two goals: to compel prisoners to work, and to have this labor performed within a state-use system. But the reality was that New Dealers in Washington, even with the implementation of Hawes-Cooper looming in late 1933, could not compel the adoption of a state-use approach. Punishment had always been primarily the business of states and municipalities, and prison conditions varied widely across regions and even within states. Howard Gill, a superintendent of the State Prison Colony in Massachusetts, assessed the law in 1931 (three years before it was implemented) and predicted that Hawes-Cooper would merely “shift the control [of convict leasing] from a small number of large contractors operating in a national market to a large number of small contractors operating in a state market.” In other words, Hawes-Cooper simply balkanized states into those that used a state-use model and those that permitted private convict leasing; it did not actually dismantle convict leasing. Indeed, Hawes-Cooper reinforced a federalist model, in which each state pursued its own prison labor policy, at the very moment that New Dealers were hoping to rationalize prison labor according to national standards.

...

Not only was federal authority limited in pushing states into a state-use system, but it could not even assure its more basic and central goal: keeping prisoners at work. Most states, these officials recognized, were flatly unprepared for the implementation of Hawes-Cooper. Many federal prison administrators worried that the law would not only affect the interstate trade of prison-made goods but also undermine all prison industries — and with it, they felt, any chance of prison discipline or rehabilitation. Some states, particularly in the underdeveloped South, depended on the interstate sale of prison-made goods to finance their precarious, Depression-ravaged budgets and had no viable substitute on the horizon. 

These problems emerged immediately after the law’s passage, when Alabama — one of the most notorious utilizers of the convict-lease system — filed suit in federal court against nineteen other states that had cited Hawes-Cooper in banning the sale of work shirts by a contractor who had used Alabama prison labor. As Alabama’s attorney argued, the state had invested over $300,000 to build prison mills and relied on its share of sales from these work shirts to maintain its inmates at labor. More significantly, Alabama invoked the notion of federal authority over interstate commerce in an ironic twist that ultimately eroded federal authority over prison labor. It argued that other states could not challenge Alabama’s prison-made exports because they could not regulate interstate commerce: that was a federal responsibility. 

There was a bemusing, if not cynical, irony in hearing Alabama, a state with a long history of antipathy to federal intervention in local affairs, argue against states’ rights on the matter of prison-made goods. Meanwhile, penologists of the New Deal looked warily on the outcome of the Alabama case and the ultimate impact of Hawes-Cooper. As Alabama v. Arizona worked its way to the Supreme Court in late 1933 (just months after Roosevelt took office), another ironic twist emerged: lawyers working for the US attorney general urged the Justice Department to support Alabama, fearing that, if it lost, prison labor would be tarred as fundamentally inimical to society. (The Supreme Court ultimately denied Alabama’s suit in 1934.) That liberal criminal justice reformers in Washington would go so far as to defend Alabama’s convict-lease arrangement — despite their historical, philosophical, and moral opposition to convict leasing — illustrates the depth of their concern about the public’s rejection of any sort of prison-labor programs.”

Robinson’s question, then, was straightforward but sneaky. Surely prisoners, who had broken society’s laws and violated the social contract, deserved punishment. Most ordinary citizens viewed prison labor in this light, Robinson averred, “as old as the story of Adam, on whom God laid the penalty of work for disobedience.” Indeed, work had been considered essential to the penitentiary ever since the opening of the first modern prisons in the 1820s. At Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary and New York’s Auburn Prison, America’s first penologists anticipated, in the words of historian David Rothman, that prison labor “would become not an oppressive task for punishment, but a welcome diversion, a delight rather than a burden.” Work would rehabilitate the law breaker and prepare him to rejoin productive society. These pioneering penitentiaries created small-scale factories within prison walls, hoping the discipline of labor would make inmates choose to be productive citizen-workers on their return to freedom.

Behind this benevolent scrim, however, the question of convict labor involved a thicket of political, economic, and moral conundrums. While penologists and criminologists claimed a legitimate interest in reforming criminals through work, the inescapable fact that prisoners’ labor was unpaid, often coerced, and frequently served the financial interest of private manufacturers effectively transformed the convict into a kind of slave — an analogy made even by prison officials such as New York’s Thomas Osborne. The fact that so many convict workers following the Civil War were African Americans, and that crime itself became so insidiously tied to white fears of blackness, underscored the exploitive and illiberal essence of prison labor in a society premised on contract freedom.”