#convict workers

The inmate’s letter reveals that prisoners saw themselves as deserving of fair labor conditions and advocated for their rights. By writing a letter to a member of the Baltimore Federation of Labor, the prison inmate aligned himself and his fellow prisoners, both men and women, with labor organizations outside the prison. In the early twentieth century, prison reformers often lauded outdoor road construction as a healthful substitute for employment in indoor prison workshops. Members of the Maryland State Roads Commission and local government officials arranged several road construction contracts. However, as this example shows, prisoners found ways of challenging their labor conditions and aligning themselves with free workers. In addition, this incident reveals how members of the Baltimore Federation of Labor chose to advocate in behalf of the prisoners by sending a letter to the Attorney General questioning labor conditions. In this case, working men and women, whether convict or free, saw themselves as allied in the same cause against labor exploitation.

This and other related experiences reveal the importance of examining labor reform within the larger debate regarding working conditions in the Maryland state prison system between the years of 1912 and 1922.

Examples of biting rhetoric were also voiced in local meetings of organized labor. During a meeting of the Baltimore Federation of Labor in June 1930, F. C. Bandell of the Electrical Workers’ Union expressed disapproval of the Board of Welfare’s plans to employ inmates in the construction of the new penal institution. He argued that unionized electrical workers should be hired to do the electrical wiring in order to prevent fires caused by faulty wiring and assure quality control. With dramatic flourish, Bandell asserted, “I want the wiring in our Penitentiary to be good, because I may be an inmate some day, and I don’t want to be burnt up.” When pressed to explain his remark regarding future imprisonment, Bandell cited the dismal economic opportunities. As “the unemployment situation was becoming alarmingly worse,” he said he feared “that honest laboring men may be obliged to turn to crime to support their families.” By this argument, Bandell cast the lack of state relief in moral terms. While criminal action was ethically suspect, Bandell implied that the lack of state aid to “honest laboring men” was even more reprehensible. The inability of the state to provide for the needs of its citizens during the Great Depression created a crisis of disillusionment and a questioning of state authority among members of the working class. 

By discussing prison labor in terms of the harsh economic conditions, wage laborers pointed out the state’s double neglect of unionized workers. The state not only refused to provide public aid to unemployed workers, but state administrators deliberately took labor opportunities away from Baltimore free workers by employing inmates in the construction project of the state penal farm. In protest, workers agitated for the right to be awarded contracts for state prison construction. Members of unions highlighted the unfairness of being passed over for contracts by prison inmates—criminals who were already guaranteed adequate food and shelter by state during their sentencing period."

The low-wage labor system generated enough revenue to the state to allow the Maryland prison system to operate mostly on a self-sufficient basis and return a profit to the state. The balance for the combined earnings of the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Corrections for 1927 resulted in a surplus of over $33,000 paid to the state treasury. A considerable portion of the surplus came from the profits of prisoners laboring in contract shops and state-use industries. Taxpayers in Maryland during the 1920s contributed little to the general upkeep of the prisons. A 1928 Baltimore news article lauded the convict labor system in the Maryland Penitentiary for being largely “self-sustaining” and noted that the prison “costs the taxpayers of the State less than $60,000 annually.”

While the prison labor system was celebrated by state officials for its rehabilitative benefits, it is clear that the revenue it generated substantially motivated the continued reliance on prison labor. Labor union members were concerned with the competition of prison-made products on the open market. Labor leaders agitated for the ending of private prison contracts and advocated for state-use industries. Labor leaders believed that the state-use system was favorable because it meant that prison-made products would be sold directly to states outside of the free market and thus pose less of a threat to workers in labor unions. Evidence of efforts made by prison administrators to bolster state-use industries can be seen in some of the Board of Welfare minutes. For example, in April 1923, the warden of the Maryland Penitentiary and members of the Board of Welfare discussed a plan to employ female inmates in the House of Correction in laundering the clothing of the inmates in both the Maryland Penitentiary and House of Correction. This motion reflected both the desire to find employment for prisoners and to provide traditional gendered work assignments. During this time, women sentenced in the Maryland prison system were kept apart from male inmates. This separation influenced the type of labor that was considered appropriate for female prisoners, thus reflecting the gender norms of labor that were imposed by the prison administration. The Board of Welfare approved the laundry plans, and in the fall of 1923, laundry equipment was moved to the House of Corrections for the use of female inmates.

Male inmates, on the other hand, were seen as fit workers for labor-intensive manufacturing and road construction. Members of the Board of Welfare sought ways to expand the state-use automobile production, and in the spring 1923, held a meeting in the Maryland Penitentiary “in which all parties interested in the making of automobile tags…were present.” Prison administrators sought to secure auto tag making contracts in states outside of Maryland, and signed a contract with the State of Florida to manufacture automobile tags in the Maryland Penitentiary state-use shops. However, this expansion did not supply enough work to keep all inmates employed, and additional work for inmates was secured by hiring out inmates on state road construction projects. Throughout the summer and fall months, prisoners were taken outside of the prison and transported to road construction sites in various Maryland counties.

True to Progressive Era bureaucratic principles, prison administrators focused attention on the prison conditions and rehabilitation of inmates. One prisoner, Henry C. Raynor, who served a prison sentence in the early 1920s, pointed out the need for better ventilation and temperature control in the cells. Overall, however, he seemed satisfied that conditions in the prison system were improving. Raynor described conversations he had with “old-time” inmates in the prison who spoke of improved food and work conditions compared with those of years earlier. The prison warden enacted clear policies about appropriate disciplinary methods to rein in power abuses of prison guards. Officers who oversaw work in the prison shops were restricted by new prison policies from using undue force to control the prisoners. One officer complained that he had once been able to beat a prisoner in order to instill discipline, but was now prevented from “knock[ing] his block off as he pleased.” This illustrates a shift in prison discipline from a reliance on physical force to more humanitarian policies. In addition, it reveals the expansion of bureaucratic rules and procedures used to govern the actions of guards and civil servants employed at the prison. … In regards to the full implementation of these progressive policies, much depended on the attitudes and behaviors of the prison guards. Raynor remarked that the warden was limited by his inability to automatically dismiss guards from service without major cause. Guards who were resentful of the restrictions placed on them found ways to unfairly punish prisoners anyway through nonviolent means. For example, one domineering officer forced inmates on his watch “to stand in driving rain or snow for ten minutes at a time, for no reason except that to show his power.” While prison policies and punishments were more humanitarian in principle, the attitudes and actions of prison guards responsible for enforcement varied the actual treatment of the prisoners. In similar manner, the ethics of some private contractors at the prison were also suspect. Raynor described how one contractor of a pants workshop would strategically require prisoners to load products during lunch or dinner time as a way to eke out extra work without pay. Another contractor, angered by new terms which required the payment of a higher wage to experienced inmates, attempted to shirk the requirement by rotating inmates through tasks to avoid paying them the higher wage, and a shirt-making firm attempted to “evade the payment of any wage at all to their men, and constantly tried to raise the daily task.” Prisoners brought grievances to the warden in regards to the shirt contractor, and one day the inmates found the “the contract cancelled, the contractor gone, and another in his place who was more fair.” Such accounts reveal that prisoners actively negotiated for fair treatment and that their grievances held some weight with the warden. While the reforms of the 1920s largely improved prison conditions, like other aspects of progressive reform, new prison policies also sheltered racially prejudiced social science recommendations, medical opinions, and merit-based grading systems. Raynor, himself a white male, described his alarm at being seated in the dining hall between rows of black inmates. He learned from fellow prisoners who had been sentenced to the Penitentiary years before, that the “mixing of races” in the prison used to be more standard, but in more recent years “ha[d] been partially corrected.” This “correction” resulted in increased segregation. Revealing racial prejudice as the normative social view of the time, Raynor published evidence of increased segregation in the prison to further his argument that prison conditions were better in the 1920s than they were years before.

Moreover, racial prejudice also affected services that were rendered by private reform groups that operated outside general state jurisdiction. The Prisoners’ Aid Association provided many services for recently released inmates at the John Howard Center boarding house. This center provided temporary housing and shelter and assisted inmates in finding stable employment. However, the housing, meals, and resources at the John Howard Center were only available to white male ex-convicts. The Association reports that similar resources were made available to women and “colored men” through “private houses or other agencies,” thus signaling the separation of resources on a gendered and racially segregated basis. Progressive Era science also led to troubling medical policies and procedures, including sterilization of prisoners deemed as “feeble-minded.” During the 1920s, members of the Board of Welfare and the Board of Mental Hygiene arranged for semiannual joint meetings. The two boards, responsible for the security of those deemed criminal and mentally ill, often communicated regarding the transfer of inmates from the prison system to hospitals and mental care units if they were found psychically unstable. At a joint meeting of the boards on February 17, 1927, the administrators discussed the “sterilization of certain insane and feeble-minded under proper safeguards and with the consent of the patient or his guardian or next friend” and motioned that such “should be authorized by Act of the General Assembly.” Discussions such as these highlight the troubling ethics of progressive reforms. State oversight of normative categories severely restricted the freedom and rights afforded to marginalized inmates and mental health patients. While progressive penologists and civic reformers may have insured better living and working conditions in the Maryland state prison system, such reforms came at the cost of greater state control over those deemed unproductive, both in terms of their labor and their reproductive capabilities.

"Popular support for prison labor reform led legislators to enact several changes in 1916, including the reorganization of the prison authority structure. The legislature dissolved the supervisory boards of the two major criminal institutions, the Maryland Penitentiary and the Maryland House of Correction, and replaced them with a single State Board of Prison Control. The governor was to appoint three members of the Board of Prison Control who were tasked by the legislature to “establish and maintain a system of  labor for prisoners to supersede the present system of contract labor.”

If the board was unable to successfully adopt an alternative system prior to the 1918 session of the Maryland General Assembly, the board was to “report to such general Assembly the result of the investigation of the subject, and any recommendations which it may deem desirable to make thereon.” Whereas the Maryland legislature had set aside the prison reform bill of 1912 in favor of the profit-making capabilities of convict labor, continued agitation by working men and women, journalists, penal commission members, and prisoners themselves had at last made it necessary to address the matter of contract prison labor.

During the 1916 session, the state legislators also granted the newly formed Board of Prison Control “authority to place prisoners at labor upon State works” and select “such form of labor as will offer an opportunity to prisoners to earn a surplus over the cost of their maintenance.” Although called a “surplus,” perhaps to avoid direct parallels to wage arrangements outside the prison, this surplus amounted to a small monetary sum paid to the prisoners. This portion of the law was significant in its recognition of the right of prisoners to be financially compensated for their labor in the prison workshops. While the wage scale for the prisoners was far below the earnings of trade and wage laborers, the legislature recognized that prisoners should be remunerated for their labor.

Although the 1916 law was a victory for prisoners, reformers, and labor unions, it posed a serious threat to the private employers who held business contracts at the state prisons. The Jones Hollow Ware Company, for example, had contracted with the Maryland Penitentiary for more than a decade. Business owners who entered into contracts for prison labor were able to employ prisoners for less than the market wage. Some companies contracted with prisons in several different states. The Baltimore Labor Leader reported that Bromwell Brush and Wire Goods Co. held contracts with prisons in Maryland, New Jersey, and Ohio.

Specific arrangements regarding the leasing of prison workshops and prisoner wage rates depended on individual contracts. In the Maryland state prison system, companies contracted for prison labor with the Board of Prison Control. Indeed, a substantial portion of the board’s activities related to the management of prison labor. The board received bids from companies and set terms and conditions of the contracts,  including the wage rate, length of contract, workshop lease, utilities, equipment, and expectations for the management of prisoners. In fact, in some years the demand for labor was greater than the available number of prisoners. In 1917, the board’s secretary  informed two businesses, Joseph Wild and Co. and Wear-Well Pants Co., that no further workshop space or additional prisoners were available for any expansion of operations at  that time.

In keeping with the 1916 legislative authorization to employ prisoners on state works, the Board of Prison Control entered into several contracts with the State Roads Commission and county governments to supply prison labor. Inmates were taken out of the prison workshops and put to work on state road construction. Criticism from labor leaders and middle-class reformers pressured prison administrators to curtail the labor demands of corporations and place some prisoners on public works projects.

The Board of Prison Control oversaw labor conditions in the prison workshops, serving as both a contracting party with private employers and a paternalistic gatekeeper to guard against any abuse of prisoners. In January 1917, Frank Metzerott, a member of the board, “moved that all contractors at the Maryland House of Correction supply this Board with a copy of their tasks [and] the amount of work each prisoner must perform.” Increased mechanization and use of unskilled labor were hallmarks of Progressive Era employment conditions. Tasks were subdivided and laborers were given quotas to spur production. Businesses seeking higher profits pressured workers to produce more in less time. The penal commission in 1913 had criticized the pace of labor in prison workshops during Warden Weyler’s tenure, and members of the Board of Prison Control took steps to reduce exploitation of prisoners by the contracting companies. A month after his motion, Metzerott directed the reduction of labor hours in the Maryland House of Correction workshops from eight and a half hours per day to eight.

Board oversight did not in fact always reduce the number of hours prisoners worked. In February 1920, the warden of the House of Correction, John Lankford, noted discrepancies in the hours that prisoners were employed in different workshops. One company employed prisoners for eight hours a day and another for nine. At a meeting of the Board of Prison Control, Lankford indicated that he would try to arrange for both employers to set nine-hour workdays. Clearly members of the prison administration did not always have the same priorities. While prison board member Metzerott sought to limit the length of the prison workday, the warden of the House of Correction opted for longer hours.

Members of the Board of Prison Control also negotiated arrangements relating to wages and the right of prisoners to earn bonus pay for work that exceeded their daily quotas. In March and April of 1917 the board discussed the need for two of the clothing manufacturers, the Cumberland Shirt Company and the Samuel Valentine Company, to supply enough work to enable prisoners to earn overtime wages. Because several different contractors operated workshops in the prison, labor conditions and opportunities could vary depending on the workload of the employers and type of industry. Contracts between the board and private companies included a variety of arrangements by which the prisoners could earn what was termed “a surplus over the cost of their maintenance.” The Board of Prison Control entered into contracts in which the outside contractor agreed to pay the state a set amount of money (usually between $0.75 and $1.25 per day) for the labor of a prisoner and a surplus (typically $0.25 per day) to each prisoner who met his or her assigned task for the day.

In addition, some contracts stipulated that employers pay prisoners overtime wages in addition to the surplus allotment. This arrangement ensured that prisoners were motivated by a financial  incentive to produce more than the day’s task, assured employers that they would have a profitable workforce, and served progressive reformers’ goals of rehabilitating convicts into industrious, wage-earning members of society.

This arrangement, however, was difficult to administer equitably. A number of contractors hired prison labor, and the workshop arrangements and opportunities for overtime could vary according to the type of industry and the priorities of the employer. Some companies provided better overtime opportunities for prisoners, who could then earn more wages. When prisoners raised a grievance regarding work conditions, the Prison Board would attempt to negotiate a solution with the private company. In the case of the Samuel Valentine Company, for example, the board invited Mr. Valentine to a meeting to discuss the possibility of giving the prisoners overtime tasks. During the meeting, Mr. Valentine agreed to a ninety-day trial period in which he would rearrange the work system to accommodate the request for overtime.

Prisoners at times made complaints directly to the Board of Prison Control, as in the case of Harry Freed. Freed was a former prisoner who petitioned the board just two days after his release from the Maryland House of Correction in April 1920. He charged the warden, John Lankford, with having failed to “make payment of the amount of money due to him while in the institution and employed in the kitchen.” The warden disputed the charge, declaring that “the prisoner had received all the pay that was due him,” that is, $4.00 per month. Members of the prison board directed Lankford to produce a receipt of the wages paid to Harry Freed along with a report of the prisoner’s personal record of behavior while imprisoned. After receiving the warden’s report, the board determined that Freed’s charges were invalid and informed him that “there was no money coming to him.” Although Freed did not receive the wages he felt were owed him in the end, this instance is nonetheless remarkable because it reveals the extent to which prisoners felt empowered to seek equitable treatment from the prison administration. Some evidence suggests that other prisoners sought for arbitration or fair remuneration. In July 1918, for example, prisoners brought wage grievances to the attention of the board. Such instances show that prisoners had a clear conception of themselves as laborers; they understood that their work had economic value above that of merely covering the costs of their imprisonment. As such, they believed they deserved fair wages and equitable treatment.

Laborers were not, however, the only group who approached the board with complaints about the labor system. Grievances were also filed by company owners. For example, a representative of the Bromwell Brush and Wire Goods Company appeared before the board to complain about prisoners slacking in their allotted tasks. The company’s representative protested instances in which prisoners were paid their surplus wage before it was determined that they had finished their allotted task for the day. In this case, the owner of a private business looked to the prison administration to enforce strict  production quotas.

Members of the Board of Prison Control thus served as arbiters of labor conditions in a time of heightened anxiety regarding rapid industrialization. Reformers, prisoners, and working men and women in the Progressive Era looked to the state to regulate and temper the negative elements of free market competition. While board negotiations were tinged with conflicting elements of pre-market paternalism and its opposite, industrial bureaucratic management, it is instructive to consider the deliberations as examples of a new understanding of state responsibility that took hold in the first half of the twentieth century—that of the regulatory and oversight functions of the state. Employing prisoners in forced labor was an exploitative measure, and yet the state’s function as regulator and supervisor to some degree tempered the profit-maximizing motivations of free market competition. In acting as arbiter between state, corporation, and prison reform interests, the Board of Prison Control was tasked by the General Assembly to find an alternative to the contract labor system and yet retain  prisoners in industrious employment."