“By the mid-1920s Hulbert could boast that over 75 percent of the prisoners at Jackson were gainfully employed, half of them on projects outside the prison walls. The mainstay of prison industry at Jackson was the binder twine plant, originally established in 1907 as an experiment in state-account production. A new mixture of sisal, manila, and hemp made the quality of Jackson twine extremely competitive in the early 1920S, and Hulbert ran the plant "night and day" to produce 14 million pounds a year. Most of this was sold out of state, through agents and consignments across the northwest, and, while there was significant annual variation, profits averaged around $90,000 a year. Hulbert expanded the brush shop, producing over fifty kinds of brushes and brooms for sale to hardware stores and wholesale suppliers; he started up a tombstone and marker shop, expanded production in the chair factory to over three hundred kinds of furniture, and added a cot factory, manufacturing the steel frames for folding beds. He developed an aluminum stamping operation, making utensils for sale to institutions across the country; he started up a brick and tile works at Onondaga and took over control of the Chelsea Cement Plant, which with the boom in highway construction was earning a profit of $180,000 by 1925; he expanded the output of the cannery, marketing over four hundred thousand cans of vegetables a year to groceries and institutions, and added a cider works that made vinegar for commercial sale. Under Hulbert's hand Michigan took a lead in that new, now universal staple of prison production, the manufacture of license plates and road signs for the state; he invested over $60,000 in new stamping and enameling equipment, and, while output was largely for "state use" in Michigan, he stood ready to take orders from states as far away as Vermont. But it was the textile plant upon which Hulbert lavished most hope, attention, and capital. After a visit to Pennsylvania in 1922, Hulbert convinced his superiors of the potential for making cotton cloth and turning out shirts, sheets, toweling, and other staples both for state institutions and for sale on the open market. He even explored the possibility of a direct trade between Michigan and prison systems in the South that raised cotton with convict labor, exchanging raw materials for finished goods. By the end of his tenure Hulbert had invested nearly $150,000 in plant and equipment for textile production.Â
In all of this Hulbert was quite in step with national trends. Binder twine, textiles, and license plates emerged, along with commercial farming, as the leading lines of prison production across the country by the early 1920s. Hulbert took to attending national conferences as an expert on prison industry, extolling-at times rather incoherently-the innovations and successes of the Michigan system. As he described them, the problems he faced were familiar ones to his colleagues in the American Prison Association: finding product lines that did not compete too openly with local or state industries but for which there was a good market; developing operations that did not require complex machinery or skilled labor; and establishing a method of bookkeeping that covered the cost of mate- rials and equipment, provided for the upkeep of the labor force, and paid some sort of wage to inmate workers as well as salaries to super- visors, guards, and sales staff-without dissolving all profits into overhead. There were tricky trade-offs here, which Hulbert, for the most part, finessed with various kinds of accounting fraud and legerdemain. His "main thought," he said, was "to put inside of prison walls factories that would be a profit to the state."
But there was a good deal more: "My dear Governor," he wrote in making his case for a textile plant,Â
there is a great possibility of expansion in this industry and at any time that you want to talk with me, I would be very glad to go over the situation with you as I think we can put Michigan's prison industries on the map so that when you leave office the state will look up to you as doing something that no other Governor ever did.
What Hulbert had in mind was to insure that Jackson prison was able to pay for itself. As we have seen, the dream of self-sufficiency was widely shared among early advocates of prison industrialization in the 1920s; their model was the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater, which was the other leading producer of prison-made binder twine in the country, as well as of farm equipment, and which made claims of profitability that were legendary in the profession, though never adequately documented. There was nothing particularly outrageous in Hulbert's ambition; Jackson prison had managed to cover expenses from industrial profits off and on for years and, most recently, during Simpson's wartime administration. The trick that Hulbert had to turn was to sustain a rapid expansion of profits in step with a burgeoning inmate population. Groesbeck was apparently always skeptical of Hulbert's lavish promotions and blatant ambitions, but he had no reason to refuse Hulbert enough leeway to chase his dream of a self- sustaining penitentiary. In 1921 the governor struck a deal with his warden: the state would provide $300,000 from the General Fund for operating Jackson prison in each of the next four years (1922-25), and Hulbert agreed to meet the balance of operational expenses from the profits of prison industries.Â
This gave Hulbert, briefly, in 1922, 1923, and 1924, a virtual carte blanche to pursue his dreams. His superiors on the commission, knowing that he had the governor's endorsement, made him head of Michigan Prison Industries in 1923, a post that doubled his income and expanded his powers, and they approved all the equipment purchases and improvements of facilities that the warden recommended. There was no sign in these years of an impending move to a new prison, as Hulbert invested $450,000 in developing the plant and equipment of the old prison facility, actually spending more on industrial buildings than on additional dormitories for the growing inmate population. And there was a general inclination in Lansing to ignore a rising chorus of complaints about Hulbert's energetic efforts to boost sales. A former warden of Stillwater prison was hired as sales manager for binder twine, earning $25,000 a year in salary and commissions to develop markets out of state. Although the man was clearly an "expert" in the field, not a few Michigan Republicans felt they had been cut out of a lucrative post. More troublesome was the grumbling of businessmen around the state as they ran across the new competitor in town: food and hardware wholesalers complained that Prison Industry salesmen were undercutting their markups by going straight to retailers with lower prices; grocers complained that some competitors were being allowed to carry extensive credit (including the husband of one of Hulbert's secretaries, who opened a grocery in Jackson on what amounted to a subsidy from prison industries); two hard- ware stores in one small town protested that they had both been given "exclusive" rights to prison-made utensils and brushes on con- dition that they place a large order.129 There was nothing illegal in any of this: the state was in business, and good business often involved deals at the expense of loyal taxpayers and Republican voters. Thus, when Mack and Company of Ann Arbor made inquiries about furniture prices from Prison Industries, in connection with a big sale to a fraternity house, and then found that a salesman from the prison had gone straight to the fraternity house and sold the furniture at a better price, Mack and Company could not complain about the business practices of Prison Industries, but it could insist, through political channels, that the prison keep out of its business.Â
Hulbert's business antics were the result not only of his personal ambition and braggadocio but of his deal with the governor. Ultimately, this proved his undoing. While his efforts to foster jobs made him, in the eyes of the Prison Commission, an ideal warden -"the discipline of the prison has been excellent. No outbreaks, mutinies or riots have occurred" - his financial arrangement with Groesbeck forced him into a heedless expansion, committing more and more resources to prison industry in order to boost output and sales. Yet he could never keep up with his obligations. The rapid increase in prison population after 1922 drove up the annual cost of maintenance, from $675,000 in 1922 to $840,000 in 1925. At the same time, Hulbert poured nearly $300,000 into new equipment and another $150,000 into structures for his expanding industries. Perhaps inevitably, start- up delays plagued the textile plant, which lost $63,000 in its first three years of operation, while a statewide boycott of bricklayers, responding to appeals from private manufacturers, brought production at the Onondaga facility to a standstill in 1925. Hulbert met his obligations in 1922, but, thereafter, industries at Jackson failed to come up with its share of operating costs until 1926, when it paid $148,000 against an accrued deficit to the General Fund that now totaled over $1.3 million. This was the biggest operating debt the prison had ever sustained. Hulbert's financial difficulties angered the governor, who wrote the resident commissioner at Jackson, Mark Merriman, that "the business end of this institution has not been properly looked after." Under political pressure from his enemies, as we have seen, Groesbeck was forced to conduct an audit of prison industry books. What the accountants found was a "real mess," and, while nothing was ever said officially or publicly, Robert Davidson, the accountant in charge, attributed the mess to a "willful manipulation" of the accounts. After meetings with the auditors in Detroit and several heated exchanges with Hulbert, Groesbeck let his warden know that "his resignation was looked for." The governor was engaged in a salvage operation, trying, as we saw, to protect his political position against the sniping of his enemies; by removing Hulbert as warden, he prevented a legislative investigation or legal proceedings and probably salvaged Hulbert's reputation. But the warden had him- self also been engaged in a cover-up; he had launched an ambitious expansion of prison industries and promised great profits, yet he was unable to meet his obligations under the operating agreement with the governor. Trying to show a profit while explaining his inability to pay forced the warden to "cook" his books, and in a prison it was not hard to find experts skilled in juggling accounts and fixing the books. The inmate in charge of industrial records, an accountant by profession and a convicted embezzler, could of course explain the elaborate ploys of double bookkeeping-twine sent out on consignment was designated "sold" and entered as profit, the nonexistent cash was entered as accounts relievable or unpaid, and merchandise recovered from the jobber was then logged as inventory on hand-but, on balance, he had to admit "the whole accounting system was a fraud and a delusion."
Always running just ahead of the game, Hulbert carved out a good career for himself and made his contribution to three Groesbeck electoral victories. When he finally tripped up, it was not because the goal itself was discredited but because Groesbeck had lost faith in Hulbert's methods, or, more exactly, was no longer able to shield those methods from hostile scrutiny. Locked in a close primary fight, the governor had to avoid the taint of corruption or waste. But he still needed Hulbert and so transferred him down the road to the new prison project that the warden had begun in 1924 largely as an extension of his efforts to keep his retainers and charges fully employed. The scale of this project, and its annual budget, was a good deal larger than Prison Industries, and, while Hulbert took a cut in salary when he gave up his posts as warden and director of Industries, he had, as we saw, ample scope in the construction project for his rest- less energies and ambitions. From what we know of his activities on the site, Hulbert did not slow down or change his habits in the least. His instincts for empire building were fully engaged on the building project and quite in step with, and of use to, Groesbeck in his battle for political survival during 1925-26.Â
Yet, while Hulbert's conduct at the new construction site expressed both his continuing personal ambitions and his determination to serve his longtime political mentor, his drive to build a bigger and better prison may have also been an effort to solve the problems of profitability that he had encountered at the old prison and that had wrecked his deal with Groesbeck. Hulbert forged ahead with his dream of a completely industrialized, self-sufficient penitentiary. Indeed, to his way of thinking the failure to meet his obligations under the pact with Groesbeck had been due entirely to the rapid rise in the operational costs of the old prison. The growing number of inmates had strained the capacity of the old facility and had forced him to distribute his population to the farms, dormitory annexes, road camps, and factories outside the walls, thus greatly increasing the costs of guarding and feeding his charges. Moreover, the effort to expand productive facilities and jobs within the old main prison had run up against limitations of space and antiquated structures, raising at every turn the start-up costs for new operations. Even with these impediments to success, and despite the rigidities of his deal with Groesbeck, Hulbert could claim that Prison Industries had managed to make a total profit of nearly one million dollars under his direction and, from these proceeds, to finance entirely the purchase of new plant and equipment for expansion. Such a return from an old, dilapidated prison gave fair promise that a new prison might be able to sustain itself, provided enough land, labor, and machinery could be brought together and used effectively. There was no necessary limit to the size of such an operation. Indeed, in an era when Henry Ford was achieving notable efficiencies and highly publicized economies of scale at his mammoth new River Rouge plant, it was not difficult for Hulbert to conclude that a larger facility and greater concentration of men and equipment might serve the ends of economy and even, eventually, of self-sufficiency. Reasoning in this way made the grandiose seem practicable.
It was also politically persuasive. We may consider Hulbert foolish or blindly ambitious to commit himself to creating a self-supporting, industrial prison. But, ultimately, as the terms of his deal with Groesbeck make clear, he never claimed that the prison did, or even would, pay for itself, only that it ought to try. It was (if the word is not too solemn to apply to Harry Hulbert) his aspiration to make the prison a productive enterprise, and it was this that resonated politically. His goal was entirely in step with the role of punishment in the prohibition era. What, after all, was prohibition all about, if not to salvage and harness the energies of labor for production, to steer the shiftless into the orderly and disciplined ways of industrial life? What better use could prison make of the rising number of convicted bootleggers and mobsters, tavern keepers and moonshiners, than to put them to productive work? Correction or reformation was not the crux of the matter here, although Hulbert could talk a progressive line when called upon; at issue was the creation of a carceral practice that affirmed, through punishment, the social priorities of sobriety and industrial discipline and anchored the legitimacy of authority not in the policing of drunkards but in the construction of orderly and productive institutions capable of serving the people with efficiency and the most up-to-date methods. Cost-effective and businesslike administration were the perennial slogans of Groesbeck's campaigns.Â
The new prison at Jackson was thus, in many ways, a monument to Harry Hulbert's persistent ambition and Alex Groesbeck's needs of the moment. The dreams of self-sufficiency, which served so well the ideology of punishment under prohibition and which seem to em- body the presumptive links between profit and uplift, and the requirements of patronage, which continually expanded outward the networks of obligation necessary to sustain competition for power at the center, joined to fashion this white elephant of corrections. Even the fiercest critics of Hulbert and Groesbeck had to admit that "the taxpayers of Michigan need not fear faulty design, workmanship, or construction, as the work built to date is superfine." It was easy enough to complain that the single-man cells with hot-and-cold running water and "push button control vitreous china water closets" sported "more conveniences than in the rooms of some of our finest hotels." And the terrazzo floors and glazed brick walls seemed unnecessarily ostentatious for a penitentiary. Yet critics waxed wistful before the enormous walls that, however grandiose, would "be admired by those who know a beautiful piece of work when they see it." Ambition and self-aggrandizement had combined with the calculations of patronage and the pressures of political competition to produce high quality from great waste. As with some great enterprise of the ancien regime, the corruption that surrounded the construction of the new prison reflected, on the one hand, the expanding resources of the state and, on the other, the inadequacy of its institutional apparatus to control or manage the tasks it had undertaken. Graft and venality filled the gaps of incomplete state formation, and, while Fred Green might attack the corruption of the Groesbeck administration and Harry Jackson might shake his head at the heedless and high-handed ways of Harry Hulbert, the epigoni were not essentially different from their predecessors, reapplying the same appeals for efficiency and administrative accountability and replaying the same rules of political combat with, perhaps, a little more caution and a little less flamboyance.”
-Charles Bright, The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the “Big House”, 1920-1955.Lansing: University of Michigan Press, 1996. pp. 84-93.
