In the midst of the Great Depression the
American public was treated to a sudden outpouring of revelations
about the horrors of the South's most notorious penal
institution, the chain gang. Even today, many people know the
Warner Brothers 1932 hit film I Am a Fugitive
From a Chain Gang starring Paul Muni. This Hollywood
rendition of Robert E. Burns s serialized true adventure story
I Am a Fugitive from the Georgia Chain Gang! (1932), cast
instant national disgrace upon Georgia's penal system and made
Burns a popular hero, a white everyman struggling against
bureaucratic indifference and state-sanctioned cruelty.
Burns's story attained mass cultural appeal, but the
depression-era left produced its own expos‚s of southern
"justice" that achieved wide circulation as well. These accounts
focused more appropriately on the plight of African-American
prisoners, who made up the vast majority of those sent to the
chain gang for petty crimes. In 1932 radical investigative
reporter John Spivak talked his way into Georgia's convict camps,
and then published a thinly fictionalized proletarian novel about
the chain gang entitled Georgia Nigger. Spivak's "novel"
came replete with photographs documenting the shocking tortures
he had observed, and the book was serialized by the Communist
party in the Daily Worker. By the mid-thirties the
International Labor Defense (ILD) pledged itself to defend anyone
who escaped from a southern chain gang, white or black. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People made
common cause with the ILD when it successfully defended an
escaped African-American convict, Jesse Crawford, against
extradition to Georgia.
It may only be a matter of time before we see a similar explosion
of southern prison tales, though today s public may prove less
sympathetic than that of the 1930s. Since 1980, America s prison
population has more than tripled, passing the one million mark
last year. Annual drug convictions have multiplied tenfold,
constituting a hundred thousand new convictions each year. In a
country with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world,
with prisons in many states under court order to improve
conditions, many people (the "public") still call for more
prisons, longer sentences, harder time. In May 1995 the state of
Alabama reintroduced chain gangs, and now works hundreds of
prisoners in chains on its roads; Florida followed suit in
December, fifty years after abolishing leg irons; in Louisiana
last year, Republican Buddy Roemer made the promise of chain
gangs a central feature of his gubernatorial campaign. As in the
past, both blacks and whites do time on the chain gang, usually
in proportion to their numbers in the overall state prison
population (60 percent black in Alabama, 55 percent in Florida).
Nevertheless, in states whose population is only one-fourth black
the racial implications of the chain gang are inescapable. Both
the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Southern
Poverty Law Center (SPLC), usually associated with civil rights
and anti-Klan work, filed suit against Alabama in federal court,
claiming the chain gang violated the Eight Amendment sanction
against "cruel and unusual punishment." As a result of the suit
Alabama agreed to end the practice of chaining inmates together
in coffles of five men. This, however, proved something of a
Pyrrhic victory; prisoners still labor against their will in
individual shackles.
Editorialists around the country have weighed in on the pros and
cons of forcing convicts to work the roads in chains, and the
television newsmagazines 48
Hours and 20/20 have run segments on this new
"get-tough" policy. From what I see in the media, however, the
historical antecedents of the chain gang are poorly understood.
Commentators who find this punishment troubling almost always
poin to its association with slavery. But no intelligent
slaveholder would have allowed the state to punish his laborers
by making them build roads for someone else. In fact, the chain
gang was a distinctive invention of the "New South," not a
holdover from slavery days. Ironically, early twentieth-century
southern reformers initially offered chain gangs as a humane
alternative to the then prevailing convict lease
system.
Observers who notice the racial composition of the new chain
gangs are on the right track. When southern convicts left the
coal mines and turpentine camps for the roads in the early part
of this century, 90 percent of them were African-Americans. The
visible nature of the chain gang rarely troubled its early
advocates, who believed that African-Americans were "benefited by
outdoor manual labor." Indeed, the advent of the chain gang
coincided with the crystallization of segregation and the spread
of black disfranchisement across the South. Like these other
white efforts to extinguish once and for all the dreams of
freedom and equality generated by emancipation, the chain gang
stood as a powerful dramatization of the reassertion of white
control over the lives of southern African-Americans. Black men
working in chains, overseen by poor whites holding shotguns and
authorized to shoot to kill, sent an undeniable message.
White southerners soon abandoned the initial humanitarian
impulse that replaced the convict lease with the chain gang, and
county road gangs scattered across the South became notorious
among blacks and a few concerned whites for their substandard
conditions and the vicious punishments meted out to prisoners
unable to keep up the pace of work. States maintained little or
no oversight of their chain gangs. In the 1930s, for example,
three prison commissioners in Atlanta feebly monitored conditions
in over 150 county chain gangs in Georgia. When civil rights
activist Bayard Rustin spent a month on a North Carolina chain
gang in 1947, he reported conditions that had changed little over
the decades. Convicts labored, ate, and slept with chains riveted
around their ankles. Prisoners worked under the gun from sunup
to sundown, shoveling dirt at fourteen shovelfuls a minute, a
killing pace. They ate bug-infested, rotten food and slept in
unwashed bedding, often in wheeled cages nine feet wide by twenty
feet long containing eighteen beds. Medical treatment and bathing
facilities were unsanitary, if available at all.
Corporal punishment and outright torture casual blows from
rifle butts or clubs, whipping with a leather strap, confinement
in a "sweat-box" under the southern sun, and hanging from stocks
or bars followed from the most insignificant transgressions. With
the exception of a few "trusties," all the guards and certainly
all the wardens in the South were white: thus African-Americans,
who remained the majority of chaingang prisoners, were singled
out for punishment. Rustin correctly concluded that the chain
gang s ultimate purpose was to degrade and brutalize.
Ironically, in a society committed to segregation from
cradle to grave, by the 1930s blacks and whites began to share a
brutal solidarity in many of the South s convict camps. The end
of leasing and the return of prisoners to public control
gradually diminished the traditional southern reluctance to
punish poor whites for crimes once prosecuted only if the
defendant was black. The chain gang enjoyed a unique status as an
interracial institution in the Jim Crow South. Thus one of the
harshest institutions of American apartheid ended up falling on
the poor of both races, as it does today.
Despite the revelations that came during the 1930s and
1940s, in many states this harsh penal system persisted until the
1960s, when the civil rights movement finally forced a change.
Superficially, the chain gangs, bloodhounds, and sweat-boxes of
benighted precivil rights Dixie now seem remote from the shopping
malls, interstates, and suburban sprawl gracing today s New
South. Why then would anyone want to bring them back? The
disturbing truth is that the very features that brought the chain
gang into disrepute have now become its selling points.
Down to this day southern states have combined extreme
fiscal conservatism with high rates of incarceration, which has
fallen disproportionately on African-Americans. In other words,
white folks want to send black folks to prison but don't want to
pay for it. (Of course this is no longer a purely southern
phenomenon). After the end of slavery, prisoners were sold back
into bondage. This was perfectly legal under the Thirteenth
Amendment, which abolished slavery except for punishment for a
crime. Not only did this save the states money, corrections
departments actually became revenue generators! The chain gang
ended the lucrative lease system, but also proved inexpensive to
run and built badly needed new roads across the rural South. And
now? Alabama s prisons are overflowing; the always-invoked
"public" wants more people sent to prison for longer terms; the
chain gang relieves overcrowding. A simple equation: "the big
advantage to me is financial," claimed Alabama's prison
commissioner, Ron Jones. (Jones was forced to resign when he
finally ran afoul of southern "chivalry": he wanted to put women
on the chain gang too.)
When Florida's legislature mandated the use of chain gangs
starting in December 1995, the new law actually did spark some
controversy: should the prisoners be chained together at work or
not? Absolutely! proclaimed Crist. That's how they do it in
Alabama five to a chain and that's what makes it possible to put
dangerous felons on the roads, and that's what makes it a brutal
and degrading chain gang. Senator Crist also fondly remembers his
childhood drives across the Sunshine State, and the powerful
moral effect (on him, presumably) o seeing chained men working
the roads.
Harry Singletary, the director of Florida's Department of
Corrections, disagrees. He believes that convicts should not
be chained to one another while at work, and he calls Alabama s
experiment with the system a "debacle," designed for media
consumption. Indeed, Singletary, while obliged to carry out the
law, thinks chain gangs simply provide the illusion that
something is being done about crime, but have little "deterrent
effect." Singletary, who is African-American and a native
Floridian, has less pleasant memories of the old-time chain gang
than does Senator Crist. When told that Crist approved of
punishing recalcitrant convicts by chaining them to a hitching
post in the hot sun, as they do in Alabama, Singletary retorted
that "they are going to have to get another secretary [of
corrections] if they are going to do that."
It is a measure of a distressing consensus that debate has turned
on just how cruel this unusual punishment should be rather than
whether it should be at all. Moreover, despite its advocates
insistence that the chain gang punishes whites and blacks
equally, in states with a large proportion of African-American
prisoners, its racial message remains, well, "visible and
obvious." Even though Florida decided to work prisoners in
individual shackles rather than "on the chain," Singletary
remains in the uncomfortable position of carrying out a policy
which he and many other African-Americans cannot regard with
equanimity. The chain gang stands out as one of the most deeply
felt symbols and experiences of white oppression and abuse and as
a rebuke to conceptions of fairness and justice in the courts.
For some whites, however, the chain gang has an equally powerful
if opposite resonance. Just as die-hard segregationists won
points with their constituency by outraging liberal opinion, the
more condemnation heaped upon Ron Jones and Alabama s Governor
Fob James by the SCLC, the SPLC, the ACLU, and bleeding hearts in
New York who read the Village Voice the
better, as far as its advocates are concerned. In Florida,
Charlie "Chain Gang" Crist wears his nickname as a badge of
honor. The image of black men working in chains reminds the crowd
Crist and Co. play to of a world they think they have lost, a
world where tough laws punished crime swiftly and severely, where
prisoners paid their "debt to society" in the coin of hard labor,
and where the members of the underclass, African-Americans in
particular, knew their place. Despite the vociferous denials,
this is what the chain gang is all about.
Alex Lichtenstein is the author of Twice the Work of
Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New
South. Copyright 1996 by the Foundation for the
Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. Readers may
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Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1700, New
York, NY 10017.To Degrade and Brutalize
During the first forty or fifty years following the Civil War,
southern states leased prisoners for private exploitation to coal
mines, turpentine farms, sawmills, phosphate pits, and
brickyards. Two factors led to this system: the unwillingness to
expend scarce resources on building new prisons and the white
fears generated by the new rights and assertiveness of former
slaves. Many petty crimes that whites would have overlooked
during slavery now netted blacks lengthy sentences. Southern
liberals who witnessed the convict lease system complained about
the inevitable brutality of a system that encouraged the lessees
of convicts to work prisoners to the utmost but provided little
incentive for humane treatment. If a convict died, another one
was always available from the "penitentiary" for the same low
price. Critics of leasing also objected to the monetary benefits
reaped by favored lessees at the expense of the rest of the
public. The solution? Employ convicts to improve the South's
dismal roadways. Convict labor should benefit all the people,
these reformers claimed, and in their view prisoners would find a
"kind master" in the state. Thus the chain gang on which Robert
Burns and Jesse Crawford did hard time was born."That's How They Do It in Alabama"
As prison reformers all over the country point out, the best way
to reduce skyrocketing prison expenditures is to send fewer
people to prison. But politicians want to look tough on crime,
and prisoners can't vote. Here is the source of the second
powerful political incentive for the reinvention of the chain
gang: the public at least the white public loves it. Prisoners
"should be treated as criminals, as animals, social outcasts,
pariahs," are the typical sentiments expressed by letters to the
editor in Florida newspapers when the chain gang is discussed.
Charles Crist, the ambitious Republican state senator who
sponsored the bill authorizing chain gangs in Florida, told me
that the "visible and obvious" harshness of the punishment would
reduce crime. Unlike his counterparts in Alabama, Crist has
little interest in the fiscal implications of the chain gang. He
just wants some of the state s sixty thousand prisoners to
receive harder punishment. Once, convicts graded and paved roads;
now they mostly clear brush from the roadside. The actual work
done by prisoners doesn t matter; symbolism is everything.