Texas Agriculture & For Profit Prisons

photo used with permission by Bruce Jackson Texas Agriculture and the For-Profit Prison Industry Part II by Charlotte Lucke

Bruce Jackson ’ s collection of photographs are haunting reminders of the way the past reaches into the present, the present into the past. Providing a glimpse into Texas prison farms from 1964 until 1979, the photos reveal convicts tilling fields and picking crops as guards on horseback watch over them with loaded rifles. The 1974 case, Ruiz vs. Estelle, widens the glimpse into Texas prisons and their labor operations. In the 1974 lawsuit, inmates charged the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) with cruel and unusual punishment at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville, Texas which houses a mattress factory, coffee plant, records conversion plant, plastic sign shop, and an agricultural operation where prisoners have grown crops and raised livestock since 1883. In a report submitted to the court in 1979, a corrections expert observed that the Texas Department of Corrections was “ probably the best example of slavery remaining in the country. ” Jackson ’ s photographs support this testimonial, visually testifying to conditions uncannily reminiscent of slave plantations.

Jackson photographed Texas prison farms in an era marked by a boom in prison populations as the carceral state tackled the spectres of crime and drugs.

According to the Texas State Historical Association, between 1968 and 1978 the Texas prison population grew by 101%, while the state population grew by only 19%. Further, between 1962 and 1972, Black convicts made up roughly 44% of the inmate population while Anglo-Americans made up 39% and Hispanics made up 17%. Yet, as reflected in data collected by the U.S. census, Anglo-Americans have historically been the majority demographic of the Texas population. Research by sociologist Michelle Alexander and historian Elizabeth Hinton, among many others, attribute the prison population surge to the federal government’ s expansion of the carceral state. More specifically, this research attributes the carceral state ’ s policing of Black neighborhoods to the surge in the Black prison population.

As problems facing communities of color persisted, lawmakers fought poverty and gaping inequality with law and order. Hinton has traced policies from the Johnson administration through the Reagan administration that funneled hundreds of billions of dollars into law enforcement and criminal justice programs that policed Black neighborhoods. Social unrest and protest further contributed to the policing of Black neighborhoods—a repetition of the racialized policing of the late nineteenth century that reverberates still today. As argued by Alexander, incarceration and the war on drugs was also a form of retaliation against the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. For policymakers, the answer to poverty, crime, and social unrest was arrest and imprisonment to maintain the status quo.

To offset costs of the surging prison populations, Texas prisons followed the model established in the late nineteenth century, producing and selling goods through prison agriculture, mills, and factories. In 1963, the Texas legislature passed the Prison Made Goods Act which established the Texas Correctional Industries (TCI) and required that prisonproduced goods be sold, for-profit, to other state institutions. With the passing of this law, the TDC developed a coffeeroasting plant, garment factories, a tire facility, and a bus-repair shop, among other operations. The state ’ s development of profitable prison operations continued; in the 1978 report Texas Department of Corrections: 30 Years of Progress, the TDC boasts about its agriculture, business, construction, and industry divisions - all of which, the report claims, maximize citizen tax dollars and rehabilitate prisoners. Ironically, the 1978 report condemns past prison conditions and lauds its progress despite the 1972 case which charged the TDC with cruel and unusual punishment.

Despite the emboldened claims of the 1978 report, the prison system of this era was tainted by inhumane living and working conditions. In 1972, inmate David Ruiz hand-wrote a lawsuit against the TDC for overcrowding, inadequate healthcare, inadequate security, severe and arbitrary punishment, and unsafe working conditions. These conditions, argued Ruiz, violated the 8th Amendment which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The 1978 article, “Inmates Tell of Texas Prison Brutality ” from the New York Times includes a testimony by a prisoner who was ordered to feed silage into a threshing machine and consequently lost both arms. In 1980, when the case finally went to trial, Federal District Judge William Wayne Justice ordered changes, including limiting prison capacities, hiring more guards and medical personnel, and stronger oversight. The 1980 charges— and ruling—continued the pattern of investigations and failed reform of the early twentieth century. Early release programs, attempting to maintain the prison population, contributed to

Since the beginning of the prison boom in the 1960s, incarceration rates have continued to skyrocket, conditions have remained deplorable, and racial disparities have endured. In Texas, policing and incarceration rates have increased even more dramatically than in the rest of the United States. American Studies professor Robert Perkinson reports that “between 1965 and 2000, the U.S. prison population swelled by 600%, in Texas by 1,200%” (30). Within the prison system, racial gaps endure as Black Texans make up one-third of the prison population, while they make up only 12% of the state population. Further, nearly half of the prison population is serving time for nonviolent offenses or probation violations. Meanwhile, the state, corporations, and private businesses continue to make money from incarceration through agricultural and industrial operations, commissary vendors, and fees for using prison telephones.

Today, the operations developed by the TCI remain intact as prisoners grow and manufacture crops and goods across the state, with the highest concentration of facilities in East Texas. In fields, Texas prisoners raise field crops, edible crops, and livestock. In production facilities, convicts process the yields into food and goods, including the textiles and goods listed for sale on the TCI website. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) also has canning facilities, cotton gins, beef and pork processing plants, textile mills, feed mills,, and an alfalfa dehydrator. In prisons, Texan inmates are required to work as long as they are physically and mentally able. On many of these prison farms, echoes of the past continue to reverberate as convicts still work the land once toiled by slave populations. In 2002, Perkinson investigated the Eastham Unit, a sprawling thirteen-thousand-acre cotton farm in Houston County. Once a slave plantation, sharecroppers and leased convicts replaced slave labor following Emancipation in the late nineteenth century. The plantation was later sold to the state of Texas and developed into a state prison. While at the prison in 2002, farm manager John Massingill gave Perkinson a tour of the operation and its 4,000 heads of cattle, 5,000 hogs, 52,000 laying hens, and 1,400 acres of field crops. In his book, Texas Tough: The Rise of America ’ s Prison Empire, Perkinson vividly describes the farm ’ s “ pungent pig complex, wooden longhouses stuffed with mangy chicks, and a cattle burial pit mobbed with buzzards ” (76). Unpaid convicts, notes Perkinson, tend the entire operation, shadowing the labor of enslaved people in the 1850s. One convict shared this sentiment with Perkinson, elling him, “This here is a slave plantation ” (78).

While prison farms are inherently unjust and exploitative, prison agriculture can benefit some prisoners as it gives them a sense of purpose and connection. Tim Sneed told Cultivate San Antonio about his experience at the Ellis Unit in Huntsville, where he was able to pursue an Associate of Applied Science Degree in Horticulture and a Texas A&M Master Gardener Certificate Program. He helped develop Herbs Behind Bars, a program that provides fresh herbs to prison kitchens. His experience and degree also helped him land a job after getting out of prison. In addition to credentials and a job, Sneed explained that the horticulture program allowed him to be outside and feel something greater than himself through the process of co-creation. Growing plants, Sneed told Cultivate, taught him patience, and his prison

horticulture experience was one of the greatest accomplishments of his life. As he illustrated the way hardened convicts' entire countenance would change after seeing a sprout grow, Sneed suggested that the horticulture program touched other convicts, too.

Recent articles similarly describe the advantages of prison agricultural and horticultural programs. A 2020 article in the The Houston Chronicle describes the aquaponic farm in the Michael Unit, a four-hundred acre farm in Anderson county, where inmates tend the farm and grow fresh greens incorporated into meals that feed the unit’ s 3,800 residents. Ariella Simke reports that prior to the development of the aquaponic farm, inmates at the Michael Unit rarely ate fresh greens, and many other units did not have access to fresh food. The article lauds the inmates who tend the aquaponic farm as “ pioneers ” paving the way toward an efficient and sustainable food system. A 2013 article in the Texas Tribute reports about the Smith County Jail Farm, a four acre plot where inmates grow food donated to the East Texas Food Bank. Reflecting on the farm, convict Frank Meadows states, “It’ s been a blessing for me . . . I’d rather be out here and get to eat some of these tomatoes. ” Using language similar to Sneed’ s, Sheriff Larry Smith of Smith County claims that the garden allows the inmates to “feel like they ’ re a part of something. ” While these articles report about the benefits of agriculture and horticulture in Texas prisons, these models are not as picturesque as they sound. Rather, they are built upon the backs of people trapped in a historically unjust and violent system.

Texas is one of four prison systems that does not pay inmates for their labor. Many of these jobs, Sneed states, are “ sweatshop like jobs, ” where inmates sit in one spot producing products such as clothes and shoes for eight hours a day. For these jobs, inmates receive a stipend called “ good time ” which are credits toward shortening their parole eligibility date. Sneed notes that this good time cannot be used outside the prison system upon release. While some inmates are able to earn money through the Prison Industry Enhancement Program, these inmates are required to use their earnings to pay for rent and for food within the prison. According to the Texas Correctional Industries, the purpose of the unpaid and paid jobs is to rehabilitate prisoners and provide them with marketable labor skills. Yet recidivism rates remain high, and with a criminal record, inmates have an incredibly difficult time finding jobs. Furthermore, data demonstrates that the prison system does not reduce crime rates. Despite data that demonstrates the failure of reform and rehabilitation, the state continues to funnel prisoners into its system and laud its operations as rehabilitative and sustainable.

The historically abhorrent conditions of Texas prisons and prison farms persist as inmates continue to charge the state with crime and failed reform continues. In 2014, inmates charged the TDCJ with cruel and unusual punishment due to the absence of air conditioning in the Wallace Unit, a prison in central Texas. While the state agreed to install air conditioning at the Wallace Pack Unit in 2018, the majority of Texas prisons remain without air conditioning despite extreme Texas heat. This May, the House Committee on Corrections passed a bill to incrementally install air conditioning and climate-control systems in Texas prisons. Yet the Texas Senate did not bring the bipartisan bill to its 2021 session, and today, 70% of Texas prison living areas do not have air conditioning. This is only one of the many problems plaguing Texas prison. Under the

the guise of rehabilitation, corporations and the state profit from exploitative prison labor and dire living conditions. The costs of maintaining prisons remain exceptionally high, and prisoners, taxpayers, and the state continue to fund a system that does much harm and little good.

Texas prison farms are an important symbolic link between the past and present as imprisoned people work the same fields once worked by nineteenthcentury enslaved people. With the turn of the twentieth-century, prisoners work not only on farms and in mills but in modernized factories and shops. As in the past, present conditions remain deplorable. In Inside the Wire, Bruce Jackson writes about being stonewalled by the Texas prison system upon his attempt to revisit the prisons in 2010. Reflecting on being denied access, he writes, “Those places do not want witnesses. ” Yet witnessing is essential for restorative justice to take place. While the model of sustainability and rehabilitation through agricultural labor seems wholesome, beneath the surface lies the violent, historical exploitation of human lives. This history must be recognized as a contributor to the racist police violence that devastatingly repeats itself again and again. Restorative justice envisions a world without prisons and without police violence: where drugs are decriminalized, social networks are bolstered, and taxpayer money goes to revitalizing rather than policing communities.

References

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