H. Bruce Franklin:
The former slave states immediately devised legislation--the Black
Codes--branding almost every former slave as a criminal. These laws
specified that many vaguely defined acts--such as "mischief" and "insulting
gestures"--were crimes, but only if committed by a "free negro."
Mississippi's Vagrancy Act defined "all free negroes and mulattoes over the
age of eighteen" as criminals unless they could furnish written proof of a
job at the beginning of every year. (3) "Having no visible means of
support" was a crime being committed by almost all the freed slaves. So was
"loitering" (staying in the same place) and "vagrancy" (wandering).
Many of the new convicts were leased. The convict lease system had a big
advantage for the enslavers: since they did not own the convicts, they lost
nothing by working them to death. For example, the death rate among leased
Alabama black convicts during just one year (1869) was 41 percent.
(4) Much of the railroad system throughout the South was built by leased
convicts, often packed in rolling iron cages moved from job to job, working
in such hellish conditions that their life expectancy rarely exceeded two
years. (5)
Besides leasing convicts, states expanded their own prison slavery. The
infrastructure of many southern states was built and maintained by
convicts. For example, aged African-American women convicts dug the campus
of Georgia State College, and prisoners as young as twelve worked in chain
gangs to maintain the streets of Atlanta. (6) Some states went into big
business, selling products of convict labor. Hence the vast state prison
plantations established in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Texas, where cotton picked by prisoners was manufactured into cloth by
other prisoners in prison cotton mills. These plantations dwarfed the
largest cotton plantations of the slave South in size, brutality--and
profitability.
full: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/MLABLACK.htm
===
NY Times, July 5, 2006
With Jobs to Do, Louisiana Parish Turns to Inmates
By ADAM NOSSITER
LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. At barbecues, ballgames and funerals, cotton gins,
service stations, the First Baptist Church, the pepper-sauce factory and
the local private school the men in orange are everywhere.
Many people here in East Carroll Parish, as Louisiana counties are known,
say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10
percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap,
sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable.
You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way.
"They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning," said Grady
Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. "They do anything you ask
them to do."
It is an ideal arrangement, many in this farming parish say.
"You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the
afternoon," said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station.
National prison experts say that only Louisiana allows citizens to use
inmate labor on such a widespread scale, under the supervision of local
sheriffs. The state has the nation's highest incarceration rate, and East
Carroll Parish, a forlorn jurisdiction of 8,700 people along the
Mississippi River in the remote northeastern corner of Louisiana, has one
of the highest rates in the state.
As a result, it is here that the nation's culture of incarceration achieves
a kind of ultimate synthesis with the local economy. The prison system
converts a substantial segment of the population into a commodity that is
in desperately short supply cheap labor and local-jail inmates are
integrated into every aspect of economic and social life.
The practice is both an odd vestige of the abusive convict-lease system
that began in the South around Reconstruction, and an outgrowth of
Louisiana's penchant for stuffing state inmates into parish jails far
more than in any other state. Nowhere else would sheriffs have so many
inmates readily at hand, creating a potent political tool come election
time, and one that keeps them popular in between.
Sometimes the men get paid minimum wage, for instance, working for Mr.
Brown. But by the time the sheriff takes his cut, which includes board,
travel expenses and clothes, they wind up with considerably less than half
of that, inmates say.
The rules are loose and give the sheriffs broad discretion. State law
dictates only which inmates may go out into the world (mostly those nearing
the end of their sentences) and how much the authorities get to keep of an
inmate's wages, rather than the type of work he can perform. There is
little in the state rules to limit the potential for a sheriff to use his
inmate flock to curry favor or to reap personal benefit.
"If you talk to people around here, it is jokingly referred to as
rent-a-convict," said Michael Brewer, a lawyer and former public defender
in Alexandria, in central Louisiana. "There's something offensive about
that. It's almost like a form of slavery."
That is not a view often expressed in East Carroll Parish.
"I've been at cocktail parties where people laugh about it," said Jacques
Roy, another Alexandria lawyer. "People in Alexandria clamor for it. It's
cheaper. I've always envisioned it as a who-you-know kind of thing."
The prisoners are not compelled to work, but several interviewed here said
they welcomed the chance to get out of the crowded jail, at least during
the day. Still, Mr. Brewer said, "if one of them were to refuse, you can
imagine the repercussions."
Nearly half of Louisiana's prisoners are housed in small parish jails, a
policy that saves the state from building new prisons and is lucrative for
sheriffs, handsomely compensated for the privilege.
"They're making a ton of money," said Burk Foster, former criminal-justice
professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and author of the recent
textbook "Corrections." The sheriffs are paid $22.39 per prisoner per day
for accommodating their charges in facilities of often rudimentary
construction.
The accommodations here appear to be made of no more than corrugated metal.
"Hey man, we're sleeping on the floor," an inmate called out from behind
the fence at the parish jail last week, before a visitor was shooed away by
an angry guard.
Exactly how much the sheriffs pocket, however, is unclear.
"Sheriffs deliberately obscure from the public how much money they're
making," said Mr. Foster, a leading expert on Louisiana prisons.
A spokeswoman for the state corrections department said she could not
respond to the idea that sheriffs profited from housing state inmates.
The sheriff here, Mark Shumate, did not reply to phone calls and messages,
but one of his investigators, Brandon Wiltcher, had an explanation for the
popularity and pervasiveness of inmate labor here.
"It's just such a shortage of people who will work, or that can work," Mr.
Wiltcher said.
This parish, the poorest in Louisiana, lost 20 percent of its free
population from 1980 to 2000. The inmate population, however, grew.
Mr. Shumate is a very big man in these precincts of lush green corn, cotton
and soybean fields that stretch into a horizon shimmering in the heat.
Residents say his inmates cook hamburgers for community get-togethers; they
are in the concession stand at children's baseball games; they dig graves,
mow roadsides and roof churches.
"They are a constant fixture and presence, at each of these community
events," said Danny Terral, who works in his family's farm-supply business.
"I daresay I haven't been at a community event where it's not been, those
orange shirts."
They build dugouts and tend the athletic fields free at Briarfield
Academy, a private school here. "They did an excellent job," said the
school's principal, Morris Richardson, adding, "We try to provide their
lunch for them."
Mr. Wiltcher, of the sheriff's office, said there was nothing wrong with
helping out the private school without charge.
"It's not only used at this private school, it's used parishwide," he said
of inmate labor. "Since it's used for everyone who needs it, I don't see
where there would be a problem with it."
The churches, too, are grateful beneficiaries. "They sent me prisoners for
a month" for menial chores at the First Baptist Church, said Reynold
Minsky, also chairman of the local levee board. "All completely free," Mr.
Minsky added. "It's a real good deal. Everybody is tickled."
Many here view the inmates essentially as commodities, who can be returned
behind bars after the agricultural season is over, and the need for labor
is reduced.
"Good thing about it, wintertime, you can lock them up put them in cold
storage," said Billy Travis, a farmer and police juror, as county
commissioners here are known. "I call it deep freeze."
Right on the main road into town, at the base of the levee, up from the
Economy Inn and the Scott Tractor Company, the quasi-employment agency
behind concertina wire is neither out of sight nor out of mind. At midday,
passing motorists can spot its residents, out for a brief exercise spell.
"They got D.O.C. mixed in with parish prisoners," another inmate
complained, referring to the State Department of Corrections inmates who
mingle freely with those who have committed lesser local crimes.
At Lake Providence Country Club one afternoon last week, during a Rotary
Club meeting, the talk was of organizing a midsummer fish fry. "I imagine
the sheriff can do that," one man called out. "I hear the sheriff does a
really good job," another said.
Outside the worn little town, a succession of empty storefronts and others
headed that way, inmates can be spotted clearing up the remains of a ruined
church off a hot country road, while a deputy lounges in the shade; picking
up trash; and clearing undergrowth from roadsides with heavy equipment.
Up the road, toward the Arkansas line, a half-dozen or so are at work in
the stifling production-line room of the small pepper-sauce plant, sweating
alongside the free laborers. Another is fixing up a house next door that
Mr. Brown bought to rent out.
The factory owner sings his praises, calling him reliable, trustworthy,
honest. The inmate, Roy Hebert he says he is in for forgery beams. "Mr.
Brown, he takes care of me," Mr. Hebert said.
--
www.marxmail.org
