Expert answer:Journal Writing
Solved by verified expert:Please read the requirements carefully and no no plagiarism at all thanks. Because the teacher will find out really easy. Your written report will need to be typed in Microsoft WORD Document, Times New Roman Font, double-spaced, with 12 pt. type, and be between 1 to 2 pages in length using APA format.Students are to read the journal article entitled: “Hell Exploded”-Prisoner Music and Memoir and the Fall of Convict Leasing in Texas by Robert Perkinson.Students are to read Parkinson’s article about convict leasing and prison music and write a minimum one to two page Microsoft Word Document summary of the paper regarding convict leasing, reconstruction, prison politics, and prison reform.
hell_exploded_prisoner_music_and_memoir_and_the_fall_of_convict_leasing_in_texas.pdf
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“Hell Exploded”
Prisoner Music and Memoir and
the Fall of Convict Leasing in Texas
The Prison Journal
Supplement to
Volume 89 Number 1
March 2009 54S-69S
© 2009 Sage Publications
10.1177/0032885508329772
http://tpj.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Robert Perkinson
University of Hawai‘i at Ma–noa
This article examines the role of prisoner self-expression in destabilizing the
harshest penal regime in American history, convict leasing, which developed
more extensively in Texas than in any other state. In particular, it analyzes
African American work songs and turn-of-the-century convict autobiographies
written mainly by Whites. It argues that prisoner criticisms influenced freeworld leasing opponents and that convict resentment thereafter complicated
postleasing reform efforts. In the tradition of anti-institutional prison
sociologists, the article suggests that reform-oriented prisons often have
difficulty maintaining order because their newly expectant inmates desire
release over rehabilitation.
Keywords:
Texas; convict leasing; slavery; Reconstruction; prisoner music;
prisoner writing; prisoner autobiography; prisoner politics;
prison reform
T
exas is legendary for its stern brand of criminal justice. Fabled home
to the Texas Rangers, lynch law, and successive prison scandals, the
Lone Star State has generated more than its share of rough crimes and punishments. In recent decades, though, the state’s criminal justice system has
garnered fame more for scale than style. In the world’s most incarcerated
nation, Texas stands out as America’s carceral heartland. In absolute terms,
it imprisons more persons (172,626) than any other state save California,
and its rate of imprisonment (682 per 100,000) trails only Louisiana and
Mississippi (Sabol & Couture, 2008, pp. 3, 17). Since 1980, the state has
Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article was delivered at Probing the Boundaries—
Prison Writings Conference, organized by Inter-Disciplinary Net, Vienna, Austria, September
28, 2002.
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Perkinson / Prisoner Self-Expression
55S
built more than 100 new prisons (Texas Department of Corrections, 1980;
Texas Department of Criminal Justice [TDCJ], 2008b), executed 406 prisoners
(TDCJ, 2008a), and spent more than $30 billion on incarceration (Legislative
Budget Board, 2001, p. 64; TDCJ, 2005, p. 9). “In the mid ’90s we were
opening a prison every week,” recalled James Marquart, a criminal justice
professor then at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, home to
Texas’s prison headquarters since 1848. “We had so many people mobilized
it was like building the Pyramids” (J. Marquart, personal communication,
March 19, 1999). By the dawn of the 21st century, the state had assembled
one of the largest punishment complexes in the world. With its prisoner and
jail population approaching 250,000, Texas today locks up more people
than Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined (Sabol &
Couture, 2008, p. 3; Texas Commission on Jail Standards, 2008, p. 7;
Walmsley, 2005, p. 5).
Texas’s breathtaking prison buildup, combined with the state’s rough-andtumble history, has attracted frequent attention from historians and journalists. Although several recent books have detailed Texas’s notorious crimes,
severe juvenile lockups, frequently used death chamber, and overflowing
prison system (Dow, 2005; Hallinan, 2001; Hubner, 2005; Texas Monthly,
2007), few scholars have examined the role of convicts themselves in what
has become, for better or for worse, America’s flagship penal system. This is
partly because of elusive sources. Unlike administrators and reformers,
relatively few prisoners kept careful written records of their daily lives.
Moreover, prisons—as the quintessential “total institutions”—are designed to
extinguish the agency of their inmates, which makes them challenging places
to look for subaltern historical influence (Goffman, 1990). Nonetheless, prisoners have exercised political influence, sometimes decisively, at every stage
of Texas’s storied prison history—often in unexpected ways.
With a nod to prison sociologists from Donald Clemmer to John Irwin
(Clemmer, 1940; Cressey, 1961; Irwin, 1980; Ross & Richards, 2003;
Sykes, 1958), this essay examines the role that prisoners played in one of
those institutional transitions, specifically focusing on the influence of convict writers and musicians. Traveling back to the turn of the past century—
a turbulent era of robber barons and socialists, segregationists and
sharecroppers—I explain how dogged prisoner activists helped overthrow
one of the most ignominious penal regimes in American history and how,
tragically, they helped undermine its reformist successor as well. More generally, using the abolition of leasing as a case study, I speculate on how
prison systems change, what convicts have to do with it, and why prison
reform so often fails.
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The Prison Journal
“A System of Vilest Slavery”
Texas’s modern prison system took shape in the volatile years after the
Civil War, as thousands of former slaves tested their new freedoms and as
bitter Whites scrambled to limit them. Almost immediately, punitive “black
codes” served up a record crop of African American felons (Crouch, 1993;
Texas State Penitentiaries [TSP], 1904, p. 45). Rather than erecting another
penitentiary like the Auburn-style fortress at Huntsville, however, White
policy makers turned to an exemption in the Thirteenth Amendment, which
prohibited “slavery [and] involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
crime.” Along with other Southern states, they decided to hire out convicts
to the highest bidder (On Texas, see Lucko, 1999; Perkinson, 2001; Walker,
1988; on the South generally, see Ayers, 1984; Fierce, 1994; Mancini,
1996; Oshinsky, 1996).
This “convict lease” system proved as pernicious as it was profitable
(Blackmon, 2008; Lichtenstein, 1996). Because prisoner contractors grew
rich by minimizing expenses and maximizing labor output, the arrangement
encouraged wanton neglect and ghastly abuse. Separated by race and physical strength, convicts were chained at the neck, stuffed into boxcars, and
shipped to work camps across the state’s former slavery belt. Plantation
owners were the most common recipients, especially sugar growers near
Houston, but railroad companies, mining outfits, lumber mills, and an iron
forge all took their share (TSP, 1884, p. 29; TSP, 1904, p. 38). Although
critics would deplore the practice as a “barbarous relic” (Woodward, 1971,
pp. 424-425), in fact, the punitive collusion between state coercion and private capital propelled Texas and other Southern states down what Jonathan
Wiener (1978) has called the “Prussian Road” to modern industrial capitalism (Lichtenstein, 1996). Just as slaves built the Old South, convicts helped
build the New South.
Whatever industries they subsidized, leased prisoners toiled from “sun to
sun” in the most wretched conditions: living in squalid, disease-infested barracks, subsisting on “food buzzards would not eat,” and enduring grueling
punishments. In the summer, convicts labored through days so hot “we wuz
almos’ dyin’,” whereas in the winter they worked “barefooted . . . in six
inches of snow.” Hundreds of prisoners—many of them convicted of petty
crimes such as “stealing a cap”—were simply worked to death, then buried
unceremoniously where they dropped (Commission Appointed by the
Governor of Texas to Investigate the Alleged Mismanagement and Cruel
Treatment of the Convicts, 1875, pp. 72-77; Dickson, 1867; J. A. Lomax &
Lomax, 1936, p. 119). Every year, between 2% and 7% of Texas’s convict
Perkinson / Prisoner Self-Expression
57S
population died in custody, most of unnatural causes, with the total rising
above 4,900 for the entire lease period (Texas Prison Commission, 1911,
p. 36). Rather than building a penal system “in the name of humanity and
justice,” declared a contemporary, Texas surrendered to “avarice and cupidity,”
thus replicating “the horrors inflicted on . . . Siberian exiles” (Henderson,
1897, pp. 314, 320-321). To be convicted of a felony in the Lone Star State,
chided a prisoner in 1893, was to suffer “a most horrible, merciless, and diabolical fate” (George, 1893, p. 37).
Given the exploitation and brutality, it is no wonder that many convicts
fought back. Although most prisoners grudgingly obeyed most of the time,
Texas convicts also undermined their lease masters in myriad ways: stealing,
quota cheating, faking illness, singing rudely, engaging in sabotage, horribly
mutilating themselves, even participating in riots and work strikes. Between
1883 and 1910, some 3,000 prisoners simply ran away (Texas Prison
Commission, 1911, p. 38).
Still others cried out in print—assailing their exploitation, begging for
redress, and defiantly asserting their personhood. I lost “the prime of my life,”
exclaimed one prisoner, confined in a “monotonous . . . abject manner, as
a slave” (George, 1893, p. 138). Another lamented that he was “buried alive
. . . dead to the world” in Texas’s “prison hell” (Calvin, 1905, pp. 7, 79).
Although relatively few convicts could write and still fewer had the
opportunity or gumption to do so, an amazingly rich trove of Texas prisoner
writing exists. Ranging from obsequious clemency appeals to eloquent
autobiographies, the documents testify to the determination of some convicts
to craft a public self beyond the reach of the whip, to channel their rage and
hopelessness, and, most of all, to seek redress and release.
Reflecting the relative powerlessness of their authors, many of these documents conformed to the language of power. Grateful for the chance to write
rather than cut sugarcane, for example, some prisoner newspaper writers
described Huntsville’s officers as “sympathetic and friendly,” adding that
“the feeling among the convicts is one of enthusiasm and hopefulness”
(“Comments and Clippings,” 1897, p. 19; “Ebb or Flow,” 1909, pp. 12-14).
Others went so far as to defend the dreaded lash. “A young [inmate] is very
like a puppy,” editorialized the Prison Bulletin in 1897. “He learns good
tricks and bad. And if whipped for doing wrong, he is apt to turn tail, run
home and try to lead a wiser, more manly—or dogly—life” (“Boys, Chicks
and Pups,” 1897, p. 7).
Such censored, compromised writing constitutes what political scientist
James Scott (1990) has called a “public transcript”—the deferential, duplicitous language of power that both masters and subordinates adopt in rigidly
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hierarchical settings. Even more so in prisons than other authoritarian
milieu, however, an angrier critique of power, a prisoner’s “private transcript,”
lurks just beneath the surface. In fact, many Texas convicts never mastered
the two-faced servility necessary to curry favor with their keepers. Jewish
prisoner Samuel Kaufman, for instance, carefully plotted his pardon for
months, befriending a powerful rabbi and ingratiating himself with
Huntsville officers. But when these efforts failed, his carefully crafted persona abruptly snapped. Having previously strived to “think pure thoughts
and perform good deeds,” he warned that “uncharitable conditions . . .
bring out the brute passions in men, when the thirst for blood becomes
inevitable” (Kaufman, 1914).
Neither writing style, neither obeisance nor outburst, proved especially
effective. Fawning newspaper articles, while preserving the authors’ trusty
status, portrayed Texas punishment as justice and tended to reinforce
administrators’ loftiest visions of themselves. Sudden ruptures in the public
transcript, on the other hand, confirmed stereotypes of the convict as sullen,
shifty, and dangerous. On their own, neither tactic posed an acute threat to
convict leasing.
Prison Blues
Prison field music, by contrast, although never directly confronting authority, helped harmonize prisoner perspectives in ways that encouraged more overt
subversion. African American convicts, in particular, drew on slavery’s cultural
memory to compose thousands of field hollers and work songs that would
eventually coalesce into an original body of music. We might think of this as
Southern justice’s only praiseworthy gift to world culture. By preserving the
practices of slavery and by herding Black people together in conditions of such
dreary servitude that only oblique, soulful music offered partial solace,
Southern prisons became key incubators of that uniquely African American
style at the heart of so much modern popular music: the blues (Filene, 2000;
Franklin, 1998; Levine, 1977; A. Lomax, 1993). In later years, many of the most
virtuoso bluesmen, among them Leadbelly, “king of the twelve-string guitar,”
honed their skills in prison and thereafter brokered their suffering into lumpen
proletariat authenticity (J. A. Lomax, 1947; Wolfe & Lornell, 1992).
Less individualistic and more pragmatic than blues in the free world,
bluesy field hollers served a variety of purposes. Old slave songs such as
“Go Down Ol’ Hannah” helped pass the time even as they lamented its agonizing creep in the broiling sun (J. A. Lomax & Lomax, 1936, pp. 118-120).
Perkinson / Prisoner Self-Expression
59S
They set the work pace and synchronized dangerous tasks such as group
wood chopping. Yet Black prison music was more than utilitarian. With
lyrics about hard bosses, cruel treatment, long sentences, loves lost, and
spectacular crimes, convict ballads also enabled prisoners to pool their sorrow, revel in past exploits, and verbalize defiance (see B. Jackson, 1972).
Consider the work song “Great Godamighty,” which John Lomax and
his son Alan heard at Texas’s Imperial Farm (now the Central Unit) in Sugar
Land; it was recorded in 1933 but harked back to the leasing era. Set in the
fields, the song at one level does the master’s work. When an angry captain
rides up on the squad, “bull whip in one han’, cowhide in de udder,” the lead
singer (often the work gang’s strongest hand) urges his comrades to pick up
the pace: “Better go to driven’.” At the moment of confrontation, however,
the singers depict mercilessness rather than just punishment.
“Cap’n let me off, suh!”
Great Godamighty!
“Woncha ’low me a chance, suh?”
Great Godamighty!
“Bully, low’ down yo’ britches!”
Great Godamighty!
De Bully went to pleadin’,
Great Godamighty!
De Bully went to hollerin’,
Great Godamighty!
According to John Lomax, who described the song in his colorfully exoticizing Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, the lead singer’s melody and the chorus’
refrain gained force, with ever more voices joining in, as the marked convict
pled his case and finally surrendered to “hollerin’” when the leather came
down on his bare skin. All the while, a higher power looks down in judgment:
“Great Godamighty” is the dirge’s repeated and final incantation. The music
has a “terrible sweep,” wrote Lomax, and the severity of the prisoners’ critique was not lost on Imperial’s guards. “The goose pimples always come out
along my spine when I hear niggers sing that song,” whispered a guard
accompanying the folklorists (J. A. Lomax, 1947, pp. 159-161).
Prayers for otherworldly deliverance were a common feature of prisoner
songs, but their storylines did not always have convicts submit to worldly
discipline. In the popular work song “Ol’ Rattler,” which the Lomaxes date
back to Reconstruction, a wily prisoner, Riley, manages to outrun
Imperial’s most prized chase hound, Rattler. When Riley first bolts from the
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line, a field sergeant blows an alarm horn, and the chase team quickly puts
Rattler and his pack on the trail. “Ketch that nigger, ketch that nigger,” the
singers chant, beginning the song from the perspective of the guards. With
famous speed, the “huntin’ dog” barrels through the cane and breaks after
the escapee. But Riley proves too strong; he embodies a potency that, in
reality, convicts rarely experience. He runs from “sun to sun,” and Rattler
finally collapses. Then, “like Christ,” in Leadbelly’s interpretation, the man
comes to the banks of the mighty Brazos River and glides across, with the
singers switching voice from the pursuers to the pursued at the moment of
apotheosis:
Ol’ Riley los’ ol’ Rattler,
Riley walked the water,
Ol’ Rattler couldn’t walk it.
Bye, bye, Rattler. (J. A. Lomax & Lomax, 1936, pp. 105-108).
The final taunt surely gave convicts a chuckle, but such songs also imagined freedom, however ambivalently, and helped forge a collective sense of
oppositional identity. At moments when the prison’s mythic invincibility
faltered, prisoner music helped give convicts the courage to rebel.
Caustic Convict Exposés
Prison work songs persisted through the lease era and beyond, but as the
legitimacy of privatized punishment began to crumble in the late 19th
century, more overtly subversive forms of prisoner self-expression achieved
greater political influence. Convict leasing had always been controversial;
as early as 1876, legislative investigators had denounced leasing as “a system of vilest slavery” (Texas State Legislature, 1876, p. 9). By the 1890s,
however, as the Populist revolt swept the nation, leasing had become so
unpopular that every political party advocated its abolition (Winkler, 1916).
Amid this gathering storm of opposition, prisoner dissidents became
increasingly bold. They signed detailed grievance petitions, candidly testified to investigators, and fired off angry letters to the press.
Most remarkable, a new form of prisoner writing flourished as leasing
faltered: professionally published memoirs. Starting with The Texas Convict,
written by Andrew George in 1893, roughly a dozen prisoner autobiographies
appeared during the next 20 years, all of them written by well-educated White
men, whom Texas imprisoned in higher numbers than any other Southern
Perkinson / Prisoner Self-Expression
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state (Calvin, 1905; Campbell, 1900; George, 1893; Gillis, 1906; Griffin,
1914; Hardin, 1961; McIntyre, 1894; Mills, 1938; Shotwell, 1909; Tomlin, 1906;
Wilkinson, 1912). Angry, muckraking, sometimes introspective and sentimental, the documents varied in style and literary merit, but together they
constitute perhaps the most intimate, detailed record of leasing in any state.
In their own time, the texts spurred on prison reformers and helped define
convict leasing to the public. What was in reality a hodgepodge collection of
penitentiaries and far-flung labor camps, convict writers depicted as a unitary
system—as a spirit-breaking throwback to “slavery” staffed by “brutes of the
most savage kind” (George, 1893, p. 148; Shotwell, 1909, p. 16).
Among the most compelling memoirs was Charles Campbell’s Hell
Exploded: An Exposition of Barbarous Cruelty and Prison Horrors, published in 1900, shortly after the author’s release from a prison ironworks.
Like many prison autobiographies, the book began with a hard-luck tale of
Campbell’s childhood but quickly boiled over with rage. Composed in an
apocalyptic idiom with the cadence of a curse, Campbell forged words as
weapons against his former tormenters. Borrowing from Dante, he commanded, “Follow me, and I will place before you acts of fiendish cruelty the
like of which ought to cause even the red hot dragons of lowest damnation to
thunder forth protests” (Campbell, 1900, p. 19).
After recounting his conviction before a “thick-headed” jury, Campbell
dwelled on his transformation from citizen to convict, which he described
as a harrowing descent from man to beast. Arriving in neck chains, he soon
had his property confiscated, his head shaved, and his civvies traded in for …
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