This essay mentions prison sexual assault. All statistics cited here are drawn from Robert T. Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020).
Narratives around labor in the U.S. South often ignore the history of prison labor and its relationship to the surrounding society. Recently, I had a discussion with an outside supporter who was surprised to learn that people imprisoned by the state of Texas are still forced to perform unpaid field work with outdated equipment. Texas prisoners pick cotton and vegetables and landscape. They make furniture, clothes, and other goods. All the labor required for these and other products is forced.
As I write this, I sit in a Texas prison cell at Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Ferguson Unit. I am currently under disciplinary sanction because I have peacefully withheld my labor power. These disciplinary sanctions are what coerce my peers to work without pay, in horrible conditions. These sanctions include the inability to make calls for weeks or months at a time, inability to participate in recreational activities, inability to purchase commissary items that are not emergency items, loss of classification, loss of line class, and loss of so-called "good time"—all of which have a negative effect on a prisoner's chance of getting parole.
All of these sanctions stifle attempts to organize, as the dire consequences of this system have become too entrenched. If we're going to organize on a mass scale and unionize incarcerated workers, our tactics will have to include methods to circumvent these incentives.
Historically, Texas prison labor has been instrumental in developing the state's infrastructure and logistical systems. As Texas struggled to reestablish itself after the Civil War, it relied on incarcerated folks to stay afloat.
As Angela Y. Davis stated in Are Prisons Obsolete?, the convict lease system was referred to by many as a "reincarnation of slavery." Historians of the convict leasing system have linked coerced convict labor to the creation of the South's modern infrastructure, including its roads and railroads. This convict leasing system, which legally enslaved prisoners, particularly Black men arrested under "Black Codes," led to the expansion of mining, coal, and steel production, fueling the emerging capitalist political economy.
The end of convict leasing did not bring about any drastic change to the mode of production in Texas prisons. Labor exploitation, Jim/Juan Crow institutional colonialism, and national suppression were intertwined. Texas, as a forerunner in the South, began to usher in what Southern Democrats (an overtly white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and their contemporary white social scientists) called the "New, New South," a period that stretched from the 1950s to the 1980s. The term "New, New South" signified the Southern neo-confederacy and their view that they had lost social, political and economic power in "their homeland" first—after the Civil War, then again at the end of convict leasing. This term signified their socioeconomic and political vision for the continued dominance of white supremacy throughout the South, and unsurprisingly, captivity was and remains a central element of their vision.
White supremacy and the prison institution were the social components that allowed the unique brand of U.S. Southern capitalism to establish itself and grow, making both these systems necessary to maintain the Southern economy and exploitation of Southern workers.
During the "New New South" period, rapid capital accumulation and industrialization were made possible by the region's low wages (no wages for prisoners), low taxes, and strict anti-union laws, which allowed for the flourishing of an economically efficient agribusiness model. "Prisoncrats" also played a role in the New New South period. Prisoncrats are the bureaucratic and administrative positions and people who make careers out of caging people, but they are not prison guards. These prisoncrats are the suits that write the policies and do the political maneuvering that make the Prison Industrial Slave Complex possible.
In 1948, prisoncrat Oscar Byron Ellis (the then general manager of the Texas Prison System) ushered in the hyper-exploitative agribusiness model in Texas when he introduced the now well-known Ellis Plan and its Five Point Plan. These Five Points were: (1) rehabilitation and vocational training, (2) new buildings with cells and segregation wings, (3) improved classification system, (4) increased salaries for guards, and (5) the modernization and mechanization of Texas prison farming. Certain points must be made to fully comprehend Ellis' plan and why these points were important to the prisoncrats and the broader public.
The first question we have to answer is: What constitutes rehabilitation and vocational training? To Ellis—and to a lesser degree, current prisoncrats—rehab for the lumpen-criminal could only be had through bone-breaking labor, "no less than 10 hours," enforced through state-orchestrated violence that mirrored the slave plantation. Vocational training for Ellis meant six hours of recreational and religious activities to be carried out secondary to field labor. "Vocations" included things that may assist a prisoner in developing better technical skills for their prison labor.
I want to call the reader's attention to the final two points of Ellis' plan in particular, since they provide a good picture of the level of economic exploitation that prisoncrats and the state of Texas extracted from the toiling prison population. Those two points also present an overview of the political economy of Texas prisons in general. Under capitalist economic systems, the extraction of human and natural resources initiates a process of underdevelopment on the one hand, and rapid development or accumulation on the other. Our observations here will hopefully provide us with greater context for the domestic neocolonial status and the underdevelopment of New Afrikan and Chicano national bodies, and the social and economic conditions that result from this underdevelopment.
Because primarily New Afrikan and Chicano bodies and the labor power they produce were relocated from Texas' urban centers—where the enclaves they inhabited would've developed economically—to the rural prison communities where their labor power and what it produced was never utilized for the development of their enclaves, but was instead controlled by and exclusively benefited by rural primarily white portions of the state.
Ellis and the 1944 Prison Reform Report use terms like "modernization" or "outdated labor practices." What this boils down to is a justification for further investment in agricultural machinery. Such machinery is designed to speed up the rate of production, and this increased rate of production leads to a more diverse production base, which results in the state or the capitalist receiving more bang for their buck, so to speak. However, in the context of the Texas prison, the laborer is unpaid, which opens the door for a more intense level of exploitation akin to that of slavery. This economic process was instrumental to the rapid development and capital accumulation of the state of Texas, which remains one of the most economically self-sufficient states in the U.S. today.
At the time that Ellis took power, industrial and farm operations constituted only 57 percent of the total cost of Texas prison operations. Three years later, that number had jumped to 77 percent. Eventually, the Texas Prison System would develop into a multi-million dollar profit model. Before the labor reforms that advanced the kinds of techniques and equipment in Texas prisons, prisoners picked an average of 60-70 pounds of cotton per day (the prison system's main crop at the time).
After the reforms, each captive worker was picking an average of 300 pounds a day. The Texas Prison System became the most profitable agricultural business in the state of Texas, to the point that it won the "Texas Farmer of the Year" award in 1957. In 1962, the Texas Prison System garnered $2 million in profits from its 10,000 acres of land allotted to cotton cultivation, which housed five cotton gins that operated seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Its predominantly New Afrikan and Chicano labor force harvested an average of 700 bales of cotton per day, for a total of 12,000 to 14,000 bales of cotton. And these laborers received zero wages for their labor.
In addition to its agribusiness sector, the Texas Prison System also operated an industrial sector that included textiles, shoes, garments, mops and brooms, mattresses, pillows, brick manufacturing, canning, and meat packing. Texas Correctional Industries, a department within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Manufacturing, Agribusiness and Logistics Division that is still active today, began to turn a profit for the first time since the convict leasing era, thanks to the extremely low cost of production. Again, because Texas captives weren't, and still aren't, being paid wages.
Generally, the trend of capitalism is that as capital accumulates, it must expand to continue the upward trend of surplus value. In the Texas Prison System, this expansion happened in two ways: (1) Using free/coerced labor to build more prisons, and (2) Building additional wings onto prisons. Regarding the latter, the initiative of adding more cells and walls was spurred on by playing on public anxiety and disinformation campaigns around the phenomenon of homosexuality and rape in prison. In post-World War II Amerika, homosexuality was considered a plague.
The unit I am currently writing from was itself built by captive labor in 1962. Ferguson was the first of its kind, with additional cells and wings initially built to segregate youthful captives from older ones, in theory to "protect" them from sexual exploitation and rape.
Ferguson was built at a third of the usual cost of a prison facility because captive labor was used instead of contracting with a private company.
Another important aspect of the story of Texas prison labor is the geographical dislocation of Texas captives. Since 1970, the beginning of what we call the period of mass incarceration, at least 80 percent of the Texas Prison population has primarily come from two counties: Harris County (Houston) and Dallas. For the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of New Afrikan and Chicano men, mostly of prime age, have been relocated from urban ghettos and barrios to rural prison farms and factories, forced to perform back-breaking agricultural labor.
It is this unpaid labor that has allowed the state of Texas, and Texas Correctional Industries (TCI), to extract such high levels of surplus value. This perpetuates the domestic neocolonial status of New Afrikans and Chicanos through the maintenance of the U.S. prison system.