Kahne 1
Colorado College
COLORADO’S SOUTHERN PENAL HERITAGE: An Investigation on the
Role of Convict Labor in Instantiating an Antebellum Racial-Gendered Order at
Colorado State Penitentiary
A Thesis Submitted to
The Faculty of the Department of History
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Department of History
By Eviva Kahne
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 2018 Kahne 2
Contents
Introduction 3
Chapter One: From Leasing to Roadwork: How Legacies of Slavery
Shaped Postbellum Ideologies of Convict Labor 15
Chapter Two: Chain Gangs and Honor Camps: How Roadwork
Racialized a Coloradan Penal Landscape 35
Chapter Three: Women and Ladies: How C.S.P. Female Work Environments
Suggest Southern Penal Influence 49
Conclusion 68
Bibliography 70
Kahne 3
Contemporary discussions about prison labor center on the degree to which convicts are exploited in their work environment.1 When speaking about penal labor, criminal justice activists place emphasis on low wages and inadequate training for jobs after prison.2 Broader critiques about prison labor focus on its economic and social connections to slavery. Michelle Alexander, criminal justice activist and scholar, asserts in her explosive book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness that prison is nothing more than the newest iteration of a system of economic and social oppression for people of color in the United States. Alexander, and the activists informed by her, should be amplified in a discussion of the injustice represented by and perpetuated within prison walls. While critical, one effect of this viewpoint has been to silence the experiences of prison laborers whose voices do not align with this narrative of oppression. Many prison activists today highlight the exploitation that exists in prison labor environments. The potential benefits that prison labor may offer to inmates are marginalized, if included at all. In other words, the social justice issue of mass incarceration currently prioritizes the voices of those who speak about prison labor rather than the diverse lived experiences of inmate laborers.
The lived experiences of prisoners should be the primary sources for how exploitation and reformation, particularly with respect to convict labor, operate inside incarcerated spaces. This thesis takes convict labor as its site of analysis; however, it does not aim to put forth an ontological claim about the lived experiences of those who have
1 Annie McGrew, “It’s Time to Stop Using Inmates for Free Labor,” Talk Poverty, 20 October, 2017, accessed 19 April 2018, https://talkpoverty.org/2017/10/19/d-c-residents- fighting-slumlord-regain-control-neighborhood/. 2 Whitney Benns, “American Slavery, Reinvented,” The Atlantic, 21 September 2015, accessed 19 April 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison- labor-in-america/406177/. Kahne 4 inhabited these spaces. Instead, I explore how social structures, racial ideologies, and gender constructs have the potential to move across regions through penal practices.
Certain forms of convict labor carry social epistemologies about race and gender and have reverberating effects on society outside prison. This thesis does not purport to speak for the experiences of marginalized populations but instead asserts that prison labor environments hold tremendous power in reifying gendered and racial orders. In other words, an examination of penal labor spaces not only reveals a clear image of worker exploitation but also reflects larger cultural attitudes about the demographics that constitute the incarcerated labor force.
Criminality and Roadwork
Roadwork is the convict labor practice examined here. The practice of roadwork has multiple connotations. At its broadest, roadwork is the production and maintenance of roads. Roadwork done by prisoners evokes a specific geographical, historical, and visual memory. It is strongly connected to the Southern landscape, in the early twentieth
century. In 1901, over seventy percent of
the work done to grade, surface, and
improve Georgia’s roads was done with
convict labor.3 Southern chain gangs
began in the late nineteenth-century and
remained through the mid-twentieth
century.
3 Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London and New York: Verso, 1996), xiii-36, 152-195, 172. Kahne 5
This image reifies a characteristic visual image of roadwork, as it relates to chain gangs in the American South.4 Immediately, the viewer notices that all of the figures in this photo are African-American men. Each of the men’s ankles is chained to each other, and the chains connect to their wrists. The men are also holding shovels. In speaking about roadwork, I am referring to the processes of preparing materials, blasting out rock to create highways, shoveling dirt, and picking up trash. What constitutes roadwork changes across the American South and West from 1880 to 1930; however, the extant imagery of prison roadwork calls up the visual schematic so starkly represented in this image.
Originally a product of penal reforms in the South during the Progressive Era, roadwork became nationally known at Colorado State Penitentiary5 in Cañon City,
Colorado in the early twentieth century. How to connect imagery of the Southern chain gang to the history of roadwork at Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, Colorado is the main problem posed by this paper. I am interested in exploring how the imagery, function, and effects of roadwork at C.S.P. match up against knowledge produced in the late nineteenth-century about this Southern system of punishment.
A major continuity of roadwork across time and space is its public quality. An examination of roadwork must therefore begin with a discussion of how this practice functions as exposed punishment. Twentieth-century French philosopher, Michel
4 This photo shows a chain gang in Thomasville, Georgia by photographer Joseph John Kirkbride, sometime between 1884 and 1891. The provenance of this photo asserts that Kirkbride was a nineteenth-century Philadelphia physician, who took this photo while traveling. No other purpose is stated; however, the fact that Kirkbride took this photo in the late-nineteenth century suggests the possibility that this work was part of a national documentation of chain gangs as an explicitly racist performance.
5 Hereafter to be referred to as C.S.P. Kahne 6
Foucault, provides the major historiographical intervention in this arena with his book,
Discipline and Punish. All scholars of convict labor subsequently discussed take
Foucault’s assertion as their philosophical framework. Foucault’s most relevant contribution to this paper emerges from his outlining of the Western world’s cultural shift from public to private punishment.
Foucault opens Discipline & Punish at the site of Damiens’ execution in mid- eighteenth century France. Brought outside the entrance to the church of Paris, Damiens underwent a series of physical punishments, which included burning his flesh, drawing and quartering his body, and burning the remains.6 Newspaper reporters and officials of the court and church all witnessed and participated in the event. Foucault asserts that the shift from public to private punishment occurred, in both Europe and the United States, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The shift can be seen through “the disappearance of the spectacle and the elimination of pain”, both of which were featured prominently in
Damiens’ punishment.7 When the central feature of private punishment shifted from the scaffold to the prison, punishment was taken away from public view. Inside the prison, spectacle and pain were replaced by prolonged confinement and regimented schedules, and “the entire economy of punishment was redistributed.”8 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Foucault argues, the shift was complete.
One of the catalysts for this shift from public to private punishment was the solidarity that developed between the condemned and the audience. Foucault stresses that
“above all…the people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those
6 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (New York: Random House, Inc., 1995), 3-69, 3. 7 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 11. 8 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 7. Kahne 7 rituals intended to show the horror of the crime and the invincibility of power; never did the people feel more threatened, like them, by a legal violence excercised without moderation or restraint.”9 Far from being scared into submission, “one of their first cries was to demand abolition.”10 This sympathy for the condemned scared sovereign powers, whose intended effect of establishing power and securing submission backfired against public demonstrations of support for the transgressor.
Public punishment, though dangerous because of its potential for class solidarity, also presented its benefits. The central advantage that public punishment offered was its reification of power and proclamation of truth. “The public execution did not re-establish justice: it reactivated power.”11 The torture that Damiens underwent was a useful tool in reifying the tremendous power of the state over its citizens—even, and perhaps especially, its transgressors. The spectacle of Damiens’ pain was deployed to present the truth of his criminality and necessity of his punishment to the public. In other words, having the guilty person confess their crimes and accept their punishment left little room for doubt in the public eye of the accused’s status. Foucault believes that “this immediate, striking manifestation of the truth in the public implementation of penalties…gave the guilty man “the task…of proclaiming [his own condemnation] and thus attesting to the truth of what he had been charged with: the procession through the streets, the placard attached to his back, chest, or head as a reminder of the sentence.”12 The assertion of state power and truth of the criminal’s status undergirded the practice of roadwork in the postbellum South. The white supremacist social order disrupted by abolition and
9 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 63. 10 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 63. 11 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 49. 12 Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 43. Kahne 8
Reconstruction was reasserted in the imagery of African-American peoples working outside, under the supervision of armed white men. Scholars Alex Lichtenstein, Talitha
LeFlouria, and Sarah Haley take Foucault’s assertions about the role of public punishment as their framework, and explore how its dangers were minimized and potentials augmented in the practice of roadwork in prisons at the turn of the twentieth century.
Historiographical Frameworks
Warden’s reports, historical newspapers, and political speeches reveal how individuals from within the prison system have thought about the social and economic purposes and consequences of convict labor—particularly convict leasing and the
Progressive reforms that came in its aftermath. Historians have crafted narratives from the primary sources to make an argument about what convict labor has meant for various
American regions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This section will aim to cover some of the primary voices in the creation of these narratives, and how those narratives have built on one another over the last thirty years. The economic and social functions convict labor played in the New South have been debated in the academy for the last thirty years. Many scholars have examined the role that roadwork in particular played in the American South, as a response to the cultural instability spawned by abolition and Reconstruction.
The U.S. historian Alex Lichtenstein broadly focuses on laborers in a postbellum
Southern white supremacist frame. His first book, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The
Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, makes a critical historiographical intervention in his assertion that convict labor was central the postbellum South’s efforts Kahne 9 to modernize after the Civil War. Throughout the book, Alex pushes back against a narrative of convict leasing as “a barbarous relic of the Old South”. In doing so, he joins
“a growing number of studies that reject the dichotomy between a modern and anti- modern South, and instead seek to link the region’s most appalling features to the process of modernization itself.”13 This linking of modernity with late nineteenth-century convict labor—particularly the convict leasing system and subsequent chain gang—became the foundation on which more recent scholars LeFlouria and Haley would construct their arguments.
Talitha LeFlouria, a historian of African-American experience, focuses on the intersections between women, mass incarceration, and slavery. Her Chained in Silence:
Convict Leasing in the New South builds from Lichtenstein’s framework. LeFlouria expands Lichtenstein’s perspective by including women in the narrative of convict leasing interwoven with New South modernity. LeFlouria acknowledges that scholars such as Lichtenstein “have been extraordinarily influential in shaping scholars’ understanding of the interplay between the social, economic, and political forces undergirding the convict labor systems of the New South, [and notes that] these historians’ works elude any in-depth discussion of womens’ experiences of confinement within the carceral regimes of the Postemancipation South.”14 LeFlouria’s argument is path breaking in the historiographical trajectory of convict leasing because of her focus on African American female inmates and their contribution to the modernization of the
New South.
13 Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, xix & xvi, respectively 14 Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 1-192, 7. Kahne 10
Sarah Haley further explores African-American women, in her discussion of what women’s work meant in carceral workspaces in the Postemancipation South. Haley’s scholarly work resides at the intersections of American, African-American, and Gender
Studies. Her book, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow
Modernity, like LeFlouria’s work, focuses on the gendered experience of incarceration in the American South but adopts a different lens. Rather than folding incarcerated women of color into the broader shifts in work culture in the postbellum South, Haley aims “to excavate the carceral life of race and gender ideology, how such ideas produced, and were produced by, the southern penal regime.”15 Haley interweaves individual profiles of incarcerated females, song lyrics, and creative non-fiction to narrate how the postbellum
Southern chain gang codified racial definitions of womanhood that restored a white supremacist order in the years following Reconstruction.
Haley asserts that the chain gang upheld a white supremacist order, in its association of black bodies with performative labor and identification of white females as embodying a normative American feminine ideal. Her assertion that a gendered-racial order was solidified in the Southern Progressive penal reform of roadwork is one of two critical interventions into the historiography of convict labor. The second is the explicit association of the chain gang with modernity. Haley relays how “after 1908 the chain gang literally paved the way (through massive county road construction) for perhaps the most significant icon of American modernity: the automobile…the criminalization of black women and their use as labor resources for the development of the infrastructure of
15 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 1-258, 5. Kahne 11 the modern Jim Crow state built by convict labor has received little scholarly attention.”16
These two interventions assert that New South modernity and Jim Crow ideology were interwoven and upheld by the labor of African-American female convicts on roads.
While Lichtenstein was concerned with the association of convict leasing with a
‘backwards South’, LeFlouria and Haley address the archival silences around the significant contribution by incarcerated black female laborers on Southern modernization.
Haley extends this association of convict leasing and modernization to social epistemologies of gender. She argues that the work African-American women did on roads to build the literal infrastructure of the postbellum South also created the social infrastructure of womanhood along racial lines. Haley argues that it was not only convict leasing but also what came in its aftermath—Progressive reforms such as the chain gang—that is inextricably bound to the economic and social modernization of the New
South and the consolidation of Jim Crow ideology.
Prison, Roads, and Colorado
This project follows in the trajectory of convict labor studies. It affirms the links made between postbellum penal work practices, economic modernization, and social reification of Jim Crow ideology. While these links are important, they all remain lodged within a Southern carceral sphere. This paper applies Haley’s central argument onto a
Western carceral landscape, to Colorado in particular. While some historians have discussed the bleeding of the American South into the American Western imaginary, they have so far failed to examine convict labor as a locus of Southern influence on Colorado.
16 Haley, No Mercy Here, 12. Kahne 12
Chapter One shows how roadwork emerged as a celebrated form of prison labor in the early twentieth century. I begin by detailing the evolution of convict labor in the postbellum South, from leasing to the chain gang, in order to reveal about what roadwork was a response to in the broader culture. The social, economic, and political changes brought about during Reconstruction challenged an antebellum white supremacist order.
The instability this created spawned a national discourse about the role of prison labor in a postbellum society. The pressures to disassociate from a slave labor schematic combined with anxieties about the dismantling of white supremacy facilitated the shift to roadwork as a predominant form of prison labor.
Chapter Two explores connections between Southern chain gangs and Coloradan honor road camps in the early twentieth century. Chain gangs in the former Confederacy, though state-operated, upheld the racialized order of the private lease and contract systems. Georgia abolished convict leasing and created chain gangs for roadwork the same year that Colorado established its first honor road camp. Subsequent discussion among Western journalists and C.S.P. wardens constructed Coloradan honor road camps as antithetical to Southern chain gangs. Southern influence on Colorado outside of prison illustrates how the state was wrapped up in a postbellum racialized order. This cultural context lends credibility to my claim that Coloradan roadwork was a locus of Southern influence, with respect to a racialized social order.
The switch to the chain gang and roadwork in the American South is inextricably bound to the solidification of a racial-gendered order. The switch to the chain gang in
Georgia stipulated that African-American women would work on roads while white women would garden, cook, and sew. Chapter Three examines how C.S.P. practices Kahne 13 exhibit this gendered-racial order. An analysis of matron’s reports from C.S.P. reveals that a gendered-racial order may also have been at play in Coloradan penal workspaces.
Disjunctures of knowledge disrupt contemporary scholarly distances between the nineteenth-century South and twentieth-century West. That black women worked on the
Southern chain gang to build roads in significant numbers, that C.S.P. became a repository for all the federal female prisoners west of the Mississippi after 1916, and that roadwork by Coloradan inmates became nationally known less than two decades later mandate investigation into the role that roadwork—as a convict labor program—played as both a response to broader Southern and Western economic and cultural shifts and promoter of a gendered-racial order across the American South and West at the height of
Jim Crow.
The origin point for scholarship on American convict labor is the Thirteenth
Amendment, which states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”17. Involuntary labor is an employee’s lack of control of the terms and conditions of their work. Identification as a criminal justified individual subjection to involuntary servitude. This justificatory labeling emerged in the aftermath of Union victory in the Civil War as a direct consequence of the abolition of slavery in the American South. Important dissonances mark the institutions and lived experiences of slavery and convict labor18, but undeniable
17 U.S. Constitution, amend. 14, sec. 1. 18 For similarities, see Alex Lichtenstein’s Twice the Work, Chapter 1: New South Slavery, 1-16. For dissonances, see LeFlouria’s Chained in Silence, on the difference in treatment for women. On page 98, LeFlouria outlines the lived consequences of convict labor’s devaluation of women’s reproductive capabilities. Kahne 14 linkages also evince historical connection, as well as its function as social control. Forced labor reinforced racial subordination in a white supremacist society.
The racial-gendered order of slavery was reified in the chain gangs of the
American South. Asserting that Coloradan roadwork programs were influenced by these
Southern chain gangs broadens the acknowledgement of institutions and regions that continue to be shaped by American slavery. Today Cañon City, Colorado, holds the highest number of prisons of any local geography in the world. An examination of twentieth-century roadwork—why it emerged in the postbellum South, how it functioned in Colorado, and how women in both regions were informed by an antebellum racial- gendered order—folds the Rocky Mountain region into a legacy of slavery that has too often been sequestered to the landscape and peoples of the American South.
Kahne 15
CHAPTER ONE, From Leasing to Roadwork: How Legacies of Slavery Shaped
Postbellum Ideologies of Convict Labor
The Progressive penal reform of roadwork emerged from a discourse on convict labor that reached a peak in the late nineteenth-century condemnation of convict leasing.
Convict leasing refers to a system where individuals and corporations purchased from states the labor of prisoners, who subsequently served as laborers for outside institutions.
The food, clothing, shelter, and well being of the prisoners were completely controlled by the contractor. The only interaction between the prison and the contractor was the money transferred from the latter to the former, and an agreed-upon date for when the inmates would be returned to the prison. The economic structure of convict leasing centered individuals who bought involuntary workers and dictated their labor, as well as their livelihood, in order to accrue profits. This structure mirrored slavery in ways uncomfortably exact for contemporary observers. Dislike of the lease system propelled this national discourse on convict labor, and facilitated a shift from the private lease to the public account system.19 Roadwork was particularly successful as a public account program because it provided an alternative to convict leasing that simultaneously disrupted the economic parallels to slavery while upholding an antebellum social structure that reified white supremacist ideology.
19 The public account system replaced convict leasing across the former Confederacy. Nineteenth century-history Jane Zimmerman foregrounds her discussion of Southern penal reforms (including roadwork) by detailing the regional decline of convict leasing, asserting that between 1880 and 1917, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, and Georgia abolished the lease system. Kahne 16
1870—Reconstruction
Discussion of the role convict leasing in the South clarifies the stakes for white southerners in maintaining a white supremacist ideology. As black subservience was no longer guaranteed by birth, the prison was both able and incentivized to shepherd large numbers of African-Americans behind its walls. Convict labor during Reconstruction reflected the compulsion to uphold a white supremacist order in the midst of abolition.
Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877. The first decade of freedom was marked by institutional and individual attempts to secure black social autonomy, economic mobility, and political agency. Historians split this period into two parts: Presidential and Radical
Reconstruction. Presidential Reconstruction lasted for two years under the supervision of
Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a Southern sympathizer and excercised loose oversight over the South.20 In this context, state governments developed the black codes, laws directed solely for African-Americans that undermined their status as newly freed peoples by ignoring civil rights, exploiting labor conditions, and criminalizing vagrancy.21
Radical Reconstruction then responded to the prior model’s iteration of racialized oppression. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 “temporarily divided the South into five military districts”, with the aim of enforcing universal male suffrage.22 This
20 In Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1867, Eric Foner describes The Ten Percent Plan as part of this broader federal initiative. Even as it demanded a rewrite of all Southern constitutions to prohibit slavery, “it could adopt temporary measures regarding blacks ‘consistent…with their present condition as a labor, landless, and homeless class” (17). This is one example of the conservative changes enacted at the beginning of Reconstruction. 21 http://www.crf-usa.org/brown-v-board-50th-anniversary/southern-black-codes.html 22 Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), xi-179, 122. Kahne 17 governmental investment in black voter participation led historian Eric Foner to assert that “[b]lack participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years.”23 In this period of Radical Reconstruction, black men heavily participated in Republican politics. Sixteen African-Americans served as United States Congressmen, and hundreds more worked in state legislatures and local offices.24 Reconstruction most directly challenged a white supremacist order through its exercise in interracial democratic government.
Prison demographics shifted over the course of Reconstruction. Lichtenstein charts the demographics of Georgia’s State Penitentiary at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1871, at the beginning of the radical period, blacks comprised 84% of the population. In 1880, after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, they were at
90%. This can largely be attributed to the Southern black codes that criminalized poverty, homelessness, and blackness. Overrepresentation of black people was not exclusive to the
South25; however, the increasing criminalization of black bodies in the South implicitly responds to the central question of Reconstruction, which concerned “the role former slaves and their descendants would play in American life and the meaning of the freedom they had acquired.”26
The overarching question of how race would organize postbellum American life was inextricably tied to work culture. Foner quotes an 1868 Washington newspaper’s
23 Foner, Reconstruction, xv. 24 Eric Foner, “Reconstruction”, Encyclopedia Britannica, May 4, 1999, accessed April 20, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconstruction-United-States-history. 25 Gildemeister asserts “in the northern state prison populations in the last half of the nineteenth century, the ration of black to white inside the prisons was approximately five times the ration found in free society”. 26 Foner, Reconstruction, xvi. Kahne 18 claim that “it is impossible to separate the question of color from the question of labor, for the reason that the majority of laborers throughout the Southern States are colored people, and nearly all the colored people are at present laborers.”27 The strong ties of race to labor, meanwhile, were emphasized inside prisons. The labor of black bodies would describe the role newly freed people would have in American Society. As coerced labor was no longer guaranteed by birth but was instead assured only as punishment for crime, prison labor became the locus of enforcing an antebellum racial and economic structure onto labor practices even in the midst of radical social and political change. The convict lease system provided a panacea for white Southern concerns.
How did Convict Leasing Respond Systematically to Reconstruction?
LeFlouria writes how at the end of Reconstruction, “Southern industrialists capitalized on the expanding tool of prison ‘slaves’ that could produce ‘twice the work of free labor.’ New South prosperity was inextricably linked to the use of convict labor, which bridged the gap between an agriculturally based slave economy and a society in the beginning stages of industrial development”28. Convict leasing reigned in the capital of the New South, and soon spread throughout the South, as it responded to multiple cultural needs.
Foremost, convict leasing furnished a practical solution to the South’s postwar fiscal crisis while, at the same time, effectively minimizing the social, economic, and political freedoms of former slaves and their offspring. Furthermore, it released the southern states of the financial burden of building and maintaining prison facilities to warehouse its deeply engorged prison population. By siphoning off its excess inmate populations, southern governments reduced prison-related costs while simultaneously increasing state treasures. Between 1872 and 1886, Georgia lessees paid more than $250,000 into the state’s reserve.29
27 Foner, Reconstruction, xvi. 28 LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 66. 29 LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 67. Kahne 19
This elucidates the functions that convict leasing served during Reconstruction, and in its immediate aftermath. Convict leasing was lucrative for the state, relieved Southern prisons of overcrowding, and was effective in restricting mobility of newly freed slaves.
1880—Discourse on Convict Labor
The push to abolish convict leasing and other forms of private prison labor nation- wide led to a broader examination of the purpose of work in carceral spaces. Work is inextricably tied to the discourse around prisons, because it is seen as both a punitive and reformative measure. In either context, deployment of convict labor wrestled with the consequences of a coerced labor force coexisting with free laborers. Questions regarding prisons’ punitive or reformatory roles as well as the effect of convict labor in the labor market directed the energies of the historical actors considered in this section. These actors were enveloped in a national discussion about what should replace convict labor, and the potential effects of its interaction with free labor.
Glen A. Gildemeister provides context for the national discussion of what would replace convict leasing. His dissertation Prison Labor and Convict Competition With
Free Workers in Industrializing America, 1840-1890, refers to the 1880s as a “Swing
Period” characterized by “the search for solutions and the abolition of contract convict labor.”30 Gildemeister describes the motives of the main actors in this discourse. He writes that
Free workers pleaded in concert to state legislatures for an end to prison labor competition through the 1870’s and free manufacturers began to support them…[f]inding their very livelihood under attack, prison contractors vigorously
30 Glen A. Gildemeister, “Prison Labor and Convict Competition with Free Workers in Industrializing America, 1840-1890” (PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 1977), 1-41, 196-254, 225 Kahne 20
defended convict labor. Contractors received support from wardens who saw the backbone of their operations about to be removed and from some professional penologists and social reformers who argued that productive prison labor was essential to criminal justice and rehabilitation.31
Free laborers understood convicts as competitors in the job market. Wageworkers saw the competitive edge of convict laborers in their ability to work for lower wages and inability to form unions. Additionally, the coerced nature of prison labor meant that inmates constituted a more reliable workforce for employers. Free manufacturers addressed the concerns about wageworkers in petitioning for the passage of the O’Neill bill, which would “prohibit the sale of [convict-made] goods…to the state in which they are produced.”32 The stated intention behind this bill was to protect free laborers from the
“injurious” effects of convict labor on the job market and the prices of goods.33 Concern about prison labor affecting the job market for free laborers, and conviction that convict labor was essential to prisoner reformation was the central tension between prison reformers and labor activists. These two groups fought each other on the purpose of convict labor; however, they were not the only ones grappling with these questions.
Government officials also participated in the discussion on convict labor—examining the purpose of convict labor, and its potential to interfere with free labor.
Carroll D. Wright was the first Commissioner of Labor for the U.S. Bureau of
Labor, and served from 1885 to 1905. His reports were submitted to the Department of the Interior, and thus internally circulated among top government officials with the aim of understanding the economic changes and costs at the close of Reconstruction. In
31 Gildemeister, Prison Labor, 225. 32 Excerpt from a majority report submitted by congressman Mr. O’Neill of Missouri to the House of Representatives, as cited in Charles E. Felton, “Prison Labor,” (address, National Prison Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 11, 1888), 4. 33 Charles E. Felton, “Prison Labor”, 1886, 5. Kahne 21 introducing the topic of convict labor, Wright identifies common ground with his readers.
He asserts how “it is universally conceded that convicts should be employed at some useful labor.”34 This scaffolding allows Wright to present the central concern of his study: “how shall convicts be employed in useful labor without unduly competing with labor outside of penal institutions, either in the wages of labor or in the price of products.”35 Taken together, these statements illustrate both the assumption of work as a normative good for incarcerated subjects and the inherent problem of convict labor as it interacts with outside peoples and markets. Wright frames these issues and articulates the central question of his study in the first paragraph of a six hundred-page report.
After introducing the central topic, question, and stakes of this study, Wright lays out the four common methods of employment for convicts. These are the contract, piece- price, public account, and the lease system. A description of the lease system is already described above. Briefly stated, the contract system allows for outside companies to provide material for convicts to manufacture goods within the prison at a per-diem rate, as specified in a contract. The piece-price system is distinct because of its payment model, where convict labor is sold not by the number of days, but by the selling price of the article made. Like the contract system, piece-price keeps the inmates laboring within the prison. Finally, the public-account system works inmates within the prison and employs them under the state, while the lease system allowed individuals to buy laborers for private gain.
34 Carroll D. Wright, “Convict Labor” (Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886), 3-6, 381-384, 389, 501-502, 3. 35 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 3. Kahne 22
After elucidating the contractor’s argument for the lease system, Wright inserts himself in the discourse. He states definitively that while “[t]his may be temporarily true…the disadvantages of the system are so great that the advantages are overshadowed.”36 Here, Wright effectually condemns the lease system. Wright asserts the faults of the lease system to be its inhumane treatment of convicts, the inability of the state to control the work process—whether it is punitive or reformative—of convicts, the fierce competition it presents to free labor, and its inability to segregate prisoners along lines of race and gender. Jim Crow ideology emerged in the late nineteenth-century and centered around an idea of the races as separate but equal. This emphasis on segregation in penal work practices should be seen in light of a larger social move toward racial and gendered segregation.
Wright condemns the lease system on the grounds of racial and gendered segregation, and calls on the rhetoric of Georgia governor John Gordon.37 The most important objection that Governor Gordon presents against convict leasing is that does not give the state the authority to enforce the prisoner’s “requisite separation according to classes, sexes, and conditions.”38 This pushback against the lease system draws on an earlier debate about the relative merits of segregated and congregated workspaces. Glen
Gildemeister elucidates this eighteenth-century debate in his dissertation, Prison Labor and Convict Competition with Free Workers. Gildemeister frames this dialogue within
36 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 381. 37 Georgia is the pinnacle site to examine the economic, social, and political dynamics of the postbellum South. It practiced convict leasing twenty years after this report was published. This is evidence that even the fiercest promoters of convict leasing were aware of the condemning discourse surrounding its practice. Lichtenstein, LeFlouria, and Haley all use Georgia as their primary site of analysis.
38 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 382. Kahne 23 the larger tension between the Auburn (New York) and Pennsylvania prison systems.
Gildemeister writes how “those of separate (segregated) system persuasion pointed to the blatant brutality and exploitation of congregate workshops where the whip made men living machines and contractors stockpiled exorbitant profits…the ‘congregates’, in turn, argued that separate confinement produced extraordinarily high rates of ill-health and insanity and that it was, in fact, a far more cruel and brutalizing mode.”39 The New York system of congregated labor won out over the course of the nineteenth century. It is significant that when a major critique came up against convict leasing, it utilized the language of segregation along class and gender lines, race being obscured but still present as a line of difference. This move toward segregation only became more powerful during the Southern Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century
American historian Jane Zimmerman asserts how
for the first time in the history of Southern penology there was a widespread concern for certain classes of prisoners, especially women and children. This concern led to attempts at segregation. The prison farm and road camps offered the opportunity to separate female from male convict and youths from older, hardened criminals.
Wright foresees the benefits of programs like farming and roadwork. He postulates that “it would enable the state to separate [the convicts] at all times according to classes, conditions, sexes, and fitness for different kinds of labor, and to institute methods for reformation with greater promise of success.”40 The fact that a lack of segregation gets brought up as a failure of the lease system and a merit of a Progressive reform illustrates the primacy of segregation by gender and race a significant goal of late nineteenth-century penal work reforms. The Progressive reform of penal roadwork
39 Gildemeister, Convict Competition, 15. 40 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 389. Kahne 24 emerged as a result of the political push toward segregated workspaces, and the two speakers’ rhetorical moves toward the public account system, made by prison reformer
Charles Felton and labor activist Eugene Debs.
Reformers saw rehabilitation as the central purpose of incarceration, and asserted that labor was the crucial component in this process. Felton was a primary voice for this population. In his 1886 and 1888 speeches to prison associations in Atlanta and Boston respectively, Felton asserts that convict labor’s primary purpose is to reform the criminal.
In his speech at Atlanta, he states that “[w]e are agreed, that physical employment by criminals is essential to their health, happiness, and reform. As well as take away all food, and ask that health and life be preserved, as take away labor, and ask that the inmates of a convict prison be made better.”41 Felton equates food and labor in order to underscore the importance of labor in nourishing the convict and facilitating the process of reformation.
Beyond asserting that labor must continue to exist as a reform measure for criminals, Felton also believes that the system of labor must change from one of contracts and leases to a system controlled by the state—the public account system. Felton acknowledges opposition to this claim. He reminds his audience, “there are those of the wage-working classes, and demagogues, who insist that prisoners should not be employed at any industry in which wage-workers are.”42 He understands the broader claim of these political agitators to be that prison labor should not, in any way, interfere with the lives and market of free labor. Felton responded by saying that “prisoners must be employed at manual labor…and can not produce anything useful, without, in some
41 Charles E. Felton, “Prison Labor”, 1886, 2. 42 Felton, “Prison Labor”,1886, 5. Kahne 25 manner, affecting outside interests.”43 “Make prison life an idle life”, he cautions, “and there is nothing correctional nor reformative in it, —neither is it deterring to others.”44
Taken together, these quotes illustrate Felton’s central argument—that labor is necessary to reform the criminal and labor activists are getting in the way.
In his 1888 speech in Boston, Felton acknowledges that an alliance between prison reformers and labor activists had been effective in creating a coalition against contract labor. He asserts that this partnership is not beneficial to the goal of reformation desired by his colleagues, because the goal of labor activists is to eliminate prison labor entirely. He declares that “prison reformers must dissolve this unnatural partnership, and form other such alliances…as will prevent the further demoralization of the industries in prisons; and if possible restore that which has been lost—not the contractor, but restore remunerative employment for the inmates of all our prisons at physical labor.”45 While
Felton does not support contract labor, he finds idleness to be the worst state of affairs for prisoners. He bemoans how “change is made because of public clamor, and without providing for an intelligent introduction of a better system—the public account.”46 Labor activists reached the same conclusion but from a different cultural context and set of goals.
1890—American Labor Movement
Debs’ participation in the national discussion on convict labor was framed around questions surrounding the rights of free labors to defend themselves against convict competition. His assertions came a decade after Wright and Felton, during the labor
43 Felton, “Prison Labor”,1886, 5. 44 Felton, “Prison Labor”,1886, 7. 45 Felton, “Prison Labor”,1886, 4. 46 Eugene V. Debs, “Prison Labor,” Progressive Thought 1, no. 4: (1899): 2-12, 10. Kahne 26 movement. The American Labor movement began in the late nineteenth-century, at the peak of industrialization and immigration. Eugene Debs was a prominent leader of the labor movement, working especially at its intersections with socialist ideology. He ran for the United States presidency five times over the course of the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. In 1899, Debs gave a speech to the Nineteenth Century Club at
Delmonico’s in New York City entitled “Prison Labor”. In his introduction, Debs
[confesses] that it would have suited my purpose better had the subject been transposed so as to read: Industry and Trade, their effect on Labor” for, as a Socialist, I am convinced that the prison problem is rooted in the present system of industry and trade, carried forward, as it is, purely for private profit without the slightest regard to the effect upon those engaged in it, especially the men, women, and children who perform the useful, productive labor which has created all wealth and all civilization.47
This passage elucidates how Debs’ positionality informs his stakes in this discourse. He enters the conversation by asserting that prison labor is an effect of the exploitative system of capitalism, which affects all laborers. Debs’ central argument is that wage laborers suffer greatly because of prison competition. He claims that two prison systems that work for private interests are the contract and lease system. By using the word
“private”, Debs implicitly calls out and condemns these two systems of convict labor.
Unlike Felton, Debs is against convict labor in its entirety. He draws direct lines between slavery and the lease system to bolster this argument. Debs calls “the convict labor problem…an unmitigated curse from which there could be no escape while an economic system endures in which labor…is sold to the lowest bidder in the markets of the world.”48 This condemnation of convict labor as a “curse” reveals the contempt Debs holds for coerced labor. Use of the words “sold” and “bidder” elicit images of a lease
47 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 3. 48 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 4. Kahne 27 system. Although this system was not the only type of convict labor present in the late nineteenth-century United States, it serves Debs’ central argument toward the overarching goal of abolishing labor in prisons. To support his claim, Debs extracts part of an investigative report done by a prison commission in Ohio in 1877. The report asserts the contract system to have “not a single commendable feature….[I]t enables a class of men to get rich out of the crimes committed by others; [and] it leaves upon the fair escutcheon of the state a relic of the very worst form of human slavery.”49 Debs asserts the negative aspects of the contract system to be the same as the lease system, claiming that its accumulation of private profit holds structural similarities to slavery.
After this strong condemnation of exploitation for private profit, Debs recognizes that “[f]ortunately the system of leasing and contracting prison labor for private exploitation is being exposed and its monster iniquities laid bare….[T]he public account system, though subject to serious criticisms, is far less objectionable than either the lease, the contract or the piece-price system.”50 Debs explicitly acknowledges that he is on the tail end of a larger discourse that places private prison labor in the spotlight and under attack. He realizes that this discourse is having a powerful effect on determining which type of convict labor will become dominant in its aftermath. Debs asserts that, in the public account system, “the prisoner’s infirmities cease to be the prey of speculative greed and consciousless rapacity.”51 He praises the public account for its movement away from individual accumulation of profits. Socialist activists reached the same conclusion as prison reformers, which is that the public account system served their constituents
49 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 5. 50 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 6. 51 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 6. Kahne 28 better than the private systems.
Convict Labor and a Racial Hierarchy
Roadwork was the result of the move from private to public penal labor practices.
Wright, Felton, and Debs held convict leasing as the epitome of private labor’s immorality. An analysis of each of these men’s discussions on convict leasing also demonstrates the racist ideologies each of these representatives had. Examining how each of these historical actors thought about race will elucidate how a shift from private to public labor does not necessitate a shift in racist social organization.
Wright’s discussion of the lease system—without once mentioning the South or slavery—makes implicit associations between the leasing system and the region’s social and economic history. Wright articulates potential benefits of the lease system, as well as its disadvantages. He understands the central argument of the system’s advocates to be that it is the most appropriate system “for the class of persons as a rule coming under it, they being mostly men used to outdoor life…this system prevails largely in the warmer portions of the country…with better results as to health and comfort than can be reached for the same class within prison walls, as is the rule in the northern states.”52 This rhetoric ties the lease system to demographics that work outside in warm weather. Wright’s words evoke images of antebellum Southern plantations. This statement condones convict leasing on the basis that the work is suited for the prisoners. Although Wright ultimately condemns the leasing practice because of its immoral economic structure, he does not disavow the assertion by leasing advocates that newly freed blacks are able to and benefit from a system similar to slavery.
52 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 381. Kahne 29
Felton believes the contract system to be politically useful but not an effective reform measure, and the lease system to be “a strange one—with little in it to be commended.”53 Felton’s discussion of the lease system is located in the American South and couched within an essentialist and racist depiction of that region’s prisoners. Felton asserts that the type of work mostly black prisoners are engaging in under the lease is suitable for “members of a race lately freed”. He further describes these prisoners as
“ragged, shiftless, indolent, and ignorant” men.54 While Felton does not challenge the type of work prisoners engage in under the lease, he asserts it be a “a thousand times worse [than the contract], as, in reality, the prisoner has no one to protect his from ill- treatment by those whose interest in him is simply a moneyed one. The people of the
South realize this, and will change this;—and the change can only be made to the public account system.”55 Felton’s position evidences that a proposed shift from the lease and contract to the public account system does not necessitate a shift in racist epistemology but rather continues a postbellum racial order within a state-sponsored work system.56
Though his racist epistemologies are not articulated in Debs’ 1899 speech, the socialist project he represents evidences white supremacist ideology. Attention to Kate
Richardson O’Hare’s writing here contextualizes the penal labor reforms Debs advocated for. O’Hare was a prominent socialist activist who worked in concert with Debs. In addition to her work with the American Labor Movement, she was a prominent antiwar
53 Felton, “Prison Labor”, 1886 Speech, 11-12. 54 Felton, “Prison Labor”, 1886 Speech, 12-13. 55 Felton, “Prison Labor”, 1886 Speech, 13. 56 Felton believes that prison work should be a deterrent for potential transgressors. (pg. 23). The performative quality of roadwork, like Damiens’ execution or lynching cultures, makes examples out of transgressors by placing them on a public platform. This public quality is another reason why Felton would support roadwork programs under the public account system. Kahne 30 activist, criminal justice advocate, and feminist. Before she was convicted under the
Espionage Act for exposing how corporations were profiting from Word War I and wrote the memoir that made her famous, O’Hare zealously promoted the socialist cause among white Democratic southerners. O’Hare’s writing makes clear that Debs’ condemnation of convict leasing and push towards the public account, like Wright’s and Felton’s position, sympathized with a white supremacist ideology and coexisted with an essentializing view of black bodies and their capabilities for labor.
In 1912, the National Rip-Saw published a pamphlet written by O’Hare, entitled
‘N**’ Equality.57 This article does not address convict labor directly, but outlines a
Socialist positionality with respect to postbellum Southern race relations. The goal in
O’Hare’s article was to dispel the notion that socialists wanted social equality for
African-Americans. O’Hare’s central point is that the Democratic party promotes a narrative of socialist sympathy with African-Americans in order to dissuade white voters from the socialist cause. She claims a major effect to be the perpetuation of a capitalist system that hurts whites economically (in their competition with blacks) and socially (in their interaction with blacks).
O’Hare’s first rhetorical move in this article is to establish solidarity with
Southern whites alienated by Reconstruction. In her opening remarks, she speaks directly
“to the man or woman who lived through those miserable days when the vile politicians from the north by their arrogant powers…[forced] the stinging disgrace of having
57 The National Rip-Saw was a socialist magazine that ran from April 1910 to February 1917. Like the speeches analyzed above, this article should also be read as public rhetoric. Kahne 31 ignorant blacks placed in positions of power and authority over them.”58 O’Hare addresses the anxieties of many Southern whites about the high number of blacks in political office during Reconstruction. Her rhetorical deployment of “disgrace” and
“ignorant” validates the claim that the African-Americans who acquired political power were unqualified for such positions. O’Hare makes another gesture of sympathy towards disgruntled whites when she recalls how “all over the south wherever I have traveled I find the good land, down in the bottoms where cotton grows shoulder high and the soil is rich and fertile, is rented to the blacks.”59 Land redistribution was a point of conflict for radical Reconstructionists. Foner argues that “[t]he creation of the Freedman’s Bureau in
March 1865 symbolized the widespread belief among Republicans that the federal government must shoulder broad responsibility for the emancipated slaves, offering them some kind of access to land…[and] confronted a white community unwilling to advance credit or sell them property.”60 O’Hare was appealing to the frustration Southern whites held about the move to redistribute land during Reconstruction.
O’Hare acknowledges that Reconstruction is destabilizing a white supremacist order, and makes clear that socialism is not invested in dismantling this order but rather destroying the capitalist system. She is concerned with the effects of capitalism on black people only to the extent it reduces the wages of white workers. Towards the end, O’Hare claims how “[w]e Socialists simply want the negro to have this opportunity to have access to the means of life, so he can quit competing with the white man, not because we
58Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches. Edited by Philip S. Foner and Sally M. Miller Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press: 1982: 44-49, 44. 59 O’Hare, Selected Writings, 47. 60 Foner, Reconstruction, 31 and 47, respectively. Kahne 32 love or hate him, but in order that he may not be used to keep down our wages.”61 This claim betrays O’Hare’s primary concern with capitalism: that it has black laborers competing with and consequently driving down wages for white people. Similarly, in
Prison Labor, Debs expresses that it is “the economic system [of capitalism], which is responsible for, not only prison labor, but for the gradual enslavement and degradation of all labor, that we must deal before there can be any solution of the prison labor problem.”62 O’Hare and Debs alike only care about the exploitation of black workers when it is symptomatic of the exploitative system of capitalism and increases competition with white wage workers. O’Hare’s assertion that socialism fights economic, not social, inequality contextualizes Debs’ comments about prison labor. O’Hare’s article makes clear that the socialist drive to dismantle convict labor, and convict leasing in particular, is not just about reducing convict competition but is also about establishing solidarity with white Southerners during and after Reconstruction.
In Equality, one of O’Hare’s talking points for socialism is that it enforces segregation. She writes how Southern voters “have Jim Crow laws that keep the negroes out of your railroad coaches, but where is the Jim Crow law for the factory, workshop, mines or cotton field?”63 Socialism, when enacted as a political practice, would separate the races in the workforce. The promotion of segregation in the workplace was central in the discussion regarding penal labor reforms.
Black participation in political life had destabilized a white supremacist social order. National discussions on the purpose of penal labor in a postbellum country then
61 O’Hare, Selected Writings, 47-48. 62 Debs, “Prison Labor”, 3. 63 O’Hare, Selected Writings, 46. Kahne 33 worked simultaneously to uphold an antebellum racial order and distance prisons from the institution of slavery at the height of Reconstruction. All of the historical agents discussed here shared a dislike of the lease system, extended to include all private prison work. The Progressive reform of roadwork responded to the racial ideologies and hierarchies of government officials, prison reformers, and labor activists shared at the end of the nineteenth century. Roadwork functioned under the public account system while simultaneously upholding a white supremacist frame, offering an answer to the problems posed by labor activists and prison reformers about convict labor, and the lease system in particular.
Roadwork thus not only allowed for an antebellum racial order to exist, but it did so in a performative way. Performance was the primary tactic that white southerners used to fight back against the changes wrought by Reconstruction. In Lynching and Spectacle:
Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, American cultural historian Amy
Wood argues that the roles cast during lynchings reified antebellum archetypes of the black man as bestial, the white woman as victim, and the white man as hero—who, in his execution of the transgressor, restores a white supremacist order. Lynchings push back against a Foucauldian shift, placing punishment in the public space. Public space and performance are deeply linked. They both necessitate an audience, and promote a narrative account. In the case of both lynchings and roadwork, the narrative was that of white dominance and black servitude.
In his introduction, Wright reminds readers that while the structure of penal labor differed between states: “[T]he influence of the employment of a prison in one state may reach beyond the limits of that state, and in such a way as to render that particular state Kahne 34 powerless in any efforts to solve the problem, the whole question has become one of interstate importance.”64 Wright’s assertion bolsters the central claim of this study—that penal practices exercise influence across regions. Products produced in one state’s prison may be sold in another state, consequently disrupting its labor market. Social structures that result from certain penal practices have reverberating effects both on society outside prison, and on other states that adopt certain economically beneficial penal practices.
Reconstruction destabilized an antebellum white supremacist order. An examination of the political and rhetorical context in which roadwork emerged demonstrates how Jim Crow ideology was embedded in the structure and function of the practice. The economic structure of convict leasing replicated slavery too explicitly.
During the 1880s, and with input from government officials, prison reformers, and labor activists—roadwork emerged as an alternative to convict leasing in the South. In addition to relieving the nation of the moral conundrum of slavery, providing work for inmates, and reducing competition with free workers, the performative quality of public penal labor reified antebellum racial roles, thus easing white Southerners concerns about the effects of Reconstruction.
64 Wright, “Convict Labor”, 3. Emphasis mine. Kahne 35
CHAPTER TWO, Chain Gangs and Honor Camps: How Roadwork Racialized a
Coloradan Penal Landscape
The South was not the only region to shift from private labor to the public account system in the aftermath of the national discourse in which Wright, Felton, and Debs participated. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the simultaneous emergence of roadwork in the American West, particularly at Colorado State Penitentiary. Despite this temporal proximity, those who built the Coloradan roadwork system distanced this penal practice from the Southern region. Advocates of the Coloradan system asserted that their work was antithetical to the imagery and social implications of the Southern chain gang.
The Coloradan system nonetheless successfully entrenched a Southern racialized social order on its inmate population, despite its claim of Rocky Mountain exceptionalism.
In Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, Eric Foner outlines political and cultural influences that shaped the landscape of the mid-nineteenth-century American West. The ideology of free labor that shaped discussions of western prisons began in the northeastern states. Foner asserts that the abolitionist sentiments of northerners were undergirded by a belief that their society,
“achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man.”65 The dignity of working people was celebrated. A culture of economic self-sufficiency and class mobility prompted “the steady stream of settlers who abandoned eastern homes to seek their fortunes in the
West.”66 The West thus became a battleground for Northern and Southern political and
65Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1-72, 226-318, 11. 66 Foner, Free Soil, 14. Kahne 36 cultural ideologies about what constituted civilization: namely, one built on slave or free labor. Free labor was understood by northerners to be antithetical to slavery. Laboring whites were seen as the key to securing abolitionist ideology in the Western territories.
Foner emphasizes that “the attack on slavery for denigrating the white laborer and stunting the economic development of the South was perhaps the major contribution of the political branch of the anti-slavery movement.”67 The appeal to whites through the ideology of free labor was strongly deployed in the national discussion of prison labor, in whose aftermath C.S.P. would open its doors.
1908—Emergence of the Southern Chain Gang, Emergence of Coloradan Roadwork
1908 was a critical year for the connection between Southern and Western roadwork programs for convicts. In September of that year, a special session of the
Georgia General Assembly “eliminated the convict lease system [and] replaced it with the chain gang.”68 Haley asserts that this legislation used convict labor “to expand and surface municipal and county roads.”69 She understands the reason for this shift to be a move “to reduce competition between free labor and convict labor”, asserting that one of the stipulations of the legislature was to protect free laborers.70 This reasoning seems a direct response to the grievances stated by earlier socialist activists, made possible by transferring the profits of convict labor from contractors to the state. Instead of being
“forced to work for private companies in various modernization industries…they would
67 Foner, Free Soil, 59. 68 1907-1809 Annual Reports, GDAH Reports, p. 10, as cited in Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here, 157. 69 1907-1809 Annual Reports, GDAH Reports, p. 10, as cited in Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here, 157. 70 1907-1809 Annual Reports, GDAH Reports, p. 10, as cited in Sarah Haley’s, No Mercy Here, 157. Kahne 37
[now] be forced to work on roads while living in camps managed by state governmental authors. Yet this reform, initially held as abolition, replicated the same egregious problems of the system that came before.”71 Haley asserts that an antebellum racialized social structure affirmed through convict leasing also functioned in the state-operated chain gangs. This argument is unsurprising, given that both prison reformers and labor activists—who, in a late-nineteenth century alliance, produced a shift to roadwork under the public account system—held racist epistemologies about prisoners and laborers, respectively.
The first road camp was established in Colorado in 1908. While it did not emerge from legislation banning convict leasing, roadwork did replace a contract system of convict labor. In A Short History of the Colorado State Penitentiary, Colorado State
Archives volunteer Gerald E. Sherard offers a concise history of convict labor at the institution before roadwork. “The usual institutional activities, [including] carpentry, blacksmithing, shoe cobbling, clothing repair and general maintenance” comprised the main industries at which convicts were employed in the 1870s and 1880s. Brick manufacturing and limestone quarrying were popular enterprises into the turn of the twentieth century. Sherard notes that contract labor, specifically with the Colorado Shoe
Co., took on a prominent role at C.S.P. in the first decade of the twentieth century. He cites 1900 as the year that Coloradan convicts began working on state highways but “it was not…until March 1909 when Thomas J. Tynan was appointed to the office of warden
71 1907-1809 Annual Reports, GDAH Reports, p. 10, as cited in Sarah Haley’s, No Mercy Here, 157. Kahne 38 that the program took on significance.72 Warden Tynan worked at C.S.P. from 1909 to
1927. His career thus spanned the evolution of Coloradan roadwork from its inception to its reputation as the national leader in roadwork initiatives for convicts in the 1920s.
Emergence of the first road camp in Colorado the same year that Georgia made the legislative switch from convict leasing to the chain gang begs investigation of these developments’ mutual relationship alongside one another, in an attempt to locate potential threads of influence from the Southern chain gangs onto Coloradan road camps.
1913—Coloradan Honor Road Camps as Antithetical to Southern Chain Gangs
The early-twentieth century discourse of Coloradan roadwork aggressively argued against even a suggestion that the two regions be compared. The Mountain States’ recurring claim was that Coloradan road camps were different in structure and outcomes.
Indeed, roadwork at C.S.P. did have some characteristics distinguishing the program from its Southern counterpart.
The “honor system” was the first difference. This system referred to the process whereby convicts were taken on their word that they would not run away from their job outside the prison. Warden Tynan attributed the moral reformation of convicts to this system as providing the opportunity for incentivized incarcerated people to “[keep their] word of honor.”73 With the emergence of the honor road camp came the gradual disappearance of armed guards. This striking absence was a second feature distinguishing
Coloradan and Southern roadwork programs in their actual performance. Laborers in
72 Gerard E. Sherard, “A Short History of the Colorado State Penitentiary”, https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/A%20Short%20History%20of%20th e%20Colorado%20State%20Penitentiary.pdf. 73 Warden Tynan, “Convict Road Work,” National Free Labor Association, 1 (1913): 22- 24, 23. Kahne 39 these honor road camps did not wear stripes, but were instead clothed in khaki or blue.
Colorado’s convicts also were not subject to the ball and chain. These costume and prop differences allowed the Western state to distinguish itself visually from the iconic imaginary surrounding Southern roadwork and chain gangs. The combination of taking the convicts at their of word of honor, along with these visual differences formed the scaffolding for the argument that in the 1910s Coloradan roadwork was not only unrelated but antithetical to Southern chain gangs and roadwork programs.
This discourse bolstered claims of Coloradan exceptionalism in its roadwork practices. Julian Leavitt asserts this boldly in Good Roads and Better Men, published by
Pearson’s Magazine. “I will begin with Colorado,” he writes, “because there the new idea has flowered at its best.”74 Leavitt’s article was reprinted in a July 1913 bulletin entitled
“Road Making by Convict Labor” and published by the National Free Labor Association.
Another article, this time from the magazine Popular Mechanics, took a similar stance.
The author, H.H. Windsor, asserts that while roadwork exists in the New England states, it is when “we reach Colorado” that one sees “the good roads problem being demonstrated in such a way which must sooner or later command the attention of all the other states.”75 Windsor further writes how “the good roads [Colorado] built and the farms they work for their own support are a part of the means to the greater object” of what he refers to the spirit of unconscious reform.76 Taken together, these descriptions emphasize Colorado’s unique relationship with roadwork as a penal labor practice.
74 Julian Leavitt, “Good Roads and Better Men,” National Free Labor Association, 1 (1913): 6-12, 7. 75 H.H. Windsor, “Convict-Built Roads in Colorado,” National Free Labor Association, 1 (1913): 24-25, 24. 76 Windsor, “Convict-Built Roads”, 25. Kahne 40
Notably, Windsor groups roadwork with farm work. These two penal labor practices emerged together as Progressive Reforms in the South but Windsor fails to note this association. This rhetorical silence around the South’s relationship to roadwork is striking.
In this discussion’s context, Southern chain gangs seem to bear no resemblance to roadwork in Colorado. Leavitt concedes how “in the North there has been…a very deep- seated opposition to road work, ostensibly based on…humanitarian grounds…[t]his feeling has been justified, in part, by the authentic stories and atrocities in the southern road camps. There can be no defence of the ball and chain gang.”77 Warden Tynan himself asserts that “convict labor on highways, as practiced in Colorado…is more or less of a new feature. It is not to be confounded with the southern ‘contract’ camps, where men are sold at auction to the highest bidder.”78 Leavitt, Windsor, and Tynan back up their claim of difference between the two regions by stating that the performance of roadwork has a less degrading effect. “Dress a gang of convicts in ordinary overalls,”
Leavitt writes, “remove chains and shackles, make an overseer of the guard, and not one onlooker in ten will think twice of the degradation involved.”79 All three of the distinguishing characteristics of Coloradan roadwork—the clothes, and lack of a ball and chain and guns—are here invoked in order to prove that this system differs from Southern road camps.
Leavitt also invokes the honor system to further distance between the two regions.
He claims how “not one man was returned for disobedience, not one ever wanted to
77 Leavitt, “Good Roads”, 10. 78 Thomas J. Tynan, “Prison Labor on Public Roads,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 46 (1913): 58-60, 58. 79 Leavitt, “Good Roads”, 10. Kahne 41 escape, and…all requested that they might be assigned to the same work when spring opened and highway work was resumed.”80 For Leavitt, the small number of escapees is incontrovertible evidence that Coloradan roadwork programs were located on the opposite end of a moral spectrum from Southern camps. Tynan takes this one step further as he constantly asserts how happy the convicts are to be working on the road camps. A different visual schematic, and the presence of unarmed overseers is not sufficient evidence to prove that Coloradan and Southern road work camps were different.
In 2013, journalist Silvia Pettem wrote an article for the Boulder Daily Camera entitled Convicts helped rebuild roads in early 1900s.81 She begins with the same
Coloradan exceptionalism that Tynan asserted and Leavitt emphasized. Pettem invokes common tropes, including the zeal of prisons at work, regular clothing worn, a lack of shackles and armed guards, and the structure of the honor program. The article’s tone shifts when Pettern undercuts this ubiquity of this visual schematic, telling readers how
“at night…each camp had an official who stood guard with a rifle.”82 This knowledge punctures C.S.P.’s claim of difference from the South. Warden Tynan again asserts this difference by citing the low numbers of attempted escapes. He attributes this to the success of the program and prisoners investment in their own reformation. No mention is given to the fact that prisoners have limited choices—if they ran, where would they go?
How would they obtain food? What would happen if they were caught? The fact that fewer prisoners ran away in broad daylight illustrates this limitation and not that C.S.P.
80 Leavitt, “Good Roads”, 10. 81 Silvia Pettem, “Convicts helped rebuild roads in early 1900s,” Daily Camera (Boulder, CO), December 21, 2013.
82 Pettem, “Convicts helped rebuild roads”. Kahne 42 honor road camps were, in their structure and intention, different from Southern chain gangs. At night, when chances of escape were greater, C.S.P. brought out armed rifles.
C.S.P. officials were indeed concerned with escapes.
Roadwork is a performance, whether or not there are armed guards or a ball and chain. The absence of these costumes and props associated with Southern chain gangs may have the effect of performing difference to an extent untrue in C.S.P. honor road camps. Pettem recalls one escapee in 1917, named C.B. Hess. Hess “[walked] away from a road work camp in Boulder canyon....After [he] returned to prison, his head was shaved, and he was forced to wear prison stripes. For three months, he also had to wear a ball and chain…[and work] between a line of penitentiary guards.”83 This incident demonstrates that all the attributes of the Southern chain gangs—their negation celebrated on the honor road camps—was never far away for C.S.P. inmates. In the case of Hess, they were brought out in order to assert the power of the prison over a transgressor—a power dynamic very different to the one running Tynan’s camps.
1918—Southern Influence on Coloradan Society
An examination of Southern Influence on Colorado here will both contextualize and strengthen the claim that the postbellum penal practice of and racial ideologies undergirding roadwork moved west in the first decade of the twentieth century. Newly freed peoples constructed the West as a space of freedom after the Civil War. Most scholarship on black movement after the Civil War focuses on the Great Migration.
Performance and migration narrative scholar Marta Effinger-Crichlow asserts in Staging
Migrations Toward an American West that while “the number of blacks who actually
83 Pettem, “Convicts helped rebuild roads”.
Kahne 43 migrated west does not compare to [those] who eventually settled in cities like New York
City…a greater documentation of these western histories is desperately needed.”84 In addition to documented migrations such as the Kansas Exodus of 1879, Effinger-
Crichlow argues that the West was a powerful image for black people, and takes into careful consideration how “black women imagined [as well as experienced] the American
West geographically and symbolically at different historical moments.”85
Staying Migrations offers Pearl Cleage’s play Flyin’ West as a work centering black people’s conception of the American West as a space of freedom. Effinger-
Crichlow quotes the character Sophia saying, “we could own this whole prairie. Nothing but colored folks farms and colored folks wheat fields and colored folks cattle everywhere you look.”86 This sentiment expresses not only an ideal but a belief utilized by Southern photo-journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. Wells was catalyzed to action by the lynching of Thomas Moss, and his statement that “told my people to go
West—there is no justice for them here.”87 Effinger-Crichlow asserts how “Wells became one of the first black women to instigate migrations toward an American West before the turn of the century.”88 Coloradan demographics at the turn of the century showcase the influx of African-Americans on the Western Frontier.
From 1860 to 1870, while the white population increased by a factor of 1.15, the black population increased tenfold, from 46 to 456 people. From 1870 to 1880, the whites increased by a factor of 4.9, blacks by 5.5. Each subsequent decade until 1930 shows the
84 Marta Effinger-Crichlow, Staging Migrations Toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 1-60, 4. 85 Effinger-Crichlow, Staying Migrations, 4. 86 Effinger-Crichlow, Staying Migrations, 4. 87 Effinger-Crichlow, Staying Migrations, 19. 88 Effinger-Crichlow, Staying Migrations, 20. Kahne 44 black and white populations increasing at a parallel rate, decreasing from a factor of 2.5 to 1.5 and eventually to 1. These numbers are significant because they show that in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, black bodies filled a territory of the Western Frontier on an unprecedented scale. This demographic information proves that the imagery presented in Flyin’ West was not only imagined but may have played a tangible role on the radically shifting populations of late-nineteenth century Colorado.
The construction of Sophie as well as the influx of blacks in Colorado suggests part of the story of African-Americans in the American West, and Colorado in particular.
In Buffalo Soldiers in the American West, 1865-1900, Monroe Lee Billington recovers the history of the “all-black infantry and cavalry regiments” who served during the postwar years in the American West. The Buffalo Soldiers, overwhelmingly stationed in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain States, primarily served “to protect people and property from Indians.”89 The presence of Buffalo Soldiers across the Mountain West affirms the African-American presence imagined in Flyin’ West, and late-nineteenth century Coloradan demographics.
Cleage, Effinger-Crichlow, and Billington effectively illustrate a racialized
Coloradan landscape; however, early-twentieth century Colorado was not only racialized but also racist. Billington recounts how “prejudiced whites often harassed black soldiers” during Reconstruction. Interracial tension gave way to fights. Whites were seldom
89 Eugene H. Berwanger, “Buffalo Soldiers in the American West, 1865-1900” in African-Americans on the Western Frontier, ed. Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 54-72, 63. Kahne 45 punished and blacks overly abused by local authorities.90 The racism of Colorado was not only interpersonal but systemic. Western lynching culture was popularized in early- twentieth century films. Wood details two lynching films that took place in the first decade of the twentieth century which “although…western…present similar scenes of communal justice and vengeance on a racialized other that white southern audiences would have recognized and applauded as both morally satisfying and sensationally entertaining.”91 Tracked by Bloodhounds, a 1904 film, took place in Cripple Creek,
Colorado. This movie’s appeal to white Southern audiences suggests that the archetypes present in southern lynching—the black male aggressor, white female victim, and white male victor—were reenacted in the West to uphold a white supremacist order. The impulse to white supremacy would only become stronger in the subsequent decade when, in 1924, the KKK’s national headquarters moved to Cañon City, Colorado.
Carie Canterbury, journalist for the Cañon City Daily Record, offers historical markers for the Klan’s time in Colorado in her 2014 article “Ku Klux Klan once a
Fremont County political powerhouse”. Canterbury begins by delineating three phases of the KKK. Its first phase centers the Klan’s emergence as a vigilante group in Tennessee committed to upholding white supremacy after Southern defeat. The second phase, during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, is marked as being “anti- black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and strongly Prohibitionist.”92 During this second phase the KKK made its strongest mark on Cañon. In the elections of 1924”,
90 Billington, Buffalo Soldiers, 66. 91 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1-270, 139. 92 Carie Canterbury, “Ku Klux Klan once a Fremont County political powerhouse,” Daily Record (Cañon City, CO), April 10, 2014. Kahne 46
Canterbury writes, “the Klan seized complete control of the state, county, and local governments statewide, including both Cañon City and Fremont County.”93 Sue Cochran, an archivist at the Royal Gorge Regional Museum and History Center, asserts that
Colorado, in the early twentieth century, had the largest, most influential Knights of the
Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River.”94 The KKK’s move west in the 1920s suggests that white supremacist sentiment was strong in Colorado.
Headquartered in a political building, the KKK exerted a powerful influence on Cañon
City. Tynan’s honor road camps at C.S.P. do not replicate imagery of Southern chain gangs; however, the Klan’s presence in Cañon suggests that there was local sentiment and leadership that supported white supremacist ideology, and it is clear that roadwork
was a critical tool is reifying white
supremacy in the South.
On the left is an image of one
of C.S.P.’s honor road camps. The
characteristic white tents, as well as
a lack of ball and chain and striped
jumpsuits, send a clear message that
this program of roadwork was different. In this photograph, all of the men are white. They are also at leisure.
93 Canterbury, “Once a political powerhouse”. 94 Canterbury, “Once a political powerhouse”. Kahne 47
It is difficult to know whether the racial makeup of this photo was representative of the roadwork camps at large because C.S.P. did not list race as a marker of identity for male inmates. This is where information of the racial and racist landscape of Colorado is crucial. The public rhetoric of Rocky Mountain exceptionalism examined earlier in this chapter is reified by these images. It is easier to distance Colorado from Southern chain gangs when all the participants in the photo are white. The fact that this photo survives in the archival record may be more indicative of the need to establish a visual schematic
distinct from the American
South rather than an accurate
reflection of the lived experience
of honor road camps.
This is an intake record
of an African-American man at
C.S.P. in the second decade of
the twentieth century. Without a
comprehensive tabulation of
intake records, it is impossible to know how common his demographic was at the prison. The archive does not tell us where he worked. In the public rhetoric, being chosen for honor road camps was a sign of privilege. On the other hand, we know that black men working on roads reified white supremacy in the South. Knowledge that black men existed at C.S.P. forces us to consider that possibility and consequences of those men working in what popular imagery asserted as both a normative good and exclusively white space. The historical context presented in Kahne 48 this chapter allows for the plausibility of African-American men working on these road camps, and the high stakes involved in constructing, rather than maintaining, an antebellum racial order in the twentieth-century American West.
Kahne 49
CHAPTER THREE: Women and Ladies: How C.S.P. Female Work Environments
Demonstrate Southern Penal Influence
Prison work reforms in the late nineteenth-century were intended to move laborers away from private contractors and toward state programs. Discussion facilitating this shift was undergirded by white supremacist ideology that wanted to reify a social and economic order in spaces of punishment. It has already been demonstrated that one of these work reforms—roadwork—was also present in Colorado, which, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, was no stranger to white supremacy. This section will address whether, and to what extent, this Jim Crow penal work environment applied to incarcerated Western women.
A racialized order was instantiated in the creation of postbellum chain gangs. The question is now: did that racialized order apply to women and, if so, did it move west? It is important to look at women’s experiences because a critical part of Jim Crow was separation along lines of race and gender. In order to fully examine Southern influence on C.S.P., we must look at female experiences.
Studies of Western carceral spaces have asserted that female laboring experiences are both reflective of gender norms outside prison, and shaped along racial lines. Two preeminent scholars in the field of nineteenth-century incarcerated Western women’s experiences are Nicole Hahn Rafter and Anne M. Butler. Both are historians: Rafter of female criminals and Butler of the American West. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Rafter and Butler made critical historiographical interventions regarding the experiences of female inmates in the American West. Kahne 50
In “Gender, Prisons, and Prison History”, Rafter writes about the emergence of women’s reformatories in the late nineteenth-century. Before 1850, there were no separate institutions for women. In 1870, interest in the rehabilitative potential of prisons led to the establishment of women’s reformatories. Reformatories were modeled after juvenile institutions, and were intended to have a domestic feel. This building was designed around an ideology of women as passive and docile. Rafter is critical in showing how late-nineteenth century penal reforms resulted in differential treatment along lines of gender. After documenting this trend in women’s reformatories, Rafter notes that both the South and West were unusual in avoiding this trend. In these regions, separate custodial prisons—often an adjoining building with a matron—experienced second-rate care. Rafter asserts, “not surprisingly, these custodial units for women were more masculine in character than the highly feminized women’s reformatories”95. In these custodial units, black women were overrepresented. At the turn of the twentieth century, reformatories often did not allow women of color. Rafter reminds us that “the mission of the women’s reformatories explains their reluctance to receive blacks: these institutions were established rescue and reform, to restore fallen women to true womanhood”.96 The splitting up of white and black female convicts into reformatories and custodial units, respectively, illustrates how gender as it interacted with race determined a female convict’s living quarters and work assignments.
95 Nicole Hahn Rafter, “Gender, Prisons, and Prison History,” Social Sciences History 9, no. 3 (1985): 233-247, 239. 96 Rafter, “Gender, Prisons, and Prison History”, 240. Kahne 51
A Gendered-Racial Order Structuring Penal Labor
Butler builds on Rafter’s argument in “Women’s Work in Prisons of the
American West, 1865-1920”, when she claims there was “virtually no formalized policy for the female offender.”97 This supports Butler’s argument that women’s work fluctuated depending on race and region. Butler asserts that contact labor was popular in the West, and that “in some western areas, especially those with cultural connections to the South, the lease program gained a foothold”.98 Rafter notes that the lease system in Texas, as well as Louisiana and Arkansas, “especially on public roads, helped to give rise to the chain gang system in the South”.99
Butler’s discussion of the lease system, as it applied to women, occurred not only on the roads but also in domestic life. In Arkansas and Missouri, African-American women were leased as domestics to white families. In New Mexico, African-American and Hispanic women were not leased out but instead cleaned inside the prison, washing windows and cooking food. In Louisiana, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, women convicts—exclusively African-American—were leased out as both servants and agricultural laborers. These variegated examples suggest a couple possibilities for nineteenth-century women’s work in the American South and West. First, that domestic science shaped the workplace. Second, that race was a determinant of where women worked. Third, that the farther South one gets in the Western imaginary, the more white women and women of color were separated, with the former doing traditionally feminine work and the latter engaging in hard labor.
97 Anne M. Butler, “Women’s Work in Prisons of the American West, 1865-1920,” Western Legal History 7, no. 2 (1994): 201-221, 202. 98 Butler, “Women’s Work”, 206. 99 Butler, “Women’s Work”, footnote no. 17 Kahne 52
Before looking to see if a gendered-racial order moved West, I must assert that it existed for Southern women. Rafter cites the 1880 census when she describes how
“Florida and Georgia, then lacking central penitentiaries, gave lessees control of all their female convicts. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas retained some women but leased out others…[of] 40 white women held by these states in
188, only one was leased, whereas of 220 black women, 81 (about 37%) were leased out.”100 Eight of the eleven states of the former Confederacy are mentioned in this list.
This association of a gendered-racial order with convict leasing occurs again in Rafter’s incorporation of a witness to the system, who recalled how “there were no white women there. One started there, and [he]…turned her loose…he said his wife was a white woman, and he could not stand to see a white woman worked in such places.”101.
Femininity, for the lessee, was evidently constructed along lines of race. It was articulated in the Southern penal workplace, where convict leasing reigned.
Primary sources suggest that convict leasing was the primary site of gendered segregation; however, other Progressive work reforms enforced a gendered-racial order.
Rafter asserts that “in Texas…at the turn of the century women were sent to local farms on the ‘share’ system, black women labored in the fields while white women sewed, gardened, and cared for the chickens.”102 At the Huntsville penitentiary, “one Hispanic and three Anglo, who had separate quarters, performed the ‘light chores’ of the camp, while the sixty-seven African-American women did all the heavy field labor for the
100 Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons 1800-1935 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 83-102, 131-156, 150. 101 Georgia General Assembly, 1974,:123, as cited in Rafter, “Prison History”, 241. 102 Rafter, Partial Justice, 152. Kahne 53 production of corn and cotton.”103 This association of a gendered-racial order solely with the Southern practice of convict leasing is complicated by the quote above. Taken in conjunction, these quotes assert that a gendered-racial order was not unique to convict leasing but was present throughout the late-nineteenth century South.
The separation of black and white females remained consistent with legislation that created state-operated chain gangs. In 1908, Georgia’s law replacing the lease system with the chain gang also codified racial definitions of womanhood. Haley locates this codification in the law’s first paragraph, which states:
If the convict be a female the judge may, in his discretion, sentence her to labor and confinement in the woman’s prison on the State farm, in lieu of a chaingang sentence, not to exceed twelve months.
Haley contextualizes this claim by informing readers that “[b]etween 1908 and 1936, only four white women were sent to Georgia’s misdemeanor chain gangs compared with nearly two thousand black women.”104 This huge discrepancy between white and black women working on roads demonstrates that a gendered-racial order was operating in the deep South—specifically, in the practice of roadwork.
Theoretical Conceptions of Female Criminality
This practice is contextualized by nineteenth-century writings on female criminality, particularly by Italian physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In
1895, Lombroso wrote The Female Offender, which both exceptionalized and essentialized female criminals. Lombroso’s position as a criminologist and natural scientist—as someone interested in translating observations of natural phenomena onto a human hierarchy—led him to understand female criminality through a gendered-racial
103 Butler, “Women’s Work”, 211. 104 Haley, No Mercy Here, 158. Kahne 54 order. His perspective is essential for understanding why a gendered-racial order may have been at play in early twentieth-century Southern and Western prison work programs.
Lombroso works to define the female criminal through a rhetoric of exceptionalism and dehumanization. He believes “the female criminal is…doubly exceptional, as a woman and as a criminal. For criminals are an exception among civilized people, and women are an exception among criminals.” Lombroso here could be referring strictly to the numbers. I read “exception” as exceptionalism. Both criminals and women are exceptionalized; that is, understood as being different from the norm.
Lombroso recognizes that female criminals carry the doubled weight of their stigmatized identities. He also concedes that within criminal populations, women—as a social, cultural, and bodily category—deviate from the norms governing ideas of and structures for criminals.
Criminality, for Lombroso, is not a perversion of but rather a reversion back to a more primitive type of human. He asserts that “most naturalists are agreed that for the type of a species one must look to the female rather than to the male.” Thus, Lombroso’s interest in females may stem from a belief that the anatomical and moral characteristics that he describes to women may reveal something about humankind’s more primitive stages. Upon establishing that primitive women are attached to criminal sensibilities, he offers a more explicitly racial tone. Lombroso asserts the necessity in “[proceeding] to argue thence that the typical forms of our race, being better organized and fixed in woman through the action of time and long heredity, joined to fewer ancestral variations, are less subject to transformation and deformation by the influences which determine Kahne 55 special and retrogressive variations in the male.” Lombroso’s ideas of whiteness were rooted in late nineteenth-century Italy, in colonial and European views. Lombroso refers to the “typical forms of our race” as having direct effects on the movement across the line of human evolution that would result in more or less criminal behavior.
Lombroso’s linkage of race to proclivities toward criminal behavior is not
Lombroso’s only argument for a gendered-racial order. His racism is seen in his naming of specific ethnic groups as embodying a more atavistic sensibility or anatomy. He writes that “what we look for most in the female is femininity, and when we find the opposite in he we conclude as a rule that there must be some anomaly….[R]emember that virility was one of the special features of the savage woman. In proof I have but to refer the reader to the…portraits of Red Indian and Negro beauties, whom it is difficult to recognize for women, so huge are their jaws and cheek-bones, so hard and course their features.” Here, Lombroso does more than conflate the criminal with the primitive and with women. He also conflates the primitive with the savage, and the savage with racialized populations. Lombroso again racializes female populations when he writes that
“Hottentot, African, and Abyssinian women when rich and idle grow enormously fat, and the reason of this phenomenon is atavistic.” This observation is significant for its linking of atavism with racialized females.
In Chapter One, The Female Criminal, Anne Butler shares her reading of
Lombroso. I agree with her synthesis of Lombroso’s argument as “[retaining] the popular ideals of purity, and passivity for women, although he defined them as by-products of woman’s deep-seated natural baseness.” Butler interrogates Lombroso in order to excavate the ideological underpinnings of attitudes toward female criminality, and how Kahne 56 they moved across time. She comments that “while Lombroso’s excessive and absurd language disappeared, its basic sentiment about women’s potential for moral depravity permeated theories of criminology for the next fifty years.” Butler focuses on the lasting influence of Lombrosian epistemology regarding the exceptional female criminal; however, I am more interested in how his coded articulation of a racial-gendered may have governed prison work environments for women.
Incarcerated Female Laborers in the Archival Record
There are scant records of incarcerated female work experiences. It is critical to interrogate this archival silence, and ask why women’s experiences were not as meticulously documented as mens. Armed with an understanding of why accounts of gendered experiences would be lacking from the archival record allows for a reading of available sources with a critical eye. Women—from the nineteenth-century through today—comprise a small proportion of the criminal population so are met with little discussion. As both Rafter and Butler insist however, not only the small numbers but also the larger national silence around prisons account for the lack and obfuscation of female work experiences. In Colorado, nineteenth-century women prisoners were virtually unmentioned. 1906, more than thirty years after the establishment of C.S.P. in 1871, was the first year that a matron’s report and accompanying record of female work experiences were included in the warden’s report at C.S.P. This was not unique to female inmates but part of a larger cultural phenomenon that makes nineteenth-century criminal experiences across the gender spectrum difficult to locate. Butler writes that there “until 1904 the nation instituted no formal system for tracking crime or for gathering statistics about Kahne 57 criminals and American prisons.”105 Women were often physically isolated and social marginalized within prison walls, as well as unrecorded. The compounded effect of national trends and physical isolation is one explanation for the lack of female experiences in the historical criminal record.
A second explanation for silence around female work experiences is that intense physical and sexual violence shaped the prison workplace. In order to avoid public condemnation, the realm of women’s work—with sexual coercion as a documented aspect of this—was kept out of the official records as much as possible. A third explanation is that the notion of a female criminal is destabilizing to a patriarchal sensibility that assumes rigid gender roles, hence unvoiced. This silence holds particular valence for O’Hare and the subjects of this essay because of the degree to which conceptions of violence in the American West were shaped by patriarchal notions. All these circumstances suggest that silences around female work experiences were not only the result of the small number of incarcerated females but the effect of cultural norms, the need to hide high rates of gendered violence and the real danger that female criminals
presented to a patriarchal sensibility.
When women are mentioned in the prison
archive, they are sidelined. This image shows a
numerical breakdown by month for C.S.P. work
environments from 1908-1910. Women appear as their
own category, after the sick, insane, feeble-minded,
crippled, and lying-in, respectively. This shows the
105 Butler, Gendered Justice, 8. Kahne 58 extent to which women’s work was devalued in the official record. An examination of their numbers reveals that while women were a statistical minority, they constituted approximately one-third of all laboring bodies at C.S.P. between 1908 and 1910. These numbers further suggest that the silences around female work experiences are more indicative of cultural norms surrounding the devaluation of women’s work rather than the lack of female laboring bodies in prison. All female prison laborers are grouped into one category on this sheet. This grouping suggests that women constituted a wholly separate category of laborers. Primary accounts of incarcerated female labor must shed light on the silences presented in the table.
Kate Richardson O’Hare
The most in-depth account of incarcerated female labor in the early twentieth century comes out of In Prison, Kate Richardson O’Hare’s memoir detailing her experiences at the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1919. O’Hare’s work is significant because of its forceful articulation of the exploitation of prison work environments in the early twentieth-century American West, as they applied to female laboring bodies.
O’Hare’s writing was used earlier in the paper to illustrate how the socialist project held racist epistemologies. O’Hare is used here to illustrate the ideologies and dynamics of female work experiences in an early twentieth-century Western prison.
One of the major silences against which O’Hare’s work speaks is the experience of prison work for women. In “Task and Punishment”, Kate both exposes and analyzes the work preformed at the prison: “[t]he Missouri Prison Board in turn sold me for nine hours each day to the Oberman Manufacturing Company, who manufacture overalls.”106
106 Kate Richards O’Hare, In Prison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), 11-180, 101. Kahne 59
O’Hare spends the rest of chapter illustrating how prison work served as the dominant organizing principle in prison. All women who were not able to make the task—that is, to finish the required number of overalls were required to work overtime in their cells or at the factory. This policy effectively demonstrates that the primary purpose of incarcerating female bodies was not to rehabilitate them but to extract profit. The arbitrary character of the foreman further demonstrates the weight placed on labor. O’Hare writes, “he had the power of enforcing the task, and he counted the jackets: at any time he could simply say there were not enough, and the women were punished without an opportunity to prove that they had produced the required number.”107 Additionally, O’Hare details how “if for any reason his vicious temper was ruffled, he would go down the line of machines, ripping and destroying the work without reason or mercy.”108 Finally, she mentions that while prison administrators deployed solitary confinement, this was to be utilized only after multiple additional tasks were assigned. O’Hare demonstrates not only how work dominated the lives of female inmates but also cemented power relations, and was taken as both the reason for and object of punishment inside prison walls.
In In Prison, O’Hare writes
exclusively about the work of female
convict laborers; thus, her memoir takes on
an explicitly gendered lens. She relays to us
that sewing lies at the forefront of her
experience. This observation fits well into a
107 O’Hare, In Prison, 105. 108 O’Hare, In Prison, 105. Kahne 60 gendered frame of what women’s work was and remains. O’Hare does not talk about whether this work was split along racial lines. This absence may initially be interpreted as signaling that there were no racial divisions in the labor that female convicts perform.
Another reading of this absence is that women of color were doing the same work as Kate and other white women. Certainly there are photographs of women of color engaged in
“feminine” work inside prison. This image was taken at C.S.P. was taken at C.S.P. and shows both white women and women of color sewing.
O’Hare does racialize some women throughout this chapter. She makes reference to “[a] young coloured girl” in retelling a particularly brutal example of gendered violence, and again to the “negress trusty” or “coloured murderess” when describing the work of what she calls the stool pigeon, “who had absolute control of the woman’s cell building and all its inmates from six in the evening until six in the morning.”109 Given that O’Hare does racialize some women throughout this piece, her failure to mention a racialized-gendered order for the female convict laborers seems to indicate that none existed.
A second way to read this silence is that, for O’Hare and her readers, incarcerated women of color did not constitute women; or rather, that their femininity was racialized.
Where early twentieth-century women worked in prison was largely shaped by late nineteenth-century perceptions of female criminality. Lombroso demonstrated that these perceptions were racialized. There is robust evidence that in the South, these ideologies affected where incarcerated women worked.
109 O’Hare, In Prison, 112. Kahne 61
Kate does not explicitly say that a gendered-racial order was operating in the prison workplace. When she makes reference to race, the bodies that she refers to are wrapped up in the Southern plantation economy. She writes that “as soon as I came into contact with the task system I had been thrown back to the condition of a negro save on a plantation in Dixie before the Civil War.”110 Shortly after introducing the nature of her labor, O’Hare makes another incitement to slavery. She writes how she knows “from actual experience that the only different between a woman federal prisoner and Cassie on the plantation of Simon Legree before the Civil War, were that Cassie was sold to the highest bidder, whereas we were sold to the lowest.”111 Here, O’Hare is reiterating how convicts would be sold off to the contractors who charged the prison the least amount of money for the labor in order to extract the greatest amount of profit. This absence is telling. Kate writes extensively—indeed exclusively—in this chapter how convict labor is gendered and raced in Southern penal work systems but does not articulate any gendered- racial order at play in the Western workplace. A third way to account for this silence is
Kate’s political aims in the early twentieth century.
Kate O’Hare was a prominent socialist activist. Her rhetorical deployment of chattel slavery could thus only go so far. In the beginning of the chapter, Kate lays out her prison work environment, describing how “a double row of power machines occupied most of the floor space, and here the so called able bodied women were engaged in making suspenders for overalls and finishing denim jumpers and jackets for unionalls.”112
She later describes the task system to be “as rigid as the laws of the Medes and Persians,
110 O’Hare, In Prison, 104. 111 O’Hare, In Prison, 102. 112 O’Hare, In Prison, 103. Kahne 62 and in exacting it absolutely no consideration was given to the age, the mental or physical condition, the previous training, or the efficiency or aptitude of the individual woman….[A]ll were subject to the same task and suffered the same punishments if they failed to produce the required.”113 These excerpts suggest that all women across a racial spectrum were engaged in the same work and subject to the same punishment.
I see O’Hare’s narrative of colorblindness as promoting a particular socialist agenda.
When O’Hare describes the nature of compensation, she notes how “all the difference between the wealth I created and the pittance paid me went, not into the treasury of the nation I was presumed to have injured, not into the treasury of the state of Missouri, but into the pockets of the prison contractor as profits.”114 A little later, she reveals to readers that “practically all the products of the prison shops go into the market…in competition with free labor and legitimate capital, but also under false and misleading labels; much of it is sold in violation of state laws.”115 These remarks reveal O’Hare’s positionality as a socialist leader in the American West. She writes that “at the heart of the whole problem of prison brutality is the ever-present and age-old problem of the exploitation of human
labour and of the profits accruing from it.”116
Here, O’Hare makes manifest what was hinted
at in the preceding quotes: that for her, prison
labor is but one manifestation of the exploitative
structure of capitalism.
113 O’Hare, In Prison, 109. 114 O’Hare, In Prison, 102. 115 O’Hare, In Prison, 107. 116 O’Hare, In Prison, 108. Kahne 63
The audiences for O’Hare’s writings are her political constituents: mostly working-class whites. As a political prisoner, Kate is writing to advance the socialist cause. Racial ordering to this work would be downplayed to stress its Marxist valence for in the American South women’s work was clearly divided along lines of race. For epistemological and political reasons noted, O’Hare would not bring up race as a divider of female work experience. Images from the prison archive support O’Hare’s narrative of interracial prison environments.
This image, taken at C.S.P., shows an interracial group of females participating in a business class. Though it is unknown whether this photograph was published, it is critical to note that it may have been used to assert the ubiquity of gender across race, and may not be reflective of the work environments these women were engaged in.
O’Hare’s memoir stresses the ubiquitous nature of exploitation in prison work environments across gender, and also points to the specific injustices females played in penal workspaces. Her deployment of Southern slavery and silences around a gendered- racial order in prison work environments reflect her socialist positionality and the political aims of her writing. Her memoir and this image are in conversation with the next piece of evidence, which are the C.S.P.’s matron’s reports in the early twentieth-century.
C.S.P. Matron’s Reports Every two years, C.S.P. submitted a report to the legislature. This mostly included accounts of how the money allotted to the prison was spent and requests for money for the upcoming biennial period. The report also included notes from the prison warden, chaplain, and a detailed table of what jobs inmates were working. Information on the lives of female inmates comprised between two and three pages of the entire report, and was compiled by the prison matron. Although C.S.P. accepted female inmates in 1871— Kahne 64 its first year of operation—the first matron’s report does not appear in the archival record until 1906. Matron’s reports began a cover page with qualitative assessments of the female inmates, followed by quantitative data, with information including the prisoner’s place of birth, occupation before conviction, and crime committed.
Rhetoric from the first page of the matron’s reports at C.S.P. from 1906-1940 shows how ideologies of rehabilitation for C.S.P. inmates conformed to a narrative of white femininity. Domestic services such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry featured prominently in the reports, as well as traditionally gendered such work such as sewing, crocheting, and knitting. The reports also note that women worked with animals and in the prison garden with vegetables and flowers.117 In 1912, matron Elizabeth Kerst note how “everything is being taught in helping the women make an honorable living for themselves, or excellent home, and housekeepers.”118 This emphasis on domesticity and housekeeping falls in line with early twentieth-century notions of white femininity, epitomized by the Cult of True Womanhood. This C.S.P narrative overlaps with the
evidence of O’Hare, who asserts that women in
the Midwest were making overalls—another
kind of textile work. Images of white women
working at sewing machines reify the
hegemonic gendered narrative of prison work.
Extant visual imagery affirms that race
117 C.S.P. matron’s reports, 1906-1940. 118 C.S.P. Biennial Report 1910-1912, 69-72, 69. Kahne 65 did not challenge female identity in a Western prison. A examination of the matron’s qualitative assessment of the female quarters, as well as a quantitative analysis of birthplace, provides space to question the ubiquity of this narrative.
The 1916 C.S.P. matron’s report, submitted by Cora Kirkham, begins to subvert this narrative in recalling how
[T]he type of prisoners received during this two years has varied more than in past periods. The fact that we are receiving more Federal female prisoners west of the Mississippi river has brought this about more than any other cause, as their crimes are usually of a different nature than the average run of state prisoners, and they have been drawn from all quarters.
The entirety of Texas is west of the Mississippi River. Texas participated heavily in roadwork programs from 1890-1910. As a former Confederate state, Texas was deeply immersed in an antebellum racial-gendered order. Its racial breakdown of prisoners on road camps illustrates a racial definition of womanhood, where African-American women worked on roads and white women engaged in more traditionally feminine activities. Kirkham’s note that the “type” of female prisoner has changed reflects this shift. She attributes this change to the inclusion of federal female prisoners. Her rhetoric is reminiscent of Lombrosian ideology, which categorized female criminals with a language of types. Lombroso had deployed this language in order to advance an essentializing and deeply racist understanding of female criminality. The shifts in
Coloradan prison demographics, as well as Kirkham’s rhetoric suggest that the racial profiles at C.S.P. were becoming less white. An examination of the data recorded on prison birthplace further validates the possibility of African-American women at the
C.S.P. woman’s prison.119
119 Race did appear as a category for men in 1936. Kahne 66
Prior to 1916, the only native-born female Southerner at C.S.P. was from
Alabama. The 1922, ’24, ’26, and ’28 reports all list Texas as the number one contributor of female inmates. States such as Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Louisiana also show higher numbers after 1916. The races of these Southern inmates, or any C.S.P. female prisoner across the twentieth-century, are not accounted for in these reports. The lack of a written record around the women’s race does not mean that the women did not have a race. Though geography and race are not synonymous, place of origin helps contemporary researches racialize a penal landscape that remains color-blind in the official record.
The first matron’s report was included two years before Tynan took office and established the first honor road camp. C.S.P. began receiving all federal female prisoners west of the Mississippi between 1914 and 1916, at the height of Tynan’s roadwork program. Texas provided the highest number of inmates between 1922 and 1928. Tynan resigned from office in 1927. Texas’ numbers dramatically dropped between 1928 and
1930. o and Texas’ unmatched numbers illustrate how Tynan’s roadwork camps coincided C.S.P.’s influx of federal female prisoners.
Without a comprehensive tabulation of intake records for women between 1906 and 1930, we cannot know what percentage of the women were African-American. Even with this information, there would be no way to definitely state whether women of color were working on C.S.P. road crews. The simultaneous presence of roadwork programs and influx of Southern female convicts suggests the possibility of these women working on road camps. Knowledge that women of color in the lease system and on chain gangs in the American South shorten the imaginative leap that female inmates of color in Kahne 67
Colorado were being worked in a similar fashion. These temporal and ideological linkages present the possibility of women of color working on the road camp programs.120
120 In the 1922 and ’24 biennial reports, Matron Mary Fitzgerald mentions the trusty program. She asserts how “many of the inmates are deserving of trusty time…[and that] it is pleasing to note that….the benefit of the ‘trusty’ system has been further extended to female prisoners”. (’22 and ’24 reports, respectively. The trusty system is strongly associated with the honor road camps, where each prisoner was given ten days off for every month of work on the crew. Of course, the trusty system could have been applied to prisoners in different occupation; however, it is still important to note the temporal significance at C.S.P. Kahne 68
The early twentieth-century shift from private labor to the public account system had, in the former Confederacy, entrenched an antebellum racialized order on Southern chain gangs. While advocates of C.S.P.’s honor road camps adamantly denied Southern influence, the racial and racist landscape of late-nineteenth-century Colorado suggests that such influence was not only possible but probable. In the American South, meanwhile, racialized definitions of womanhood were enacted in the decision to place white women in domestic spaces and women on the road. Demographics of female inmates at the height of C.S.P.’s roadwork program showcased higher numbers of
Southern women. The racist underpinnings of roadwork in a national discourse, the success of C.S.P.’s honor roadwork programs, the racist landscape of Colorado, and the presence of Southern women at C.S.P. alike present a real possibility that the gendered- racial order of the antebellum South found its way to the American west through Tynan’s roadwork programs.
Further research might definitively demonstrate that C.S.P. enacted this gendered- racial order in its roadwork programs. Excavating the racial makeup C.S.P.’s female inmates and scouting for images of honor work crews are further steps to be taken in the
Cañon City archives. Information on Warden Tynan’s life is potentially helpful. Where he trained to become a prison warden would be useful in ascertaining the human and material resources that served as direct influences on his leadership. Tynan’s involvement with the Klan in Cañon City—where they were political and social allies—would be critical in evaluating the extent to which Tynan would have implemented Southern white supremacist ideology in his prison. Kahne 69
The significance of this argument is not that women of color were (very likely) working on C.S.P.’s road camps. That has not been definitely proven. What has been proven is the possibility for a transfer of Southern gendered-racial ideology to Colorado through prison labor, specifically, in the early twentieth-century penal practice of roadwork. The ideology of a gendered-racial order manifestly operated in Southern chain gangs, where white women worked as domestics and on farms, and men and women of color worked on roads. Jim Crow ideology of the inherent difference of the races is displayed in the practices of Southern chain gangs, where prison labor internalized and upheld racist ideologies that both reflected and permeated broader society. Convict labor—as a performance—is powerful not only because of the immense material profit that it reaps but also because of the ideologies that it upholds. That the gendered-racial order codified in Southern chain gangs was perpetuated in the C.S.P. practice of roadwork, especially because of the racist leadership of the Klan in 1920s Cañon and the presence of Texas female felons, is a plausible historical continuity.
Whether or not the archive can provide definitive proof, the power of convict labor to instantiate social ideologies of race and gender is evident in Colorado’s carceral history. Attempts to reconcile with an American legacy of slavery demand attention be paid to the American institutional practice of convict labor, and the racial and gendered ideologies reified within it.
Kahne 70
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