Slavery, sugar, and the Texas prison system

Two New York Times articles published over the weekend deserve readers' attention for their illumination of racist history that informs many of the Texas topics covered on this blog.

First up, Bryan Stevenson has an excellent piece on the role of slavery in development of modern prison systems. While many authors have cited this history as the source of modern-day racial disparities, Stevenson focuses much more on slavery's contribution to Americans' acceptance of excessively harsh and dehumanizing punishments, including public torture and maiming of victims while white onlookers gathered in crowds eating deviled eggs and drinking lemonade.

Though not focused on Texas, Stevenson also described the convict leasing system common throughout the South that dominated Texas' prison system well into the 20th century.

In Texas and Louisiana, the story of convict leasing centered in large part around sugar, with the now-defunct Imperial Sugar in Sugar Land, Texas, the center of the industry in the Lone Star State. In Louisiana, we learn in another Times story titled, "The Barbaric History of Sugar in America," "Even today, incarcerated men harvest Angola’s cane, which is turned into syrup and sold on-site." The author argues that the modern American sugar obsession wasn't inevitable. Refined sugar would have remained a rare luxury product without the existence of a large, captive work force that could be coerced to perform labor which free men would never choose.

Every evil thing done to make sugar under slavery also happened on the Jim-Crow-era prison farms. The unmarked graves cropping up around the old Central-Unit property in Sugar Land are a testament to this dark legacy.

Serendipitously, on the most recent Reasonably Suspicious podcast, Michael Hall and I included a song in the Top Five Great American Prison Songs that speaks directly to the these sugar-plantation practices: "Ain't No Cane on the Brazos." I had never heard the original version before, and it's amazing. Give it a listen:


The song describes black prisoners cutting cane on the Brazos River from 1904 to 1910. At times this business was so deadly they'd run across bodies of fellow inmates on "every row," the song declared. (Some of those described are surely men whose corpses are being discovered now.) When cane couldn't be cut fast enough, according to the song, black women were brought in to work alongside the men. Every line is punctuated by mournful moaning in which the suffering in the cane fields is made heart breakingly palpable.

Indeed, this history was a big part of the reason Grits pushed for closing the Central Unit a few years ago. True, I'd like to close many more prisons, but there was a reason the Central Unit was targeted first. When the wind down took longer than expected, I wrote:

For my part, the Central Unit's economic role in the prison system's ag business was one of the reasons I favored it as a prime target for closure. Not only was Central's historic role symbolic, breaking it up would end some of the last remaining physical vestiges of the old convict leasing system, replaced to a lesser and far-less brutal extent in the modern era by in-house agricultural operations on the agency's vast real estate holdings. Grits isn't surprised it has taken longer than expected to untangle a century's worth of economic ties wrapped up in the Central Unit's operations, but I'm glad it's happening.

Certainly, one could point to stories (and songs) about inmates cutting down timber in the East Texas forests, or even picking cotton. But harvesting cane was especially deadly and unremittingly terrible. What happened at the prison units around Sugar Land was a human-rights tragedy of immense proportions, perpetrated with state government's profit-sharing cooperation and explicit stamp of approval.

Check out the two Times pieces linked above, they're describing important, seldom-discussed history with significant implications for the Lone Star State.

Sugar Land, convict leasing, and the future of TX prison closures

At Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy has the story of a campaign by a former TDCJ prison guard named Reginald Moore to get the city of Sugar Land to acknowledge the history of slavery, convict leasing, and plantation culture on which the area's economy was founded. There's a bunch of good stuff here. For example, the Jester Unit(s) sit:

on land that was part of the 97,400-acre tract granted by the Mexican government to Stephen F. Austin in 1823 for his services as impresario. Like most of the Anglo settlers he brought to what was then northern Mexico, Austin was a Southerner, and he saw Texas as fertile ground for creating the kind of cotton plantations that were flourishing across the South. In his recent book Seeds of Empire, University of North Texas historian Andrew Torget writes that “the rapid movement of U.S. expatriates into northern Mexico was—more than anything—a continuation of the endless search by Americans during those years for the best cotton lands along North America’s rich Gulf Coast.” Integral to cotton farming was slavery, which Austin encouraged by granting settlers 80 acres of extra land for each slave they brought with them.

This is important, little-discussed history about the political economy of the Texas prison system in the 19th and 20th centuries (for more, Robert Perkinson did a decent job with it in Texas Tough). Again, from Hardy:

Then came the Civil War. The South’s defeat and the abolition of slavery plunged the Texas economy into a depression. Deprived of their labor force, most of the sugar plantations on the Lower Brazos went bankrupt. One of the few that survived was the Williams plantation, which was purchased after the war by Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry A. Ellis, business partners and Confederate veterans. 

Cunningham and Ellis survived the abolition of slavery by finding a new source of cheap labor: the Texas prison system. Although they weren’t the first growers to use convict labor, they were the biggest: in 1878 they signed a contract with the state to lease Texas’s entire prison population. This was perfectly legal, since the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, made one very consequential exception: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Italics added.) 

In the years before the Civil War, Texas’s state prisons had held around two hundred inmates, all kept at a single facility, in Huntsville. After abolition, the prison population exploded, disproportionately with black men. Unable to house and feed all the new prisoners, the state began renting them out to private companies, who were grateful for the supply of cheap labor. ...

The working conditions in Cunningham and Ellis’s sugar fields were as bad or worse than they had been on the slave plantations. Mosquito-borne epidemics, frequent beatings, and a lack of medical care resulted in a 3 percent annual mortality rate. The plantation soon became notorious across the state as the “Hellhole on the Brazos.” ...

Between 1906 and 1908 the plantation and its sugar-processing operations were bought up by Isaac H. Kempner, of Galveston, and William T. Eldridge, of Eagle Lake, who formally incorporated as the Imperial Sugar Company. Although Eldridge had used convict labor on another farm, Kempner was opposed to the practice and began planning to transition to free labor. To attract a new labor force, the two men established a company town, Sugar Land, with worker housing, stores, and a modern hospital. 

Texas’s experiment with convict leasing was coming to an end anyway. In 1910, following a series of newspaper investigations of the Texas prison system, the Legislature formally ended the practice; by 1914 all prisoners were back under the exclusive control of the state. From then on, the only entity that would benefit from the coerced labor of prisoners would be the Texas Department of Corrections. 

To be fair, this history hasn't been entirely forgotten, even if Hardy's protagonist finds himself fighting a lonely battle in Sugar Land, where city officials are clearly in denial, promoting some weird, Chamber of Commerce line that pretends that Texas history began post-Jim Crow. Indeed, that history was one of the reasons reformers targeted the Central Unit as the first one for closure. As Grits wrote when the facility shuttered:

For my part, the Central Unit's economic role in the prison system's ag business was one of the reasons I favored it as a prime target for closure. Not only was Central's historic role symbolic, breaking it up would end some of the last remaining physical vestiges of the old convict leasing system, replaced to a lesser and far-less brutal extent in the modern era by in-house agricultural operations on the agency's vast real estate holdings.

Similarly, Grits has argued that the Jester Unit and several others clustered together near Richmond, in Fort Bend County, should be the next state facilities targeted for closure. They're surrounded by million-dollar homes, suburban schools, and not one but two country clubs. So the historic and systemic concerns raised in this article combine with NIMBYism and the irresistible logic of property values to make those facilities prime targets for closure if TDCJ's population continues to decline. 

After a $458 million budget hike last session, TDCJ has been ordered to cut $264 million from its budget for the 2018-19 biennium. That will require reducing incarceration levels and closing facilities. Recent history shows that cuts to core services like prisoner food and healthcare have limited real-world value. We've cut those costs to the bone, and then some. If the Lege wants prisons to cost less, they must choose to operate fewer of them, and change the law to incarcerate fewer people.

Grits isn't sure the groundwork has been sufficiently laid to close these Fort Bend facilities yet: They could become more vulnerable in 2019 and 2021 if inmate populations continue to decline. And in the near term, the state would save more money in the next budget cycle by declining to renew several private prison contracts which expire in August 2017. But over the next five years or so, the fate of those units around Richmond will likely come into play, and this history will inevitably become part of that dialogue. Perhaps then, these forgotten stories Mr. Moore is unearthing will end up playing a more prominent role in debates over the area's future than the blindered town fathers in Sugar Land can presently contemplate.

Central Unit not 100% closed: Targeting prison closures based on economic, budget benefits

The Austin Statesman's Mike Ward reported Friday evening ("Over a year after closure, state prison still runs some operations," Jan. 18) that, despite de-funding in the last budget, TDCJ's Central Unit in Sugar Land is not yet fully closed, though the prisoners there were moved to other units. The reasons won't surprise anyone familiar with the Central Unit's history - it was formerly the Imperial Unit, built to provide leased convict labor to the Imperial Sugar Company and one of the facilities at the heart of the agency's agricultural operations in the region, which are extensive.

Prison officials say moving out the convicts was the easy part, especially with excess capacity in other prisons. But it’s taken more time to shut down the other operations at the Central Unit, which served as a regional warehousing and distribution point for a variety of goods to keep running the more than two dozen other prisons in the area. Plus, officials said, the lockup farmed various crops on several hundred acres.

With the previous residents gone, convicts and guards had to be brought in from another prison about a mile away to continue those operations. ...

“It’s taken us a while to move those operations,” said Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “Both were significant projects.”

A new warehouse is being built at the Terrell Unit, down the road to the south, and new agriculture facilities will be added at the Pack Unit near Navasota — at an additional cost of nearly $7.6 million.

The final closure date for prison operations at the Central Unit site? Probably in July, officials said, after the new warehouse and the ag operations are complete.

When prison operations finally cease, the site is to be turned over to the General Land Office to be sold. “We’re still waiting,” said Land Office spokesman Jim Suydam.

While I'd prefer the facility had closed more quickly so the budget savings could be more easily argued, it sounds like the delay won't affect plans to move forward with closing more prison units. "[L]egislative leaders and prison officials agree that additional closures are likely," Ward reported.

For my part, the Central Unit's economic role in the prison system's ag business was one of the reasons I favored it as a prime target for closure. Not only was Central's historic role symbolic, breaking it up would end some of the last remaining physical vestiges of the old convict leasing system, replaced to a lesser and far-less brutal extent in the modern era by in-house agricultural operations on the agency's vast real estate holdings. Grits isn't surprised it has taken longer than expected to untangle a century's worth of economic ties wrapped up in the Central Unit's operations, but I'm glad it's happening.

In general, criminal-justice economics requires a long view. Prisons take a long time to build and once built cannot be easily de-commissioned. The effects of raising or reducing already-long sentences may not show up in state budgets, in practice, until a decade out, but the failure to make that calculus has been the main reason why Texas prison budgets and populations ballooned. It took Texas four decades to get in the fix we're in and the ship of state turns slowly.

Notably, the two units Sen. Whitmire has suggested for closure - the Dawson State Jail in Dallas and the Mineral Wells pre-parole unit - are both operated by a private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, and arguably simply ending a contract requires less wind-down time than closing one of the state's oldest units whose facilities were an integral part of their regional ag operations. (Grits should mention that these are the two units this blog predicted were most likely next on the chopping block back in August 2011.)

A big reason the Central Unit was considered "easy" to close was that the local chamber of commerce crowd wanted the land there opened up for development. A similar dynamic is the main reason why the Dawson State Jail is on the list. It stands on a site where the city of Dallas would like private developers to construct what's been dubbed the "Trinity River Project."

Looking strictly at property in a similar position vis a vis real estate development interests, Ward noted back in 2011 that the state might consider more prison closures in Fort Bend County: "a new high school and homes have popped up near the Jester I Unit. A new intermediate school and strip-center have opened just across from the Jester III and IV prisons. Custom homes, some valued at about $1 million, back up to the Vance Unit. Prison cotton fields and livestock sheds now sit alongside for-sale signs along Texas 99 that bisects the former prison farms."

OTOH, Huntsville ISD has found its property tax revenue choked off because of vast tax-exempt TDCJ holdings in Walker County. An economic argument could be made for targeted closures and property sell-offs there. Or, the Legislature could consider closing one or more of the rural units having the most trouble maintaining adequate staffing. If legislators decided to consider prison closures beyond Dawson State Jail and the Mineral Wells unit, those might be some of the logical options ripe for consideration, one would think.

Just as past Legislatures that approved Texas' prison expansions, authoring an array of new felonies and "enhancements," didn't have to budget the real, long-term costs of their policies at the time they enacted them, the economic benefits of de-incarceration won't be immediate, but in the long-term will be far more significant than just tinkering around the edges of the corrections budget.

Sale of Imperial Sugar, Central Unit closure denote end of an era

Picture via 'Leadbelly: Life, Legend, Legacy'

Imperial Sugar is selling out to an international conglomerate the year after the Texas Legislature chose to close the Central Unit (formerly the Imperial unit) which was an early center of convict leasing that made Imperial a lucrative enterprise a century ago, with labor costs not much higher than a slave owner's. Grits finds it ironic that both institutions should dissolve so close to one another, as though their fates were somehow entwined.

In the book Texas Tough (pp. 205-206), historian Robert Perkinson said the Imperial unit's expansion and renaming as the Central Unit came in the face of calls for reform out of New York and "signaled that Texas's penal system would develop on its own terms, rooted in the Texas slavery belt and devoted, above all, to plantation production."

It was at the Imperial/Central unit that Texas Governor Pat Neff supposedly promised Leadbelly, the great murderer-minstrel (pictured), his pardon, famously delivered on the final day of his administration. Now the plantations are gone, the Central Unit has closed, and Imperial Sugar in all likelihood will no longer exist as a brand. For southeast Texas, the sale of Imperial Sugar in some ways provides a capstone for a confluence of events that, taken together, amount to the end of an era. Indeed, one hopes history may some day identify it as a signal point, a prelude to a new era.of deincarceration and even more prison closures. Perhaps it's crazy to imagine, but stranger things have happened, many of  them right there in Sugar Land.

Texas justice initiatives presaged changing public opinion on reform

Could Texas' closed Central Unit in Sugar Land "symbolize a new approach to justice in America?"

PBS' Need to Know posed that question Friday evening in a 25-minute feature on Texas corrections reforms and the state's closure of its first-ever prison unit in last year, interviewing state Sen. John Whitmire in the bowels of the now-empty Central Unit. "You can't build your way out of the problem," said Whitmire. "If you don't deal with the root causes of crime, you'll never, ever have enough prisons. You'll bankrupt your state." The closed prison unit, said the chairman, is "the evidence we need that we're doing something right, and we're not compromising public safety." At one point, Whitmire said "most" of the 12,000 women locked up in TDCJ probably don't need to be there.

PBS also interviewed outgoing House Corrections Chairman Jerry Madden who recalled how, when he was named Chairman in 2005, House Speaker Tom Craddick called him in and said eight words to him that "changed my life": They were, "Don't build new prisons, they cost too much." Madden estimates that so far Texas' reforms have saved the state around $2 billion.

In a blast from the past, the story quoted Gov. Rick Perry's 2007 State of the State speech, showing a clip where the Governor declared that "There are thousands of non-violent offenders in the system whose future we cannot ignore. Let's focus more resources on rehabilitating those offenders so that we can ultimately spend less locking them up again," he advised to hearty applause. Another nifty quote: "Doing the intelligent thing is not being soft," said District Judge Robert Francis, who runs a reentry court in Dallas.

The reporter marveled that with Texas' reforms diverting thousands from prison, crime rates continued to fall even as incarceration rates declined. And Jeff Greenfield interviewed Adam Gelb from the Pew Center on the States to ask if Texas' "experiment" might become a "national movement." Gelb discussed how conservatives like those who've signed onto the Right on Crime principles are able to get to the same place on the issues as moderates and liberals, often agreeing on outcomes for different ideological reasons.

Relatedly Gelb's colleagues at the Pew Center on the States just released a public opinion poll which affords reason for optimism that the public would support further changes along these lines. Among the top line findings:

• American voters believe too many people are in prison and the nation spends too much on imprisonment.
• Voters overwhelmingly support a variety of policy changes that shift non-violent offenders from prison to more effective, less expensive alternatives.
• Support for sentencing and corrections reforms (including reduced prison terms) is strong across political parties, regions, age, gender, and racial/ethnic groups.

Here's an image providing more detail from the national survey (pdf) of 1,200 likely voters:

Moreover:

For reasons about which we can only speculate, public opinion appears to have shifted on questions of mass incarceration. Asked “Do you think there are too many people in prison in the United States, not enough people in prison, or is the number of people in prison about right?,” The results were:

Too many: 45%:
About right: 28%
Too few: 13%
Don't know: 14%

On average, said Pew, voters think about 20% of US prisoners could be released without harming public safety.

Remarkably, 69% supported the statement, “One out of every 100 American adults is in prison. That’s too many, and it costs too much. There are more effective, less expensive alternatives to prison for non-violent offenders and expanding those alternatives is the best way to reduce the crime rate,” with a whopping 50% saying they "strongly support" it. Among major state budget items, more voters said they were willing to cut prisons (48%) than any other area of government.

Fully 77% of voters agreed that “Our spending on corrections has grown from $10 billion to $50 billion over the last twenty years but we are not getting a clear and convincing return on that investment in terms of public safety,” including 76% of Republicans surveyed.

Equally fascinating is that common tuff-on-crime messages are beginning to lose their appeal. Asked if they agreed with the statement, “People who commit crimes belong behind bars, end of story. It may cost a lot of money to run prisons, but it would cost society more in the long run if more criminals were on the street,” just 25% said they supported it (15% strongly support). The public just isn't buying that common argument anymore, according to these data.

Reports like these give me hope that Texas may continue down a reformist path despite considerable political uncertainty. It's purportedly a Chinese curse to wish on another that they "live in interesting times," but without question we certainly do.

TDCJ board chair: Future prison closures possible

Reader Texas Maverick emails to point out this passage from the board minutes (pdf) of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's August 2011 meeting:

Chairman [Oliver] Bell commented that the closure of the Central Unit has been a positive story and stated he was pleased the current trends have allowed the board and the TDCJ to be able to close a unit. The Central Unit has been studied for closure for the last six to eight years. Crime rates are down and offender populations are relatively flat. If the trends continue, Chairman Bell stated it might be possible more prisons could close in the future.

TDCJ executive director Brad Livinsgston told the board that "the closure of the Central Unit is a success story that the TDCJ can tout." I'm glad that's the board's perception. Given the budget situation, they'll need more of the same in 2013 to avoid prison costs spurring significant tax hikes.

Historic adult, youth prison closures driven by budget red ink, rehab goals

The Statesman's Mike Ward has a story on the Texas Legislature's historic decision to close one adult prison in Sugar Land and three youth lockups, the first time the state's has shuttered such facilities:

For the first time in its history, Texas is shuttering a prison -- a creaky, 102-year-old lockup southwest of Houston once made famous in the folk song "Midnight Special."

Half the state away in Brownwood, a Texas Youth Commission lockup for teenage lawbreakers sits empty, one of three juvenile prisons closed effective Sunday as part of a state plan to focus mostly on community-based rehabilitation and treatment programs.

The empty cells were once unthinkable in a tough-on-crime state like Texas that once couldn't build prisons fast enough.

Texas joins a nationwide trend of shutting expensive state prisons, driven partly by red ink in state budgets, partly by a drop in convict numbers -- with the lowest crime rate since 1973 -- and partly by a policy shift from lock-'em-up justice to rehabilitation programs.

"From where Texas was just a few short years ago, this is huge," said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, a Richardson Republican and an architect of the changes. "There were those who said this day would never come."

Proposed TDCJ property sales

The Texas House voted yesterday for HB 2969 to sell property around the Central Unit in Sugar Land and 896 acres attached to the Estelle Unit in Huntsville. It also authorizes the sale of up to three, unspecified TYC facilities. The Estelle property is presently used "for cattle grazing, timber production, and recreational hunting."

In a report (pdf) last fall, the General Land Office also suggested selling off 16.4 acres in Mineral Wells, but that apparently didn't make it onto the list, probably because of deed restrictions on the property and the need to clean up soil and groundwater contamination and hazardous materials in the buildings. TDCJ owns 122,374 acres worth $2.4 billion at market value, according to the GLO. The Comptroller says there are more than 11,000 acres of "underused" TDCJ lands.

Grits had hoped the state would close the Dawson State Jail in Dallas - which the City of Dallas wants to use for its proposed Trinity River development - and selling off that property as well, but the Department of Criminal Justice has successfully fought off additional prison closures.

The Central Unit and TYC units would only be sold if the final budget eliminates their operating funds. All the properties would have to be sold by Sept. 1, 2013.

Second prison closure planned this fiscal year

This is a good sign, via the Statesman's Mike Ward:

State prison officials, their initial budget-cutting plans rejected by legislative leaders, have shuffled the deck and come up with a new proposal to cut more administrative jobs and close two prisons earlier than planned as a way to save $50 million.

The revised plan, provided to Senate and House leaders yesterday, would lay off an additional 400 administrative workers at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and move up the planned closure of the 1,000-bed Central Unit near Sugar Land to sometime before Aug. 31.

In addition, 500 beds at the 2,100-bed Mineral Wells Unit — a private contract prison for convicts who are soon to be paroled — would be closed by August.

TDCJ still plans to eliminate some treatment capacity and Project RIO, the job assistance/reentry program, as part of its 2.5% cuts, which must be implemented in the current fiscal year. And there's an extent to which Mineral Wells and the Central Unit were the easy first calls regarding prison closures. Future decisions will get tougher. Still, it's a hopeful sign to see legislators pressing the agency to close prisons to preserve treatment programming:

Added Sen. Kevin Eltife, R-Tyler, a member of a Senate working group on corrections spending: “We sent them on a mission to come up with $50 million in cuts that wouldn’t adversely impact parole and probation and (treatment) programs … and they did a good job.”

Sugar Land anxious to get rid of 'unwelcome neighbor'

I'm not sure every community would embrace the proposed closure of a state prison so gracefully, but locals in Sugar Land are welcoming the closure of TDCJ's Central Unit, reports Katie McCall at KTRK-TV:

It's something people have been wanting for years. Now there are new talks of closing down a big state prison in Sugar Land. The prison near Highway 6 and Highway 90 is near the airport and several neighborhoods.

The central prison unit has been a Fort Bend County fixture since 1909, but to nearby homeowners it is an unwelcome neighbor.

Homeowner Yenni Kuncoro said, "I think it's better that the prison is out of the neighborhood area because it's a safety for the children. Also the surrounding neighborhood is more secure."

Now the unit is the subject of discussion at the Capitol in Austin. With the state trying to tighten its belt in the wake of a massive budget shortfall, selling off this prime real estate that sits on 337 acres on Highway 90 is, to some lawmakers, a no brainer.

Rep. Charles Howard said, "There is no question at all that this property is prime potential for development which would bring in more jobs and more value and thus help the city and the county and the state."

Howard is all for the proposed closure of the unit in September, with possible redevelopment as a business park. The city of Sugar Land and local business leaders are also on board.

"There would be generation of additional taxes both for our school district, the county, and the state of Texas if this property was put on the tax rolls," said Sugar Land City Manager Allen Bogard.

The Central Unit's property abuts the local, regional airport, and sits between the City of Sugar Land and a locally subsidized industrial park down the road. Lately the locals approved building a minor league baseball stadium near the site. In other words, a site that in 1909 was out in the sticks (basically a plantation owned by Imperial Sugar which leased inmate workers from the state) is now in Sugar Land's prime urban growth corridor. A lot of other older state-owned units are in the same boat; shutting some of them and selling the vast swaths of property surrounding them could be a tremendous source of budget relief.

RELATED: See a feasibility study (pdf) for relocating the Central Unit published by TDCJ two years ago. At the time, the agency wouldn't contemplate simply closing the facility but instead analyzed three "scenarios" of its own suggestion: Closing the unit and leasing beds, building a new facility nearby, or building a new facility somewhere else. Embracing outright closure by reducing the overall inmate population eliminates most of the complications and costs that the agency used as a fig leaf to claim shutting down the Central Unit wouldn't save money.

See also related Grits posts:

• Sugar Land's Central Unit near top of possible prison closure list
• Dallas, Sugarland locals to TDCJ: Move, please
• Whitmire: Central Unit a "goner"
• Data on TDCJ unit age and cost
• Baseball stadium to be constructed near Central Unit in Sugar Land, will state close facility?
• Central Unit trusty broke out of, and back into prison for shopping trips
• As 2011 budget crisis looms, should most expensive prison units be closed?