While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a 2023-2024 Research Team at Social Science Matrix.
Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina’s history of convict labor, and shows how incarcerated labor shaped (and in turn, was shaped by) the state’s highway systems, landscapes, and scenic tourism industries in the early decades of the 20th century.
Xander Lenc is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley’s Geography Department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns—and their problems—from other economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. In doing so, he argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography.
Listen to the interview below or on Apple Podcasts. An edited transcript of the interview is included below.
Podcast Transcript
Woman’s voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Julia Sizek: Hello, and welcome to the Matrix Podcast. I’m Julia Sizek, your host. We’re recording today in the Ethnic Studies Changemaker Studio, and our guests are Xander Lenc and Elizabeth Hargrett. Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s history department and holds a Master’s degree in history from EHESS, in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina’s history of convict labor and shows how carceral networks shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the state’s highway systems, scenic tourism industries, and landscapes in the early decades of the 20th century. Xander Lenc is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s geography department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns and their problems from economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. He argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography. Welcome to the Matrix Podcast.
Elizabeth Hargrett: Thank you so much for having us, Julia.
Xander Lenc: Thank you, Julia.
Sizek: So let’s get started by understanding how prisoners become laborers. And what are the kinds of work that prisoners often end up doing in the United States and elsewhere?
Lenc: That’s a great question. I would say that, ironically, something that we might call “convict labor” or “prisoner labor” preexists anything that we would call the prison itself. You can look back to ancient Greece and ancient Rome, in particular, where the worst punishment wasn’t incarceration, it was being condemned to the mines. People often wouldn’t live more than six months to a year in hard labor. In the United States, similarly, indentured servitude, or penal transportation, preexisted the modern penitentiary, and was in many ways a major source of a lot of early colonization.
Before Eastern State Penitentiary, which is usually considered the first modern penitentiary in Philadelphia, it was common to use work gangs, etc. They were experimenting with all of these different styles of punishing people through committing them to labor, sometimes in public. The goal of the prison originally was partially to remove them from the public eye, and to make sure that the exposure to criminality in public would not move into the public itself through sympathy, because the public was often very sympathetic towards these work gangs. And the thought was that maybe criminality is this infectious substance that can move from the prisoner visually into a random housewife walking down the street.
One thing that I think is very common is that prisoners are chosen to do the labor that is hardest to find laborers to do. That’s often hard labor. It’s often, I would argue, related to mines or subterranean space; it’s often very dangerous, in spaces that are dark or disease-ridden. And in many cases, it’s infrastructural. It’s not simply an industrial mode of production, where you have a product that is going to be sold on the market, although there are experiments in this as well. But very frequently, it’s about, over time, compromises in the United States between capital and labor lead to opposition to products being sold on the open market. No one really likes that, because it depresses wages or depresses profits, and no one likes to compete with that. And laws are passed that make it much more common for the state to be the main consumer of anything that has been produced by prisoner labor. And one of the common outcomes of that is that producing infrastructure.
Hargrett: So, yeah, that’s a big question, and Xander answered it beautifully. So in the case of North Carolina, I think there are a series of laws that really worked to answer this question. In 1831, before the Civil War, there was a law that passed that said that the county sheriff could hire out to any person who would pay the fine, a free Black person or free person of color, who had failed to pay a debt. And then in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation, you may be familiar with the Black Codes, which was a series of sweeping laws that were passed across the states of the South that were passed with the aim to secure a compliant labor force in the wake of emancipation. These [Black Codes] criminalized [Blacks] serving on a jury, testifying against whites in court, it restricted the movement in and out of the state of free Black people, etc.
So that same year that the North Carolina Black Codes were passed, in 1866, the first law permitting the use of convict labor on county roads was passed. It was a very ad hoc practice at this point. There was no regulated system of governance around this. But that opened up the use of convict labor on county roads. With the erection of the penitentiary in 1870, convict labor was used to quarry the stone that would build the prison, and then in the actual construction of it. And any kind of prison labor that happened in the following decades, up until the expansion of the railroad system in North Carolina, was mostly manufacturing within the prison, so blacksmithing, carpentry, brick masonry, etc.
In 1872, however, a very important law was passed that legalized the leasing of convicts to railroads and private corporations, specifically a number of railroad companies that had started to build in North Carolina. And with regard to road building, as I said in 1866, that was the first law permitting the use of convict labor on county roads was used, but there was no law that treated any kind of organized system of county road labor until the Mecklenburg Law of 1885. That only applied to three counties at the time. But it was basically a template for the 1899 Road Law that would make it legal to use the labor of anyone who had been sentenced to 10 years or less.
So there are a lot of details I could have added in there, and that’s because the system of convict labor in general in North Carolina, as Alex Lichtenstein [NOTE: speaker meant to say Matthew J. Mancini] has said, has always devolved to the counties. So there were certain counties that would only employ the labor of people who had been sentenced to one year or less, others two years or less. Some actually passed laws that expanded it to anyone who had been sentenced for up to 20 years, etc. But those are, I think, the major legislative milestones that defined who, which prisoners were also laborers in North Carolina.
Sizek: Yeah, so both of you have pointed out that prisoners are used for very specific forms of labor. They aren’t just participating in normal sort of what we might call now capitalist industries. What is distinctive about prisoner labor? And what are the forms of labor that they are undertaking in comparison to private industries, or in comparison to competing government programs, like we might think about the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s?
Lenc: With prisoner labor, I think it’s important to emphasize that pretty much everything has been tried at one point. Penology in the United States was always sort of a very experimental frontier. And oftentimes, it was even left up to wardens to just try and figure things out. At certain points, where prisons were often being managed by private contractors, there was not necessarily a lot of oversight, depending on the time period – this changes over time – for what they’re expected to do. It’s sort of like an hacienda system or something, where they are given a grant to oversee this prison, and in exchange, they can do whatever they see fit to do to make money and make a profit off of the people they’re given dominion over. It is much more like buying slaves. In some cases, like in the Deep South coming out of reconstruction, a lot of people make arguments about whether or not there’s a pretty direct continuity from slavery. But it’s true that also this is very upsetting. If you are someone who employs wage labor, then you are not going to be very fond of your competitor not having to pay wages, because prisoners — or paying very little, as is the case today. And similarly, laborers in rival unions in that trade are not going to be happy that there are other laborers who have a wage of zero.
So over time, there’s a lot of political pressure to stem how much competition there is in the market for anything that is produced from a prison industry. And in most states, this is restricted pretty quickly in the 19th century, as this practice develops, and as penitentiaries proliferated across. And where I study, in the West, there are, however, some important exceptions that ended up getting made. After the transcontinental railroad is finished, there are suddenly a lot of unemployed Chinese men who are entering new industries. And this helps fuel a white supremacist labor movement. The most prominent organization of this is the California Workingmen’s Party, and they have a very nativist, white supremacist, labor-oriented ideology that is very influential in politics. They’re very successful at the California constitutional convention, and implement a number of anti-Chinese and also a number of anti-prison labor platforms. However, they do start to strategize to figure out how you can leverage prisoner labor to specifically target industries where Chinese workers were entering. Sometimes, in some cases, prisoner labor was targeted to reorganize the labor market specifically to hurt certain workers by the primarily white labor movement at the time in California.
Right now, I’m working on a history of Folsom State Prison, in California. And one of the benefits for the boosters at least is that they claimed that the quarry that prisoners could work there would compete with other quarries that were employing Chinese laborers in Northern California at the time. And their hope was to eventually depress Chinese wages enough that it would be impossible to survive as a Chinese man in California, and people would leave. This was part of an explicitly white supremacist movement that was emerging at the time. And it is not really clear that it worked very well.
However, it did lead to some other union busting. And also, white union workers ended up being impacted. For example, as they’re building the state capitol, which is buying granite from the Folsom quarry, union workers who were opposed to any sort of prison labor products refused to work. And the state said, “I’m sorry, but the law requires us to buy our own products, so I guess we can’t use union labor. We would love to, but we’re not going to be able to do that.” So it did really end up backfiring for white supremacist labor organizers at the time, I would argue. And you see this in a couple of other cases. It does not seem — and part of the problem is that it is not necessarily true that quarries were exclusively being worked by Chinese laborers, and the failure to recognize that there are white laborers in these industries too also made this white supremacist movement falter. It was really inconsistent in the actual demographics of the labor market at the time.
Hargrett: So in the case of the road building in North Carolina, initially, labor competition wasn’t an issue at all, mainly because of their statute road labor system, in which roads were built and maintained — mostly maintained, these dirt roads across the state — by citizens in lieu of a road tax system. However, this system became less and less efficient. When there was this shift to convict labor, that is when organized labor, in particular the [North Carolina] State Federation of Labor, came to see convict labor as a threat. And consistently, from the 1900s well into the 1930s, which is the period that I’m looking at, and probably well beyond, pushed back against the use of convict labor on roads, often calling for its abolition. For the railroads, from the 1870s, the reduced cost of using convict labor instead of free labor did pose a threat to free labor, and that was absolutely a concern of organized labor in the 1870s and beyond.
Lenc: I would emphasize, too, that, if anything, one of the primary objective products of prison labor programs, from the point of view of wardens, is a well-disciplined prisoner. Even if it cost more money to operate these programs, oftentimes wardens still would desire to have them, because the fear was that prisoners who don’t have anything to do all day are more likely to riot, to misbehave, not to listen. And if you are committing them to hard labor, then there’s a familiar factory disciplinary system that you can adopt. You don’t have the wage system that you can use to discipline workers, but there’s a familiar sort of product. It was seen very genuinely by some wardens as — who have adopted this Protestant work ethic ideology — as a way that you can rehabilitate someone, by committing them to work. And the problem with prisoners is they had never worked before, which of course was very rarely true, I would argue, but this was a sincerely held belief. So even if money was not successfully pouring in, very frequently there was still a desire to commit people to work. Work is an ideology, and not just a source of income, for many of these prisons.
Hargrett: Right. And with regard to competition, if we’re thinking about the time period in which, for example, the North Carolina State Penitentiary was built, one of the main goals of a lot of these penitentiaries was just to have a self-sustaining prison. And a lot of the work that was being done in these prisons was toward that aim. So as I talked about before, there was blacksmithing, quarrying, etc., and it all kind of funneled back into the prison. Any manufacturing that was being done at the time in the late 19th century didn’t necessarily, at least in the case of North Carolina, pose any threats.
And it seems like in the 1910s, 20s, 30s and beyond, once convict labor began to be seriously used in public roadwork, that organized labor would argue for that return to a convict labor force that served – that worked only in service of the state. For example, the president of the State Federation of Labor in 1930 again argued for the complete abolition of the leasing of convicts to private corporations, and suggested enlarging firms to provide prison work, diverting employment to reforestation projects, upkeep of game preserves, etc. — anything used in connection with the state.
Sizek: So this is interesting, because you’re both raising this problem of needing to do something with these laborers and with people who are convicted of crimes. And what they end up doing is they end up focusing on infrastructure, a lot of the time – both of you have raised this point. How and why did you all choose to focus on this aspect of the carceral system? Because this not often an association made between prisons and infrastructure. How did you come to research this topic?
Hargrett: So in my case, I wouldn’t say that the focus on infrastructure was incidental. But when I was looking at convict labor on the railroads, that obviously is part of North Carolina’s transportation infrastructure. It wasn’t until I started looking at the state’s road system and how convict labor was used to build and maintain it that I realized how integral it was to that story. We’ll say starting in 1900, specifically J.S. Holmes, the state geologist who would later be the head of the state highway commission, and was pretty much the biggest proponents both of the Good Roads Movement (the modernization of the state’s roads) and the use of convict labor on public roads. He understood and argued — well first he understood that in order to massively expand and modernize this road system, you needed a large and very available labor force. And he argued for the use of convict labor very explicitly from the beginning, as did the superintendent of the state penitentiary, J.S. Mann, in the early 1900s.
So the expansion of the state road system in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s not only relied on convict labor, but it was intricately intertwined with the state prison board, the state highway commission, all of these different state departments worked together very deliberately and very closely in order to both modernize the state road system and expand the convict labor system. So it just, it just became clear that these two systems were inseparable to me.
Lenc: I don’t think that I set out to study infrastructure in prisons, but the archives definitely just kept on leading me in that direction, and sometimes in really surprising ways. In the case of the Folsom Dam, which I mentioned a moment ago, it turns out — and I didn’t know this — that this was in many ways the beginning of the modern Western electric grid. They had been experimenting with long-distance AC power at the time. And the current standard of 60 Hertz really begins actually precisely at the Folsom Dam, which ends up electrifying downtown Sacramento, which is just a dozen or so miles away. And all of the streetlights and streetcars and downtown breweries, and I believe also the Capitol itself, are electrified by the dam that is built by prisoners at that site.
And it’s part of the origin of the prison itself. The deal for the prison is that, to buy the land, they wouldn’t just pay off the claimholder at the time, who was an old miner from the Gold Rush who was still developing the area, but that they would pay in prisoner labor to help develop this dam that he’d always wanted to build. And this is at a time when, in California, legislators are really trying to figure out how they can catch up with the East Coast. They’re developing a state constitution and all these other bureaucratic forums and state buildings. There’s a desire, in order to save costs, to integrate them, to share resources between departments. And wherever there’s an opportunity for a prison, for example, to service through labor any other part of the state, then they take that very quickly whenever they can.
And I would argue that this sort of continues today. The way to understand the firefighting program in California is not just about saving the state money, necessarily. I don’t necessarily know that it does. Prisons are pretty expensive. I think that if the goal was to have prisons to fight fires, there are cheaper ways to do that. But what it does do is integrate the functions of the state to sort of appease lawmakers who are always trying to save small little pockets of money here or there. But also logistically, it’s difficult to attract laborers to a rural area to fight a fire. You have to build them a town. But if you have fire camps all over the state and people who are effectively living outside very cheaply, then you can move them at will. It’s up to you, not up to them. Then you have a lot of power to command sovereignty over a wider space and to deploy labor here and there in emergency situations. When the Oroville Dam spillway collapsed a few years ago, some of the first people on the scene were prisoners of the State of California. And it’s something that you can’t do with wage discipline. So a lot of the power of the state is not just in saving money in these circumstances, but in the power that they hold over prisoners spatially. They can move them without any real consent, under the auspices of a liberal constitution. There’s no other space like this really, outside of immigration law.
Sizek: I think the point that you’re raising, Xander, is also that these jobs that convict labor is being used for are quite dangerous. These are not jobs for ordinary people, or they’re often in forms of employment that people take that are high-risk, high-reward. So what are the conditions on the ground for these different laborers over time, and how does it change, as well?
Hargrett: So with the railroads, for example, the hazards are just evident in the work itself. You’re blasting through mountains, blasting through tunnels, etc. And the era of convict leasing on the railroads in North Carolina was absolutely the most violent. In 1881 and 1882 alone, there were 74 deaths that were deemed “natural.” On the western North Carolina railroad, 20 were killed trying to escape; there were another 90 people who died in the state penitentiary, which likely obscures a higher number of deaths that were caused by railroad work. And the warden, around this time, made a report that said that any prisoner who had spent any substantial amount of time on the railroad often came back just with their constitution shattered and their energy gone. And even with the best medical attention, they were unlikely to recover.
With road work, prisoners at least in the early years were working at every step in the process of truly constructing these roads. And they were integrated into the process a bit more thoroughly than they would be later on. And by that, I mean they were operating stone crushers, they were quarrying, they were operating heavy machinery, driving meal teams, running engines, draining the road beds, crushing the gravel, laying it down, etc. And all of that is very physical, hard labor. So those are the health hazards of the work itself.
Then you need to take into account that you’re working outside. Contrary to many penalogical arguments of the time that really touted the benefits of work in the sunshine and the fresh air, etc., the North Carolina sun can be very punishing. They were draining swamps for roadbeds. There were a lot of mosquitoes, there was a lot of malaria and instances of malarial fever that I found in different inspections and reports at the state health board, etc. Then you have the health hazards of the living conditions itself, because, as Xander noted, when you have this kind of infrastructural work, it’s easy to lose that labor in it if it’s not being geographically confined to one space. So very early on before the automobiles, the advent of the automobile, and later on, prisoners were often living in rolling cages, whether wooden cages or in steel cages that would just have a tarp thrown over them at night. There’s exposure to the elements at night, moisture, etc. So the occupational hazards of the job are one thing entirely, but then you just have the hazards of coming into direct contact with the landscape.
Lenc: That’s a great answer. And I think it raises two really important points. And one of them is the difficulty of working in the archives of identifying this violence when it happens. Sometimes, it’s actually surprisingly easy; state physician reports are often very candid about, “What happened today? Well, this man [and sometimes you’ll even get a name] fell off a large cliff in this quarry,” or “this person fell into the rock crusher,” and “this person fell into the river and drowned.” And there was, “this person went a little too close to the edge of the work yard and was shot by a guard because they thought that he maybe was trying to escape.”
Sometimes this is spelled out very clearly. But there are many other forms of violence that aren’t going to appear very transparently in the archives unless there’s an investigation. Folsom has certain wardens who became notorious for torturing, doing basically their era’s equivalent of waterboarding of prisoners. And oftentimes, this is because if you can’t just deny people wages, you have to resort to violence in order to make sure that people don’t slack off. Or sometimes, if you have a particularly sadistic guard, then they might resort to punishment for even less than that. That isn’t necessarily going to show up in the reports unless there is a big break in the press. But because these are people that the public has decided that they don’t care about very much, it’s much less likely — it’s not a priority for the average paper, which is usually very content to just condemn these men and be fine with this, although it does happen, too.
The other thing that you raise that is really important is that the prisons themselves were actually quite dangerous, work or no work. These were spaces where disease was rampant. This was an ongoing problem. Malaria in California remained a very serious concern in prison, and disease would spread very quickly. And it wasn’t necessarily a salubrious environment, even if you got to take the day off. This doesn’t necessarily excuse the labor itself, which was of course very dangerous needless to say, and these were industries, long before OSHA, where there were no safety mechanism in place to make sure that people weren’t being maimed on the job site left and right. But there were also no guarantees that you would not be similarly injured when you are just confined to yourself for 24 hours a day. That is a similarly dangerous environment, I would argue.
I think it raises the question for today of how we think about labor programs. There’s a push to, for example, eliminate prisoner labor in California — and I think there’s a great argument for this. But I think that it misses the point. If you just modify the prison labor programs, I don’t think that unto itself is the most pressing issue for prisons today. The question is, okay, are we fine if people are just kept in their cells all day, or kept on the yard all day? It seems like it’s addressing a small sidecar issue. And it has been for a long time, as people have tried to change the prison labor program without changing the question of, why there are so many people in prison in the first place?
Hargrett: To go back to Xander’s point about the recording of working and living conditions and the reporting of it, that has definitely been one of the biggest, not obstacles, but most interesting problems of my research. To your point about jails at the turn of the century — in North Carolina and elsewhere, the chain gang and labor, less so on the railroads — this argument was definitely wielded in support of convict labor on the railroads as well. But public road construction was seen as a progressive reform, a way to get the prisoner out of the dank, vermin-infested prison cell, and out into the sunshine and fresh air, etc. I mentioned that before. The problem was, as Xander mentioned, that the only looks I’ve been able to get — the only real detailed perspectives I’ve been able to get on these conditions were when there was some sort of awful tragedy that occurred and there was a thorough investigation into it.
Or interestingly, in newspapers. I’m kind of jumping around here, but in the — specifically there was this golden period in the newspapers of transparency into the work of convict laborers on North Carolina’s roads. And a lot of it, I think, was pushed by these Good Roads advocates like the state geologist, Joseph Hyde Pratt, etc. You would see very often just these little blurbs for each county, like “the convict labor gang has done this work on this road, they’re doing a great job,” or there would just be updates on where they’re moving along. Early on, they were often quite positive, commending them on their work. In 1911, there was this one blurb that I found where a street had gotten together and two women had taken the initiative to go around to their neighbors to ask if they would contribute to a Thanksgiving dinner to thank the convicts for their labor on the road. That was a very short-lived period. But there was a certain amount of transparency that I saw in newspapers that I did not see anywhere else. And it wasn’t necessarily just responding to crisis. And I’m not saying that they gave me a rosy picture at all, they were very neutral, here’s what’s going on with the roads picture. But there was a certain transparency that I did not find anywhere in state documents, for example.
There were a series of laws that were passed in North Carolina. The first one is as early as 1901 that charged each county Superintendent of Health with the responsibility of performing inspections at these camps. However, the complete lack of personnel, the inability to enforce that, just meant that reports were sporadic. There was no real template or set of guidelines for it. So the kinds of reports that were being made were all over the place. Some would be three pages long going into high detail, others would just say good condition. And also the fact that these were rolling camps. They were moving — they weren’t attached to a certain topography, they weren’t attached to a certain community, there was no way to systematically take down these conditions. And even when it became systematized later on, there would be inspection cards. The State Board of Health and the State Board of Public Welfare would do regular inspections. It just either wasn’t enforced in a lot of counties, or wasn’t archived. So it’s something that’s been really difficult to get a full picture of unless you look into other parts of the archive, like those newspapers, or, for example, the Good Roads Association circulars that are talking about the details of the work that’s being done grading roads, etc. So you can get a picture of the work that’s being done, etc. and the kind of effects that it might have on one’s health. But yeah, that’s been a constant, not erasure, but obscuring of labor conditions and working conditions in the archive.
And it was something that was also noticed at the time. I was reading a report from a prison physician, and he wrapped it up at the end by saying that this is a mess; there’s absolutely no systematic way of keeping records, so I can’t follow up on any of this. J.S. Mann, the superintendent of the prison that I mentioned before, he also recognized that the county system and the record keeping system just wasn’t organized in any sense of the word.
Sizek: So obviously, the archival traces of a lot of these programs have disappeared, aside from some newspaper reports or looking at county health reports of the jails or prisons. But the infrastructure is actually quite enduring and still exists today. What are the legacies and afterlives of prison labor that you see in your work?
Hargrett: Well, in North Carolina, the same structures are pretty much in place. I haven’t mentioned the prison farm system that was established in the late 1880s and 1890s. And it was prison farms and road labor that came to compete for convict labor once railroads ceased to be profitable for the state and private corporations. And that’s pretty much what remains now. The large majority of prisoners who are in North Carolina and working right now are maintaining public roads, building public roads, and the Caledonia State Prison Farm, which has been in operation since 1890, is still in operation. I don’t have the details in front of me right now, but I’m fairly certain that I read that the majority of the food that is circulated within the North Carolina Department of Corrections — canned food, specifically — is processed at the Caledonia State Prison Farm.
There are other ways that prisoners work. Prisoners – not prisoners, but the prison can forge contracts with the government, whether it’s beautification projects, recycling projects, etc. But one really interesting program that is in North Carolina is the Young Offenders Forest Conservation Program. Something that I get into with my dissertation is how not just public road infrastructure and the state prison system are so uniquely intertwined, but also the state’s history of forestry and conservation. There is this Young Offenders Forest Conservation Program that has young prisoners, young inmates cutting trails, doing park maintenance, etc. And just, I think it’s important to see those through-lines. You see some of the arguments for reform that I’m reading about in the late 19th century about how this helps mold character, it’s healthy for them to be in the sunshine, this kind of reformative aspect of working outside, you see them repeated with programs like this.
Lenc: In the case of the Folsom Dam, it’s sort of the exception that proves the rule. You can go to the Folsom power house, which was connected to the dam, and it’s a state park today. You can walk in, look at the old machinery, and there are some docents that’ll explain things to you. It’s well-funded, there’s plaques all over the place. And some of them will even mention, and I even have some photographs of, prisoners who actually built the facilities that made that possible. But that is, like you mentioned, rarely the case. And very frequently, the only evidence that prisoners worked on a particular site and built infrastructure, built a road, or even developed more subtle infrastructure, such as a firebreak by cutting out a number of trees, that doesn’t exist anymore, but is the reason why a town still stands (because a fire didn’t come through). That’s harder to trace. And sometimes it’s just a scrap in a newspaper from the 19th century that mentions: “Oh, they came in today, and there were a bunch of prisoners who were working on the side of the road.”
I had a real desire to try and integrate that. I’ve been talking with Elizabeth for the past year, and we were in the early stages of developing some sort of carceral labor mapping project that would integrate — because everyone in their own individual projects is finding all of these scraps in these very surprising cases. I stumbled on something that says Olvera Street in Los Angeles, which is a major tourist destination, was built by prisoners at the LA jail, and the sheriff was overseeing the construction project himself. This isn’t something that has a plaque there, commemorating that. And it would be very nice to have an integrated way to figure out where in the landscape prisoners have made their mark, necessarily not by choice.
I also think that simply commemorating is not quite enough. There’s an impulse in history to just put up more plaques. And one thing that is an irony here is, who’s going to be putting up these plaques, that’s precisely the kind of project that prisoners are often enrolled to do. Clarence Jefferson Hall has a great book about the development of Adirondack recreational facilities in upstate New York by state prisoners. And a lot of these sorts of facilities are developed by prisoners. I would say that the task of recovering this history and identifying the hidden history of the landscape is as part of a political reparations project to try and figure out how we can address what I think many of us would agree is an unjust absorption of labor, to try and develop forms of redress, and also change our current policies to create a more just attitude toward crime and punishment — one that is about racial justice, one that is about addressing class difference, and one that isn’t simply about confining things to the past and pretending that this doesn’t happen anymore.
Hargrett: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I agree with everything Xander’s just said. This project is really exciting for those reasons. And I think that combining all of these different scraps that we’ve put together, when it comes to public infrastructure, it becomes really difficult for the reasons that I said before. Just think about the state highway system of North Carolina, for example: you have the constant expansion adding onto different roads, renaming of roads, and as, you know, the National Highway System expanded, you have state highways that are absorbed into these roads. So just tracing it is so difficult.
However, to your point about public memory, I do think that that is an important component as well. When I was going through North Carolina in my research, most everyone that I shared my research with, the first response they would have was, “oh, the Civilian Conservation Corps worked on that road,” etc. That’s what’s been integrated into the public memory because that’s what’s on the plaques. I saw multiple museum exhibits on the CCC and different state parks, etc. This isn’t just for lack of desire to memorialize that. It’s, as we’re saying, the difficulty of tracking down these scraps, and also just administratively speaking, in North Carolina, the entire state prison department in 1933 was transferred to the State Highway Commission. If we’re talking about the movement of labor, the recording of labor, and how it can just kind of disappear administratively in the archive, etc. If someone is reading a book and wants to learn more about this labor that was being done on this road, they go to the index, they see “State Highway Commission,” because there was no separate prison department. It was a sub-department of the state highway commission. So memorialization is a start, because what makes it into history and geography monographs, for example, is what tends to trickle into public history textbooks, public memory, these plaques, etc. And it just perhaps makes the public interest in these kinds of projects more available.
Lenc: I agree. That’s really well said.
Sizek: Well, thank you so much for resurfacing these histories of prisoner labor for us. And thanks for coming on the podcast.
Hargrett: Thank you.
Lenc: Thank you so much for having us, Julia.
Woman’s voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.
Image at top (source): Chain gang of convicts engaged in road work. Pitt County, North Carolina. Autumn 1910. The inmates were quartered in the wagons shown in the picture. Wagons were equipped with bunks and move from place to place as labor is utilized. The central figure in the picture is J.Z. McLawhon, who was at that time county superintendent of chain gangs. The dogs are bloodhounds used for running down any attempted escapes.
