Prison farms, walls, and society: Punishment and politics in Texas, 1848--1910

Punishment policies in Texas between 1848 and 1910 resulted from influences related to the rise of market capitalism and democracy. A political and business elite desired a penitentiary as a solution to perceived problems of social disorder in antebellum communities. Inspired by often flawed and misleading reports concerning the merits of penitentiaries elsewhere, Texas leaders established a walled penal facility at Huntsville to confine the state's convicted felons. Penitentiary advocates believed that a symbol of "civilization" would punish more effectively than barbaric corporal and capital sanctions that local governments rarely administered. Although some reformers urged the adoption of humane programs designed to transform the lives of social deviants, penitentiaries in both the northern and southern United States abused and tormented their inmates. Because free citizens did not wish to support idle prisoners, penitentiaries expected convicts to pay incarceration costs with their labor.;The self-sustaining American prison labor tradition dominated Texas penology from the outset. During the antebellum and Civil War eras, the state operated a cotton and woolen cloth factory at Huntsville. Following the war, communities sent African Americans to the penitentiary for the first time. There, former chattel slaves and their descendants joined the South's largest white convict population to exceed the capacity of the Huntsville facility. Texas then leased surplus prisoners to private employers and opened a second enclosed penitentiary at Rusk to manufacture iron for sale on public account. Economically successful but politically controversial, the convict lease system ended during the Progressive Era after it became an increasing source of embarrassment to proponents of "New South" modernization. The state also halted the unprofitable Rusk iron works.;As an alternative labor source, Texas acquired plantations that served as the nucleus of the penal system during much of the twentieth century. These large prison farms qualitatively improved the treatment of neither black nor white prisoners, but continued to exercise social control functions over what Steven Spitzer has described as "problem populations" in order that free citizens might feel secure.