Clements Center Brown Bag Lecture: Hidden Economy under Chained Hands

In the aftermath of World War II, Texas embarked on the nation’s most ambitious reform program to replace its notorious plantation/prison farm system with an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business oriented Sun Belt state. The result was an agri-business operation that was so successful that state leaders and penologists could claim that they had successfully modernized the South and vanquished the ghosts of their past. Gone were the prison’s public images of slavery, convict leasing, the lash and bat, “sexual perversions,” and degradation. Rather than accept the albatross of their slave heritage and a prison system that served as a living symbol of southern “backwardness,” Texans created instead a prison where such “bottom line” and business-like results as production, cost efficiency, and external images of order allowed the state to stake a claim to modernity. But this reputation of competence and efficiency obfuscated the reality of a brutal system of internal prison management in which inmates acted as guards, employing coercive means to maintain control over the prisoner population. The inmates whom the prison system placed in charge also ran an internal prison economy in which money, food, human beings, reputations, favors, and sex all became commodities to be bought and sold. In this presentation, based on newly released court records and oral histories conducted by the author with prisoners, prison administrators, litigators, and legislators, Dr. Robert Chase will discuss both how the Texas prison system managed to maintain its high external reputation for so long in the face of the internal reality and how that reputation collapsed when inmates, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, revolted. Robert T. Chase received his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park (2008) and his Master’s degree from George Mason University (1999). His primary area of specialization is in social movements, racial politics, and political culture. He is in residence this year as a Clements Center Research Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America to complete his manuscript “Civil Rights on the Cellblock: Race, Reform and Punishment in Texas Prisons and the Nation, 1945-1990” for publication.