Plantations to Prison Farms: How Far Have We Come? (2024)

On a 90-degree June day at Memorial Unit in Southeast Texas, the humidity makes the heat cling to your skin. Live oaks line both sides of the long driveway to the prison. There’s the faintly herby scent of the fields and the curdled hint of something dead when the wind shifts. Grackles swoop down, with their telltale squawks.

To the right, prison fields eventually run into privately owned land on the Providence Plantation; a sign by the road reminds you it was established in 1824. But just ahead, there’s the prison – red brick, ringed with barbed wire. In a field behind the prison, you can see a group of mostly Black and brown men at work for no pay.

It’s uncanny how little life has changed here in 200 years.

Like every Texas prison established before the 1980s, Memorial Unit is built on a former slave plantation.

A short drive away, you can see the rubble of slaver Abner Jackson’s home and sugar mill. The live oaks around his plantation are covered in Spanish moss, and they’re older and larger than the ones lining the driveway to Memorial Unit, but otherwise they look the same.

Jackson owned the Darrington plantation that the Memorial prison was built on. He also owned close to 300 slaves. Some of those enslaved people worked in the same fields that prisoners do today, on the 6,000 acres of state-owned land that surrounds Memorial Unit.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment of the Constitution abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime.”

Today, Texas is one of a handful of states, all in the South, that pay no wages to incarcerated workers. “Every inmate who is physically able has a job in the prison system,” Texas’ prison agency explains in an FAQ. “Inmates are not paid for their work, but they can earn privileges as a result of good work habits.”

Texas prison agriculture generates roughly $90 million in revenue each year, according to a 2021 state audit report. Most of the goods stay within the prison agency – food crops feed inmates and cotton goes into their uniforms. But roughly a quarter of prison-produced goods are sold outside. This year, the Associated Press looked at about a dozen state prison farms, including operations in Texas, and traced prison labor in the supply chains of McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Pizza Hut, and other major corporations.

Thirty miles south of Memorial Unit, Robert Hockley looks out a car window to the fields behind Clemens Unit, a prison established on a former slave plantation in 1893.

As a teenager, Hockley picked cotton here by hand, filling a bag slung to his chest.

“In 1996, I was a slave,” Hockley says. “I was a slave legally, by the Constitution of the United States. I worked for free, in the worst conditions you can work in.”

The Right to Say “Hell No”

Hockley was a kid from Galveston caught up in gang life. He was 13 at the time of his first arrest. In 1996, at age 17, he and friends burglarized a home looking for jewelry, a purse, whatever they could find. “Materially, I did not take anything of value. But I did take these people’s sense of safety. Outside of material value, I traumatized someone.”

When Hockley arrived at Clemens Unit, he’d never seen a cotton field. A few months later, he and a group of other young prisoners walked to the fields, surrounded by officers on horseback with rifles. “It was all white, from here to that line of trees,” Hockley said, looking out at Clemens fields.

His first sight of the cotton field was something he felt in his chest.

“You felt the agony. You felt the suffering,” Hockley said. “It’s no different from seeing a gas chamber. You’re like, well damn. Many people didn’t make it out of here.”

He was in shock, looking for other people around him to affirm that they couldn’t really be there to pick cotton. But many of them had been to the fields before. As he explains it, it was a rebellious spirit that landed him in prison to begin with, and that spirit had not been broken yet. “I was like, 'There’s no way I’m picking cotton. To hell with this.’”

That’s how he learned that heat could be a punishment.

“At 17, I’m under the assumption that I have rights. And my right is to say 'hell no.’ And I was sadly mistaken. They had designed the system for people like me, who would say 'hell no.’ And that system was as brutal as I could ever be.”

When Hockley refused to pick cotton, horses surrounded him. Officers made him kneel, handcuffed him, and brought him to the back of a trailer, enclosed by metal fencing. He was the first, but he was soon joined by four other young men from other squads who refused to participate. For four hours, they sat bunched together and handcuffed on the metal floor in the heat. “That was my introduction into burning hell.”

Craig Anderson remembers the cages well. He worked in a “hoe squad,” as prisoners call the farming teams, at Connally Unit during the Nineties. It was a new facility, but with similar antiquated practices, including armed guards on horseback called high riders.

“They had a trailer that had about a three foot by three foot metal cage. And if somebody got into a fight or got unruly, you’re gonna sit your ass in that trailer, that little metal cage,” until the work day ended.

Back at Clemens, after Hockley returned to the prison after hours in the cage, he was disciplined for his refusal to work. He spent the next 15 days in solitary confinement. Hockley said that broke him. Soon, he decided picking cotton would be better than losing what little freedom he still had in prison.

A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson points out that a small percentage of prisoners are working on the field force at any given time (in April there were 219 inmates working in fields on average, out of 132,995 prisoners total.) Also, prisoners stopped picking cotton by hand and started using machinery to harvest cotton. “I don’t have an exact year, but it has not happened in quite a while,” said TDCJ’s Amanda Hernandez. Officers do still observe inmates from horseback at times, but the hot cage punishment is “not a practice in TDCJ,” she said.

Today, a prisoner who refuses to participate in farming will be disciplined. Per the disciplinary rules, minor penalties can lead “cell restriction” for 30 days per disciplinary case. That means a prisoner is not allowed outside their cell except for certain essentials including showers and doctor’s visits.

The spokesperson declined to answer whether the TDCJ agrees with prisoners’ descriptions of their work as “slave labor.” But generally, the agency frames fieldwork as a benefit to prisoners.

“The inmates learn to use equipment, which translates to job skills to help them gain employment upon their release,” Hernandez said.

Regardless of any perceived benefit to inmates, the benefit to taxpayers is not clear. The 2021 audit found that, while the state brought in more than $90 million selling agricultural products in one year, it would have saved $17 million over five years by buying canned foods and certain crops instead of producing them. Cotton and cottonseed in particular cost $5.6 million more to produce with prison labor than to purchase externally.

“When you think about cotton picking in Texas, where the state does not pay, the point is to remind people that the state owns you,” said Bianca Tylek, founder of Worth Rises, a nonprofit opposing forced labor, in an interview with the Marshall Project in 2021. “They want to make it parallel to slavery, and they are willing to do it at their own cost.”

The Cell Hasn’t Changed

Though prisoners today benefit from some modern equipment, conditions are still “miserable,” as the recently released Anderson told us. “I don’t know how to describe it except that it’s miserable.” Current inmates and their families describe water that stinks or isn’t clear, poor ventilation, sack meals that aren’t filling, and constant bug bites.

But the top complaint, by far, is the heat. At the end of a day of fieldwork, prisoners may return to cells that exceed 110 degrees in the summer.

“The living conditions haven’t changed,” said Hockley, whose brother is still incarcerated at one of the state’s oldest prisons. “Yeah, picking cotton has, but living in a hundred-degree cell hasn’t. So how far have we come?”

Anderson’s first stint in prison was as a young man in the Nineties. On his second stint, from 2011 to 2022, he didn’t work in a hoe squad but tailored inmates’ cotton uniforms with no air conditioning. “It’s nasty this time of the year,” he said. “I mean, you sweat all the way up to one or two o’clock in the morning when it finally starts cooling off a little bit. And then at four o’clock, they start feeding breakfast and everybody goes to work.”

As a tailor, he said he had a fan blowing hot air on him, “but I couldn’t blow it too hard on me because it’d blow my strings on my sewing machine.”

Current inmates describe similar problems with the heat. Mary McConnell said her husband has a postgraduate degree in electrical engineering from UT-San Antonio, but at Ramsey – another prison on a former slave plantation – his job is unloading boxes from a delivery truck. As a man in his 60s, heavy lifting in the heat wears on him. To cool down, he bought rags from the commissary to wet and hang around his neck. He said during their water breaks, he sometimes finds the water orange from rusty pipes.

Nick Wood, who’s been incarcerated for 24 years, said new equipment had made fieldwork much easier, but the heat inside has only gotten worse. On the worst days and nights at Wainwright, he soaks his clothes and lays on the wet floor to cool off.

Cooked to Death

A lawsuit filed in April claims Texas prisoners are being “cooked to death” in prisons that lack A/C, and that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has grossly underestimated the number of deaths caused by heat.

The prison agency claims there hasn’t been a heat-related death in a Texas prison since 2012. The lawsuit claims there have been more than 270 heat deaths since 2001, and advocates identified a dozen last summer alone. Last summer, Tona Southards Naranjo told the Chronicle she viewed her son Jon’s body after he died in prison and saw heat rash from head to toe. “What happened was a judge sentenced my son to 20 years, but the TDCJ sentenced him to death,” she said.

State data shows that the air-conditioning problem isn’t distributed evenly. It’s concentrated in the prison system’s southeast region, where the state’s predominant slave counties were before emancipation, and where the state’s prison system was born.

Most of the state’s roughly 100 prisons today are only partially air-conditioned and about 15% have no A/C in housing areas at all, per data from TDCJ. But the rates are much worse among the prisons which we know were built on former slave plantations. Among those, roughly 85% have no housing A/C at all. (We presented the TDCJ with a list of 13 prisons built on former slave plantations to fact-check. A spokesperson responded, “I don’t have that information.”)

The TDCJ explains that the units without any air conditioning are the older facilities, where it would be more expensive to add air conditioning. The current projects underway to add air conditioning are mostly in facilities that are already partly air-conditioned. A spokesperson explained why the agency isn’t prioritizing older prisons on former plantations. “To ensure funding goes further, we are air-conditioning other units as it would allow us to provide more cool beds,” a spokesperson said.

In prisons with partial air conditioning, generally many cells are still hot, while other areas including medical and warden offices are air-conditioned. When people show signs of overheating, guards may bring them to the cooled areas for respite.

The majority of these partially air-conditioned prisons, and the majority of Texas prisons overall, were built in the 1990s.

Michele Deitch, director of UT’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, is familiar with the conditions at the state’s oldest prisons. “In some ways, I’m more shocked that we bought 100,000 beds in the Nineties when air conditioning was common and didn’t put air conditioning in these facilities.”

History Repeats

Hockley suspects that the lack of air conditioning was never an oversight. Instead, he sees it as one part of a larger, intentional effort to dehumanize prisoners.

He points out how some improvements that might seem compassionate – like the introduction of tablets, which help prisoners contact family more easily – also give the state even more control. With a shortage of guards, the tablets allow prisoners to watch each other and report misbehavior to officers.

“It’s like a tree. The roots are so deep and rotten,” Hockley said. “The people there are like, 'Look at the top. We green now. Let’s not go into the roots. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole.’ Because if we fix the air, we’re gonna have to fix this, we’re gonna have to fix that – you’re gonna have to fix this whole system.”

So, what are the roots?

In the public imagination, Texas history often centers around ranching and oil, but that’s only part of the story. Slavery dominated the state’s economy for decades. In the mid-1800s, roughly one in three Texans were enslaved. A geologist at the time noted that in Texas, “dazzling white [cotton fields] create rather a painful sensation in the eyes.”

Texans initially resisted the construction of prisons, but as attitudes changed just before the Civil War, the potential for slave labor figured in. “If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves,” posited the Telegraph and Texas Register, “why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?”

Texas began building prisons before the Civil War. Texas was also the last state to free its enslaved population, nearly two years after President Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved Africans in America. It wasn’t until June 19, 1865, that union troops arrived in Galveston Bay and shared the news.

By that time, Texas’ first prisons were already built on former plantations, but the state had come up with another scheme to work around emancipation.

Recall Abner Jackson, whose plantation land was turned into prison land. After the Civil War, the sugar mill near his house didn’t stop operating, and it didn’t start paying workers either. Instead, the state leased nearly 200 prisoners to operate the sugar mill for a 15-year period, says Angela Villarreal, curator at the Lake Jackson Historical Museum.

Finding prisoners to lend to plantation owners wasn’t complicated. After the Civil War, “Black Codes” led to arrests of freed African Americans for minor offenses like vagrancy and petty theft. In many ways, she said, conditions for workers got worse. “The company leasing prisoners did not have to pay to replace them,” Villarreal said. “They did not care about their health or the harsh working conditions they had to endure. If a prisoner became ill, or worse, died, they were easily replaced.”

Long after convict leasing ended in the early 1910s, treatment of inmates at prison farms closely mirrored treatment of slaves. For decades, Texas prison laborers were routinely whipped and beaten. In 1978, a national corrections expert described Texas’ prison farms as “probably the best example of slavery remaining in the country.”

Around the same time that Hockley was released from prison in the early 2000s, professor Robert Perkinson was witnessing a prison farm in Texas for the first time. “Nowhere else in turn-of-the-millennium America could one witness gangs of African American men filling cotton sacks under the watchful eyes of armed whites on horseback,” Perkinson wrote in his book, Texas Tough, published in 2010. “Plantation prisons at Sugar Land, Huntsville, and elsewhere have preserved the lifeways of slavery in carceral amber.”

The Condition

Twenty years after his release from prison, Hockley finds himself thinking about certain guards who, at this point, have “done more time than me.” From inmates, the Chronicle heard descriptions of guards fainting from the heat and leaving their jobs, and how the resulting short staffing causes even more trying conditions for prisoners who can’t leave.

As we drove on an unobstructed road around Ramsey prison – also built on a plantation – a guard stopped us. “You can get shot for driving around the unit. We’ve got guns in all these towers.”

Later, parked far away, Hockley defended her.

“No telling how much time she’s done in that prison,” he said. “This place exists because of the condition that is created that makes this place happen. She has been stuck there. I did eight years. I came home, I found my way. I have a family, I have a business. I am far away from that prison. I’d tell them, listen: the difference between me and y’all [guards] is that I’m gonna leave one time. All I need to do is walk out the gate once. Y’all walk out and come back up here every day thinking you’re getting ahead. Because you exchange your time for money, you are under that impression.

“This place doesn’t serve you or me, in no shape, way, or form. It victimizes everybody.”