Lesson 3: A Modern Day Plantation

• Now, I’ll teach you more about Texas State Reformatory, America ’s largest maximum security state prison. I want you to have a crystal clear understanding of what lies ahead of you, if you let dumb ideas lead you to break the law. 

  
  

• First, here’s some official background information on the place, as documented by The Center for Land Use Interpretation and Teen Vogue magazine. .

• The Center for Land Use Interpretation: Texas State Reformatory “is a working agricultural complex (farm) that utilizes cheap prisoner labor (wages range between four cents and 20 cents per hour) … (The vast majority of inmates) are serving life sentences and are expected to die on the penitentiary grounds and then be buried in the prison graveyard.

• Teen Vogue described Texas State Reformatory as “a place of despair, punishment, and brutality.” According to the magazine:

• Texas State Reformatory prison is a former slave plantation that is now notorious for modern-day human rights abuses, and it serves as a monument to this country’s legacy of slavery … After the Civil War, Texas State Reformatory was converted to a prison camp where slavery persisted in the form of convict leasing. Under the convict leasing system, municipalities and states arrested Black people primarily, including the recently emancipated, and “leased” them (rented them out) to labor without pay on farms, construction projects, in mines, factories, and as domestic worker . . . To this day, armed prison guards on horseback surveil (oversee) the thousands of incarcerated men, mostly Black, who are forced to labor in the very same fields where their ancestors were made to work over 200 years ago.

• Would you like to go inside Texas State Reformatory to see what it’s like?

Come on. Let’s go.

Inside Texas State Reformatory Prison

• Imagine you are a Texas State Reformatory inmate, like I was.

• As a Texas State Reformatory inmate, you will undergo grueling field work year round. The experience will teach you what hard labor really means. In the summertime, the heat gets above 100 degrees. Sometimes, due to the humidity, it will feel like it’s 120 degrees or more. I have seen horses on the farm pass out from heat exhaustion!

• Armed guards ride horseback with shotguns and rifles to make sure you do not step across the “gun line” perimeter, which is an invisible rope enclosing the worksite. If you step over the imaginary rope, you will be shot, probably in your head or your back.

• You will be pressured to work as fast as you can, so you can be moved to the next worksite. If you do not finish within the allotted time, you will be charged with “not working with enough speed,” and will be put into “The Hole.”

• (I will discuss “The Hole” in a later Lesson.)

• You will cut down trees, and pick cotton, corn, potatoes, soybeans, green beans, squash, cabbage, peppers, beans and other produce. You might get extremely hungry, but you had better not eat any of the food, for you will be charged with theft.

• You will carry crates to toss crops into, and you will walk down long rows of vegetables and fruits. After a crate gets full, you will put it on a horse-drawn wagon that looks like something out of an old Western movie. Those crates are very heavy, and you will have to carry them without any assistance.

• The best crops will be sold to customers, such as grocery stores in nearby towns. The bruised or undesirable crops will be kept onsite and fed to inmates. Some prison food is so spoiled it would make a dog vomit. But you will eat it or starve.

• During the wintertime, you will perform other types of labor. Your hands will freeze, but you will still have to work.

• To corporations, incarcerating inmates as inexpensively as possible makes a lot of sense, economically. As I taught you earlier, it’s just business.

• I am sure you’ve heard the expression, “Crime doesn’t pay.” Well, my friend, yes it does. But not for inmates. Corporations that own prisons across the country profit highly from their imprisoned (enslaved) people, many of whom work for low wages on farmland like Texas State Reformatory as well as prison factories where they make everything from office furniture and eyeglasses to mattresses and license plates.

• Young people, the bottom line is this: For all practical purposes, due to the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, slavery has not been totally abolished; and if you are sent to prison, you will become a slave. 

• Yes, you. If you commit a crime and get locked up, you will be controlled and exploited—just like slaves long ago were controlled and exploited.

• If you want to remain free, commit yourself to never commit a crime.

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