Setting:
Directions: From Little Rock travel approximately 100 miles north on Highway 67 North. Turn right on exit 83, Highway 384. Travel approximately 2½miles and turn left on 384 S (302 Corrections Drive), McPherson’s Unit is on the right.
EXAMINER
How has this history of incarceration impacted McPherson’s Unit?
MR. PROVE-IT
So, you are still listening, Examiner!
Well, we have already decided not to cover the historical criminal justice models of incarceration centered on reforming white male criminals back into productive American citizens up through the Civil War…so, I guess you are really asking for the rest of the story?…
(Waits a beat for a response from EXAMINER and after getting only silence, MR. WHINEY continues.)
MR. WHINEY
…Well both of those two competing models—that we won’t mention again—had one thing in common, they were quite expensive to run on a per-prisoner basis.
They also demanded that society as a whole buy into the notion that the moral reformation of criminals into citizens was a worthwhile cause. It is no coincidence that the backlash against this notion coincided with the collapse of slavery and an influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Creating two new large groups of people that were excluded from the category of white American citizen at the time these movements were losing steam.
MR. PROVE-IT
No, it’s not.
Nor is it coincidence that “law and order” political campaigns, where politicians played to constituent fears and hatreds, sprung up in a fire storm at the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th.
MR. WHINEY
In both the North and the South, models of incarceration shifted from reformists visions of individual penitence towards cost-effective models focused on the economic exploitation of the prison laborer.
MR. PROVE-IT
Maybe, but you aren’t seriously saying that the North and South were equal in response to this shift!?!
Yes, racism and xenophobia were and still are prevalent in the North. And yes, the government used them to justify cramming two or three prisoners into cells designed to house single prisoners. And yes, the new, post-Civil War, prisons looked more like those old European workhouses…BUT almost overnight, you saw the South restructure its justice system to fill the labor pool lost by the end of slavery.
Hell, it happened so fast that they couldn’t even build new buildings to house the folks they were incarcerating, and so many southern states turned to chain gangs and “prison farms” that utilized the existing infrastructure of slave plantations.
MR. WHINEY
The 1860s saw the death of the prison reformation movement in the United States that had once been held up as a shining world-wide example..well at least in Europe and the colonial empires—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interrupting.)
—Then the next 100 years of penal justice in the United States was a dark age for all of the violent and horrific reasons that you can imagine.
MR. WHINEY
True, but we do not need to rely on our imaginations to talk about the process of criminalizing minority racial and ethnic communities in the United States.
The horrors of the convict leasing system employed in many southern states, including Arkansas was a model that saw prisoners rented out to plantation owners in a direct continuation of the practices of slavery, and can be read about extensively in the book Slavery by Another Name, by Arkansas educated historian, Douglas A. Blackmon.
While organizations like the NAACP worked tirelessly for over a century— and under physical and existential threat from groups like the KKK—to challenge these policies in court, sadly, the prison farm, in a form, still exists today in Arkansas, and other southern states. Officially, convict leasing was made illegal at the federal level during FDR’s presidency, but it continued off the books throughout the South, as prisoners were given “permission” to serve their time living and working on the farms and plantations of prominent citizens. In the State of Arkansas, it continued until the state experienced its otherwise unsuccessful reform movement in the 1960s—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interrupting.)
—Hold on there Mr. Whiny! That is presenting a pretty one-sided view of things.
After all, officially, Governor George Donaghey oversaw the dismantling of the convict leasing system starting with his election in 1908. And don’t forget, or write out of history, the activists who have been doing prison reformation work in Arkansas—activists like Laura Conners, who petitioned the Board of Corrections to dismiss the head warden of Tucker Prison farm in 1921 for the inhuman treatment of inmates.
MR. WHINEY
Yes, but that motion was denied and the legacy of violence and corruption at the Tucker Prison Farm went on to demand national attention, and multiple Supreme Court injunctions, for the next 50 years. We cannot grow soft of our histories of our institutions just because we want to recognize that they were not the cultural monoliths that they are often made to seem.
MR. PROVE-IT
(MR. PROVE-IT is convinced and ups the intensity of his rhetorical tone.)
Fuck, Mr. Whiney, don’t stop there with euphemisms like violence and corruption for absolute unimaginable barbarity.
The Tucker Telephone, a torture device where prisoners had a live electric wire attached to their nut sack—controlled through a rotary phone—is named after the prison farm where it was invented, and went on to be used by American soldiers in the Vietnam war…The brutal conditions at that one prison alone have inspired books and movies.
MR. WHINEY
Yes, it has. Into the 70s Arkansas prisons were run like criminal enterprises with the primary expectation of the state being that the prisons turned a profit off farm labor.
To cut down on the costs of operation, entire prisons employed only two or three guards called wardens. The rest of the staff was made up of current prisoners—called trusties—who were given guns and held responsible for policing their fellow prisoners.
MR. PROVE-IT
The Civil Rights movement took its sweet-ass time making its way into Arkansas’ prison system. In the meantime, wardens acted like kingpins. “Favors” were “earned.” Sexual violence, extortion, and bribery were rampant.
MR. WHINEY
And while there was a brief stint in this time period where the penal incarceration of white women occurred at a separate women’s prison farm just outside of Jacksonville, AR–known as Pea Farm—African-American women were held on location at the same prison farm as African-American men, and no matter where they were incarcerated or the color of their skin, women in prison in Arkansas have a long history of being subjected to sexual slavery at the hands of their jailers.
MR. PROVE-IT
That’s the gods-ugly truth.
And it’s been pretty damn-well documented—even though the conditions at Pea Farm have been nearly erased from history. Apparently, somebody didn’t want it known that the women incarcerated there were taken regularly to Memphis, to be prostituted in brothels there.
MR. WHINEY
The fate of women in penal institutions has never been pleasant, and the State of Arkansas is no exception. The Arkansas Board of Corrections had been run as an exploitative for-profit system since the State Legislature asked it to take on that role with the end of slavery.
It would use up anyone it could get its hands on to keep things running smoothly and equally important, under the radar of the general populace. Like so many other institutions throughout history: slavery, imperialism, war—women’s bodies have so often been treated as objects of reward and trade. It has taken a willful ignorance to keep that role a secret.
MR. PROVE-IT
Which leads us to McPherson’s Unit…
MR. WHINEY
(MR. WHINEY interrupts MR. PROVE-IT’s dramatic pause.)
—Not quite.
Women continued to be incarcerated, for the most part, at sub-facilities of other correctional complexes from the end of the Pea Farm through the 1960s and 70s, but starting in the 60s and continuing into the 80s and 90s, a reform movement began that culminated in a number of federally mandated reforms that saw an overhaul of the entire Arkansas Department of Corrections system.
MR. PROVE-IT
Ah, you want to go into this first.
And introduce a bunch of important characters to the investigation that have some name recognition within both the national and state discussion of privatized prisons.
MR. WHINEY
I know who you are trying to allude to, but before we go there, let’s first address the role of a man named Terrell Don Hutto.
MR. PROVE-IT
Well you’re correct that that is not the big name I was hoping to introduce, but it does eventually get us there.
And Hutto is a mighty big name in the discussion of privatized prison. After all, the T Don Hutto Residential Center is a controversial privately run “center” run under the auspices of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office for the detainment of nonresident families and children, none of which have been charged with any crime except illegal entry into the United States.
MR. WHINEY
You are jumping ahead in the timeline of our narrative.
In 1971, Hutto was the newly appointed Commissioner of Corrections for the State of Arkansas with a strong agenda of reform, hoping to build on the work of previous reformers to permanently dismantle the trustee system, but only because it hand been mandated by the US Supreme Court in July of 1970. It was not until Hutto took over in June of 1971 that it became the official policy of Arkansas Department of Corrections to ban inmates from carrying firearms. Hutto assumed control of a department rife with violence and corruption and he worked to increase non-incarcerated personnel and security in all of the state’s prisons, as well as regulating prisoner conditions like bedding, medical care and food service. He began a number of innovate educational and work-release programs and oversaw the separation of maximum-security facilities from general population facilities as well as overseeing the construction fo the first units dedicated to juvenile offenders and elderly offenders. This went a long way to reducing the level of violence in Arkansas prisons in which both the very young and very old were subject to abuse and manipulation from long-term violent offenders.
But rampant violence and sexual assault continued to be a problem in Arkansas state prisons. U.S. federal courts continued to hear cases against the Arkansas Department of Corrections and through a series of cases such as Holt v. Hutto, Finney v. Arkansas, Finney v. Hutto, and Hutto v. Finney, the State of Arkansas’ prisons again went before the Supreme Court where it was determined by the Attorney General of Arkansas that prison officials acted in “bad faith” in their obligations to remedy the horrific conditions of Arkansas prisons.
A lawyer who worked under this Attorney General of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton—
MR. PROVE-IT
(Interjecting.)
—There it is—
MR. WHINEY
—Don’t interrupt—
—an attorney-general-appointed lawyer who worked on the Hutto v. Finney case that went before the Supreme Court, reported that the Arkansas Prison system in the 70s was an absolute “hell-hole.” It took a lot of time and work to fix, and that the problems ran deeper than any specific administrator. When asked, this lawyer described Hutto as “not a bad or evil man. He had a terribly difficult task with limited resources to accomplish it. I would not have wanted his job.”
MR. PROVE-IT
So, I guess it could be said about Hutto’s time as commissioner that Arkansas finally saw the biggest reforms in its history, but not necessarily as a result of his management.
MR. WHINEY
Reductive, but not entirely inaccurate.
By the time Hutto left his position as commissioner of corrections in 1976, Arkansas prisons were experiencing massive changes and much of these changes were being undertaken under the eye of future president Bill Clinton.
MR. PROVE-IT
You mean, Arkansas Attorney General Clinton—who’ go on to become one “tough on crime” governor—who’d go on to become a president who campaigned heavily for a crime bill that would greenlight the adoption of privatized prisons in America, and just happened to provide the funding that paid the way for the Grimes/McPherson Complex.
(Swooping in from the silent void that encompasses everything beyond the voices of the debating investigative narrators, a new speaker asserts his way into the conversation.)
4TH RESPONDENT
—Y’all are killing me, mang!
Show’em the big picture—the illuminati shit.
Hutto gets Arkansas moving in the right direction—by getting the guns out of the hands of the fuckers serving time—separating the meal from the meal worms—literally. Sure! But what is he really up to, mang? Improving conditions? Maybe as a side-effect—but his real project—his real project, mang—is the industrial revolution of a feudal state prison-industrial-complex—BAM!—He was burning down the baronies so the petty bourgeoisie can finally have its day in the sun—
(4TH RESPONDENT continues, almost as if he does not need oxygen to fuel his breathy words.)
The ADC was a shit show of a state-run institution—with a revolving door at the top and dead prisoners pilling up on the bottom—READ about it, mang—THOMAS MURTON, mang—quote, Accomplices to the Crime, end-quote, mang—The truth is out there—and Hutto saw it on those ever-crumbling walls—He saw it and it burned him up—It burned him, mang—working for a, quote, state, end-quote, that was burying its bodies in shallow unmarked graves—instead of cemeteries—Hutto saw it, mang—He saw it—and started formulating his new system, mang—right here in Arkansas—refined it in Virginia—and then signed on with Tom Beasley and Doctor Crants—DOCTOR Crants, mang—Doctor is his first name—no shit—not a title—to start the first private prison company in America, mang.
(MR. PROVE makes as if he plans to respond but 4TH RESPONDENT does not surrender the microphone.)
Y’all think, quote, Clinton, end-quote, pushed Hutto out, mang—for making with his, quote, bad faith, end-quote, comments?—naw—fuck that, mang—Hutto and Clinton were Arkansas Democrats—through and through, mang—right at that time when the, quote, Dems of Arkansas, END-quote, were taking the white hoods off and—finally—picking up the protest signs—You think they weren’t in on it together, mang?—Weren’t—yeah, quote, in collusion, END-Quote, mang—That is some bullshit—Clinton goes on to get crowned, quote, the first black president, end-quote, of the Younited states—by none other than Toni Morrison—fuckin’ TONI MORRISON herself—and what does he do, mang?—but oversee the largest growth ever in the privatization of state and federal prisons—while Hutto’s company rises—it rises, mang—and he becomes—like—the profiteer-in-chief of the private-public partnership.
(Again, 4TH RESPONDENT stops just long enough to create the illusion of an opening before continuing.)
But it doesn’t stops there, mang—Oooohhh no—You think this shit isn’t still going on?—Within just the last three months, mang—CCA—the Correction Corporation of America—has, quote, rebranded itself, end-quote, into—into “CORE CIVIC—so it can, yeah—quote, provide three distinct business offerings—
(4TH RESPONDENT adopts the tone and speech patterns of a robot.)
CoreCivic Safety—a national leader in high quality corrections and detention management—
4TH RESPONDENT breaks robot character to return to ranting)
—that should be, quote, international, end-quote, mang—because their correctional facilities are all over the globe, mang—
(4th RESPONDENT returns to robot voice.)
CoreCivic Properties—offering a wide range of innovative, cost-saving government real estate solutions—
(4TH RESPONDENT breaks character again to start a rant, that begins with a nervous laugh.)
—Ha! Try—We will own and manage all government infrastructure—so the State pays us to manage all their, quote, site-specific management services, end-quote—Fuck that, mang!—and—
(4TH RESPONDENT returns again to robot voice.)
—CoreCivic Community—a growing network of residential reentry centers to help tackle America’s recidivism crisis—
(4TH RESPONDENT finally drops the robot voice for good.)
END-FUCKING-QUOTE—Did y’all just hear that, mang?!?!—they are—like—out to own all government services!—Y’all we’ve gotta help the people, mang—see through this smoke screen, mang—Clinton and Trump are more than golf partners, Mang—this public-private merger is more than forty years in the making, MANG…We’re all Fucked.
(Between the outrage of the outburst and 4TH RESPONDENT’s slough of accusations, assumptions and assertions, there is a beat of silence while all the respondents collect their thoughts. Finally, MR. PROVE-IT responds.)
MR. PROVE-IT
We get another one of these guys, huh?
Examiner?
Is this really going to be the new normal around here?
Is this really what we need?
Because people were already lining up to take this investigation seriously, so you decide to just…let this conspiracy…theory…mang…into the fray?
Make it a battle royal?
(The AUDIENCE is confused by MR. PROVE-IT’s appeal to EXAMINER to act as gatekeeper, when it seems like EXAMINER has been limited to the role of moderator since the beginning of the investigation, but maybe the intensity of CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG’s claims combined with a growing chaos and confusion about what he wants this investigation to accomplish has dulled MR. PROVE-IT’s understanding of this investigation’s organizational structure.)
CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG
You think your professional wresting reference is witty here, mang?—Just because your favorite video on YouTube is the one featuring a pre-presidential Donald Trump getting stone-cold-stunner’d—straight into the mat—in front of thousands of screaming fans who probably went on to vote for him?
MR. PROVE-IT
Yeah, but that video is kickass. And I don’t care if you have one-billion dollars, or two billion…
(MR. WHINEY, trying not to let his frustration with the current tangential digression show, responds with scorn.)
MR. WHINEY
Gentlemen…while Conspiracy-theory-man,
(MR. PROVE-IT and CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG interrupt to correct MR. WHINEY’s mistake.)
MR. PROVE-IT CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG
Mang. Mang.
MR. WHINEY
CONSPIRACY THEORY MAAANG’s contribution, at this juncture is of questionable value.
However, we are not here to play respectability politics or discuss YouTube videos.
There are connections between Hutto and Clinton that could lead a rational person to ask some of the questions that CONSPIRACY THEORY Mang raises. Although we would be absolutely irresponsible as investigators—even as amateur investigators, not to offer some balancing counter points and questions.
Clinton WAS the Attorney General that threw Hutto under the federal court bus—by declaring that Hutto’s administration had acted in bad faith to investigate prison abuses, and as a result, pushed Hutto out of his position in the ADC. Turning around to suggest that President Clinton would be the one that paved the way for Arkansas’ first private prison, is a big stretch though. The push for private prisons has mostly held up at the state level, and it is individual states that have been responsible for the biggest and most expensive mergers of government and private industry.
Additionally, the State of Arkansas only experimented with one private prison venture, and that contract was awarded to CCA’s chief competitor—Wackenhut. It seems unlikely that the Hutto-Clinton connection is very strong, or you would think that the contract would have gone to his company.
CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG
Y’all mean to tell me…
(Pauses a beat for dramatic effect.)
…that all it takes—for you…mang—to stop looking—to stop searching for connections between the global and national “manipulators” is lack of immediate—and personal—financial profiteering?—No wonder our financial watch dogs failed so spectacularly in the collapse of 2008, mang—and no wonder they will again within the next 5 years.
MR. PROVE-IT
And 9/11 was an inside job, right?
CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG
(If CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG is aware that MR. PROVE-IT is teasing him, it does not register in the tone of his response.)
No way, mang!
That’s quack science—but—but saying that the CIA had nothing to do with the California 80s crack epidemic—because it can be “proven” that they did not “invent” the crystallization of cocaine—that ain’t the same thing as declaring them innocent, mang— of providing fronts for counter-revolutionary militias throughout Latin America—do you know what I’m saying?—to distribute cocaine in our, quote, urban centers, end-quote—in exchange for weapons, mang.
Even if—and in my eyes, maaaang—that is a big IF—even IF…Clinton and Hutto—weren’t “in collusion”—if they “never” discussed issues of “privatization”—of prisons, mang—as a solution for rampant state-wide institutional corruption—it is undeniable that both their attitudes about the prison industry—in the United States, mang?—were shaped by that legacy of abuse in the State of Arkansas…mang.
(CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG does not make it easy to latch on to coherent arguments, but MR. WHINEY has faith that there is reason to try.)
MR. WHINEY
So, your claim, if I got this right…
…is that regardless of whether it was intentional or not, is that it is likely that the history of incarceration in the State of Arkansas: a History of abuse and neglect, which has largely been ignored on the national scale, has played a central role in in both Hutto and Clinton being open-minded to the possibility that almost anything else had to be better?
MR. PROVE-IT
See, to me, that is the most damning and difficult argument to ignore against government-run institutions of incarceration.
When a prison is state-run, there is a stead-fast belief on the part of most Americans—even those on the left—that the system itself is solid and good. Folks think that all the problems that we encounter with putting that system into practice are the faults of individual bad actors running things.
The mainstream political parties fight tooth and nail over who’s gonna take over—just long enough for the person they put in charge to get overwhelmed by systemic problems—and then blame that person for not being capable of overcoming a system designed for abuse and corruption. You just can’t put people in complete control of other people’s lives and pretend like you haven’t created a time bomb that is just waiting to go off. It seems Terrell Don Hutto might have fallen into that trap, and “slick Willy” Clinton was one of those career government-types who specialized in making sure that the buck always stopped with some other sucker.
MR. WHINEY
Ok Mr. Prove-it.
(Something has just snapped for MR. WHINEY and he has shifted in lecture mode.)
You can legitimately question Bill Clinton’s commitments to accomplish social change and willingness to side-step accountability…but thinly veiled sexual and— frankly—misogynistic side-banter like “Slick Willy” has no place in this investigation…This isn’t 1st grade.
MR. PROVE-IT
(MR. PROVE-IT just got called out on his sexism and lashes back defensively.)
I was not the first person to call him that.
MR. WHINEY
(For all of MR. WHINEY’s faults, letting people off the hook for sexist behavior is not one of them and he has seen reactionary defensiveness like this in the responses of many an otherwise ardent pro-feminist male ally.)
No, you weren’t. But “it wasn’t me” is the official excuse of cowards and enablers of oppression.
And that last “some other sucker” comment is at least as offensive as the nickname or, at least, mentioning them together makes them both worse. In addition to getting us wrapped up in some macho-tough-bro-talk-metaphor relating sex to an extortion game—your comment also had the effect of derailing a productive conversation about the privatization of prison in Arkansas and the United States—
CONSPIRACY THEORY MANG
(Interrupting.)
—that’s not cool, mang.
MR. WHINEY
No, it’s not cool, man.
Because that conversation was really starting to go to some constructive places and illuminate some interesting links to our current investigation.
(MR. WHINEY really lets MR. PROVE-IT have it now, with a scolding that sounds like it could be directed at a 1st grader.)
Which is—SUPPOSED—to be focused on the institution of McPherson’s Unit and the people who have been directly impacted by its existence.
Not our own pathetic male insecurities.