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“....contractors and the prison authorities encountered a prison population [many of whom were Civil War veterans] in which significant numbers of long-term convicts had lived through the less industrialized, less violent, and more incentive-oriented contract system of the reformist Reconstruction era. In those years...prisoners had witnessed the introduction of rudimentary educational, religious, and vocational programs. In addition, official policy, and a new generation of reformist prison wardens, had actively promoted the principles of ‘moral suasion’ over the more naked coercion of the lash and paddle, and passionately rejected the kind of prison order in which the contractor and his needed were the preeminent concern of prison governance. Under these reformatory policies, which were reinforced by the states’ broader commitment to various kinds of social reform during Reconstruction, prisoners’ moral standing in the community, though still relatively low, had risen. During the ‘long depression’ of 1873-76 in the course of which many prison contractors had closed up shop, convicts in many Northern prisons had also become accustomed to exercising a relative degree of liberty within their institution (albeit under conditions of grinding poverty). The regime that prison administrators moved to introduce in the late 1870s rejected both the reformatory ethos of the Reconstruction era prisons and the various regulations aimed at limiting the scale and intensity of contractors’ operations within the prisons. With its large-scale industries, punitive task system, liberal application of corporal punishment, and overriding doctrinal commitment to rendering the prison a secure and profitable institution, the consolidated contract system unambiguously threatened to lay waste not merely to prisoners’ physical, mental, and spiritual welfare, but to their improving position in American society.

Unsurprisingly, large groups of prisoners did all they could to prevent the new system from being established. Once the authorities had broken the first wave of strikes and rebellions and imposed the new regime, prisoners subsequently found new ways to frustrate, undermine, and, occasionally, assault the system. The particular triggering point of the rebellions and their outcome varied from state to state and among the different kinds of contract in use (that is, lease, time, or piece-price). But regardless of which part of the country or under which they labored. Whether they toiled in the Southern lease mines or steelworks, Northern prison factories, or Western jute mills, the rebels took aim specifically at conditions or incidents directly connected with the operations of the contract labor system. In particular, almost all their grievances concerned the efforts of contractors to raise production levels, cut costs, inflict punishments, or a combination of these things.

A series of uprisings at the industrial Missouri State Prison in Jefferson CIty, beginning in 1874 (the same year in which the Missouri’s Redeemer government adopted the convict lease system proper) and continuing into 1875, anticipated the general pattern of Gilded Age convict rebellions. Like many prison uprisings, the 1874 protest began as a food riot in the mess hall. Following an apparent effort on the part of the overseers to work the convicts harder than usual, a large group of prisoners spontaneously rioted in the hall, claiming, in the words of one prisoner, that their food was ‘insufficient for hard-working men,’ and taking several guards hostage. As negotiations with the authorities got underway, the prisoners formed a leadership committee that then inspected the commissary and conversed with the president of the prison company (a Colonel Murphy) about the food problem. According to newspaper reports, Colonel Murphy assured the aggrieved prisoners that they would get all the good food they needed, whereupon the convicts promptly released their hostages and called an end to the action. The peace was short-lived, however; possibly emboldened by Murphy’s apparent concession, prison laborers in the shoe shop of lessee August Priesmeyer and Co. staged another protest (the details of which remain obscured) later that day, in the course of which some of their number threatened to burn down the penitentiary if their demands were not met. This time the authorities responded with a general lockdown in the cellhouse, which they achieved with the aid of a small company of Jefferson City citizens who had rushed to the prison and leveled their guns at the rebellious convicts.

It is unclear whether the prisoners found any real redress of their grievances that day. But in 1875, 300 of the leased convict cobblers armed themselves with hammers, knives and pikes and again went on strike, once more in protest of the poor and meager rations. The strike quickly escalated, and within a matter of hours, about 500 prisoners had taken possession of the penitentiary and made hostages of some of the keepers. One convict leader, a white man by the name of Henry Adams, en7umerated the men’s grievances: THe food was not fit to eat; the hominy was ‘short,’ the Sunday soup ‘weak,’ and the apples riddled with worms; in sum, the men were being ‘treated like dogs.’ A tense standoff followed, as Governor Charles Henry Hardin the state Attorney General, John A. Hockaday, and the lessees arrived to discuss the crisis. The state authorities soon found themselves having to contend not only with a rebellious mass of prisoners (who were now threatening to burn the prison to the ground), but an excited crowd of armed citizens who had, in the meantime, encircled the prison and made it clear they would shoot down the prisoners in the event of a mass-break out. Eventually, a small company of militia entered the prison, broke up the mass of striking convicts and sent them back to their cells. By a local newspaper’s account, ‘no blood was spilled’ that day; the prisoners eventually all gave up and the volatile crowd of citizens dispersed. (The last convicts to concede defeat were the cobblers who had instigated and organized the strike. Blood was, in fact, eventually ‘spilled,’ when the state prison inspectors ordered the keepers to punish Henry Adams and another convict leader, Philip Noxon, to the full extent of the law: They were given seventy lashes and internment in the ‘blind [dark] cell’). The convict leadership included three white prisoners (most notably, Philip Noxon, the probable leader of the previous year’s uprising, and Henry Adams ) and a black prisoner whose name was (reportedly) Kemp Kollins. It is unclear what became of this last convict. A hardening of the authorities’ attitudes was in evidence during the Missouri prisoners’ second rebellion: Unlike the previous year, the wardens and lessees flat-out denied the convicts’ charges of poor and inadequate food, and insisted that their rations were ‘both wholesome and adequate.’ The authorities also refused to negotiate with the prisoners - something they had been prepared to do the first time around.

The other large-scale prison rebellions that erupted around the country between 1877 and 1892 were invariably triggered by efforts to speed up production; the implementation of cost-cutting measures (including a reduction or dilution of food rations, with no corresponding lowering of the daily task); an incident of a lashing, slugging, or internment in the dark cell; or a combination of these events. Convicts’ demands followed much the same general pattern as found in Missouri: In almost every documented the rebellion, the prisoners demanded more and better food, on the explicit grounds that they were hard working men who could only work if they were properly fed; an end to corporal punishments such as paddlings and the lash; a slower pace of labor; or a combination of these the things. In many instances, the rebellions began as isolated, spontaneous riots and melées, only to escalate into more disciplined, prison-wide strikes in which certain leaders emerged and became spokesmen for the greater mass of prisoners. Bread riots, in particular, often erupted in the mess hall or cellhouse without planning or forethought, but then quickly assumed a more disciplined form. Rioters typically forged a measure of solidarity among significant majorities of their number appointed spokesmen, made demands and attempted to negotiate with the authorities for relief.

Some months after the award of the massive stove-molding contract to John Sherwood Perry at Sing Sing in 1877, prisoners struck in solidarity with a prisoner who had just been brutally ‘paddled.’ Eighteen months after the contract industries at Minnesota State prison at Stillwater were integrated into the massive North Western Manufacturing and Car Company, the prison was burnt to the ground in a fire that the authorities strongly suspected (but never proved) a group of prisoners had set. Hundreds of prisoner workers at the Massachusetts state prison at Concord went on strike, beginning on Independence Day, 1882, and through the next several days; the following year, the Missouri state prisoners rebelled once more, burning down a number of the lease labor prison shops at the Jefferson City prison (including two of the much-hate shoe shops). Similar events unfolded in the industrial prisons of New Jersey and Massachusetts: Prison laborers in the shoe shop at the Trenton state prison struck for heartier breakfasts in the winter of 1890 and a few months later, upwards of a hundred shoe and harness makers at the Massachusetts state prison in Charlestown rioted, this time smashing machinery and completely demolishing their workshops.

Prisoners working in the nation’s largest industrial prison system, New York’s, repeatedly rioted and struck. As noted earlier, in 1877, convict iron-workers at Sing Sing (where upwards of 900 were now smelting and molding iron for John Sherwood Perry’s oven-manufacturing business) struck. Like many other uprisings of the period, the rebellion was triggered by a paddling (and subsequent internment in the dark cell) dealt to a convict oven-molder on the grounds that he was shirking his work. After being punished in the transgression, John Barrett allegedly stabbed a guard with a modified mess-hall knife, fled into Perry’s foundry and successfully enjoined dozens of his fellow workers to strike. The keepers armed themselves with revolvers, eventually dispersed most of the striking convicts, and shot and killed Barrett (after he reportedly wielded a heavy hammer and ram against the officers.) Young male prisoners making hollow ware and brushware under the highly rationazlied piece-price system that Zebulon Brockway had established at the Elmira Reformatory for Boys also struck tools and refused to work, in 1882. Prison shoe-workers went on strike at Sing Sing in 1883, and at Kings County penitentiary, in Brooklyn, in the summer of 1885. At Kings County there was some evidence to suggest that the guards conspired with prisoners against a new and unpopular disciplinarian warden. The theme of poor food and physical evisceration was of central importance in nearly all the strikes of the post 1870 period. Like the Jefferson City riots, and most of the prisoner rebellions of the post-Reconstruction period, the trouble at Kings County began with a strike by about 100 men in one workshop over the inadequacy of prison food and the consequent atrophy of bodily strength and energy....the men protested that the prison food was not giving them enough bodily strength and energy with which to perform a day’s labor. Apparently galvanizing prisoners in other workshops to down tools and protest, the cobblers’ strike quickly escalated into an all-out food riot in the cellblock, with hundreds of prisoners demanding that they ‘ought to have hash for breakfast about to do a day’s work.’ Fore three days, the prisoners yelled, ‘Hash! Hash!’ (and somewhat more cryptically ‘We’ll fix it in the morning!’). As in many of the other rebellions that took place in the industrial contract prisons, the Kings warden eventually restored order in the prison by orchestrating a show of force (in the form of a special detachment of the New York Police Department), and starving and weakened, and increasingly hungry, mass of striking prisoners into submission.

Although open, large-scale acts of defiance occurred mostly in the contract prisons of the industrial states (most of which were in the Northeast and Midwest), prison strikes and rebellions were not unknown in other regions in the Gilded Age. The Far Western and deep Southern states also saw a number of prison rebellions - most of which erupted in the wake of the transition to one or another variant of the consolidated contract labor system. These regions’ prison rebellions tended to be less well-documented than those in the Northeast and Midwest, but it is clear that even the country’s most exploited and oppressed prisoners - the black men and women who toiled for convict lessees in the mines, swamps and plantations of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina - struck sometimes by the hundreds, for better food and the abolition of corporal punishment. Some took even more direct action setting their prisons and mines on fire in protest of speed-ups and whippings. Edward Ayers notes that, in at least one instance of convict rebellion in the South - a strike at the Rising Fawn Mine in 1884 - the Governor of the state considered the uprising serious enough that he dispatched the militia and artillery to the site. Similarly, in the Far West, prison laborers working the San Quentin jute mills struck twice in 1891, each time for more and better food, and once for the opportunity to air their grievances before the state board of prison directors.

Understood as efforts to bring immediate and direct relief from the structures and conditions of which they were aggrieved, the Missouri, New York and other prisoner strikes and protests of the 1870s and 1880s were manifest failures. The prison authorities did not concede to prisoners’ demands and, in every instance I have been able to document, the authorities quickly and forcefully put down the rebellions (typically through a combination of a show of force and suspension of rations). More often than not, an insurrection not only failed to win any obvious measure of relief for the prisoners, but resulted in a loss of life or limb, and extension of prison terms, for the participants. At the same time, however, the insurrections were neither without meaning nor entirely destructive to the prisoner’s cause. Most immediately, strikes and riots were bad for the contractor’s business: Rebellions disrupted production, however briefly, and, a we have seen, often led to the destruction of valuable machinery and materials. More subtly, strikes also taught an important lesson to contractors and prisoners alike: Convicts’ laying down of tools and the consequent halt in production laid bare the contractors’ unavoidable dependence upon their imprisoned workers, and persuasively negated the idea that convicts were powerless, broken men who could do nothing but toil obediently for their masters. In their collective acts of defiance, prisoners realized - and caused contractors to recognize - that far from having an entirely free hand within the prison factories and camps, contractors were subject, if only in some degree, to a relation of dependency. Rebellions exposed a vital link between the conditions of prison life, on one hand, and the convicts’ ability and willingness top work hard and well for their contractors, on the others. Prisoners possessed something that the contractors needed. Contractors were in the business of making commodities, extracting minerals and materials, or raising and harvesting produce, and for this they needed convicts to render up their labor. Even with the prison guard, state militias, local police forces, and armed posses at their disposal, contractors nonetheless depended upon two interrelated things: They required a significant degree of cooperation from the convicts, and they required, at the very least, the acquiescence of the citizenry at large to the prison labor system. Prisoners’ strikes and rebellions reminded them of the first dependency; the newspaper stories and legislative investigations that generally followed upon the heels of any large-scale rebellion or other prison disorder underscored the second.

Although it is the case that the prisoners did not explicitly demand an end to their forced labor or the abolition of the contract system per se, they tended to take aim at its most injurious and unjust practices. The practices over which they were prepared to rebel (speed-ups, the administration of lashings and shocks, diminution of the rations) were not discrete or inessential features of the new, highly consolidated, contract system; rather, they were an intrinsic part of that system. Although rebelling convicts did not call for the outright abolition of the system, therefore it was not the case that they were merely trying to ameliorate its worst excesses or reform it in such a way that its basic structure and operating logic were left intact: When convicts rebelled against speed-ups, beatings, and poor rations, they contested, however obliquely, the system’s foundational principle: that is, that the contractor had a free hand to raise production levels, cut costs, discipline his labor force, and maximize profits as he, and he alone, saw fit. Even with the full force of the state at his disposal, a judiciary that effectively adhered to a ‘hands off’ doctrine in regard to prisons and prisoners, and a steady supply of fresh laborers, the contractor could not flex his hand just as he chose. Prisoners had very few means available to them by which to contest or ‘negotiate’ the conditions under which they worked; indeed, as we have seen, the lack of opportunity for organizing was among the characteristics of convict labor that made it very attractive to manufacturers who sought a freer hand on the factory floor. But prisoners were not entirely without means. Ironically, the very structure of large-scale prison industries both rendered the contractors more vulnerable to attack and made possible new, and potentially paralyzing forms of strike action. More so than the less specialized, smaller-scale industries of previous eras, Gilded Age contractors were vulnerable to a complete shut-down of their operation. As prisoners in a number of institutions appear to have grasped, the integrated nature of the contract industries and the division of labor into multiple, sequential phases not only vastly augmented production capacity, but rendered prison industries far more vulnerable to paralyzing attack. Under earlier versions of the contract system, labor had been less extensively divided and specialized and a disruption in one workshop or among among one company of workers did not necessarily slow or halt the prison’s industries in toto. Under the large-scale, integrated, and highly specialized structure of Gilded Age prison industries, small groups of convicts were able to halt production by disrupting just one phase in the sequence of production. Repeatedly, convicts were able to turn the large-scale, integrated nature of prison industry to advantage, whether by simply closing down one phase of production (as happened at Sing Sing in the foundry in 1877), or spreading word of a prison-wide strike along the production line itself.

It is very difficult to know whether contractors modified their approach to prisoners as a result of any given rebellion. Certainly, there is evidence that, in the wake of the strikes at Sing Sing in the late 1870s, the major contractor at that prison, John Sherwood Perry, commenced a public campaign in which he claimed that his system was firm, but humane (and, of course, the key to significant cost-savings for the people of New York). Annual prison reports throw little light on the question of whether workshop conditions, food supplies, and disciplinary practices changed significantly following large-scale rebellions. Beyond prison walls, on the other hand, the rebellions had a profound and discernible impact. Although convict strikes and riots lasted, at most, just a few days, and typically failed to deliver any immediate relief to the prisoners, the insurrections nonetheless enjoyed a considerable afterlife in the press and in public discourse more generally. The prison ‘mutinies’ of the Gilded Aged invariably drew the attention of the press, labor organizers, and a growing cadre of middle class social critics. Press coverage of the rebellions, in turn, led prisoners to discover another means by which they could contest and undermine the prison order: They could smuggle out accounts of working conditions and abuses (real and imagined), or go to the press in person upon release from prison. In New York, a number of prisoners did this. In 1879, two years after the well-reported Sing Sing strike of 1877, prisoners recently released from Sing Sing and Auburn went directly to the press and warned that it was only a matter of time before prisoners would rebel again. One such prophet, an ex-prisoner by the name of William Hawley, turned up at the offices of the New York Times within days of being discharged from auburn and testified to the illegal and routine use of the lash at Auburn, its grueling task system, the rotten, inedible food, and escalating rates of punishment. Reporting the story, the Times editorialized that if the ‘harrowing tales of life in that institution under its present management...are true, a general outbreak in the prison is to be feared.’ (An ‘outbreak’ did in fact follow, though not at Auburn but Sing Sing).

In many states, the convict rebellions helped reopen public debate over both the efficacy and the ethical value of the prevailing system of penal servitude. Reports of convicts’ actions palpably refuted the claim of contractors and the authorities that their system imposed order in the prisons. In a related vein, the reports of beatings, shock treatments, and chronically overworked and underfed prisoners that invariably accompanied news of a prison rebellion contradicted one of the contractors’ key claims - that their system was firm but humane. More than merely altering the free citizenry’s perception of the prisons. News of prisoner rebellions and abuse scandals also helped revive organized labor’s drive against contractual prison labor.”

- Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. Cambridge University Press, 2008. p. 142-149 Image is: Sing Sing Prison. (Prisoners at work at the quarries.), from Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views. 1863-1885? New York Public Library. Stephen A. Schwarzman Building / Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: MFY Dennis Coll 91-F152

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New Joint Employer Liability Guidelines Effective in March

“Growers need to be thinking very carefully about the farm labor contractors that they engage because they can be held responsible for the conditions and treatment of workers,”

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has recently issued an update to the definition of what constitutes joint employer liability. While the new ‘four-factor balancing test’ updates the regulation officially, the criteria of the test have been what DOL has been using as its general enforcement practice. The most common instance where this change in regulatory enforcement would be seen in the…

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