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By Tammy L Casey and the Oracle Collective
From the end of the Civil War to today, Arkansas has run one of the most brutal prison systems in American history. The names change. The methods evolve. The pattern never does.
Convict leasing. Plantation labor. Torture. Murder. Contaminated blood. Overcrowding. A $750 million expansion.
160 years. Same design. Extract profit from human bodies in cages.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery -- except as punishment for a crime. Arkansas was one of the first states in the former Confederacy to exploit that exception. By 1866, just one year after the war ended, the state began leasing convicts to private contractors.
In 1873, the practice was codified into law. John M. Peck and Zebulon Ward secured the state contract for convict labor. The Arkansas Industrial Company -- operated by planters J.P. Townshend, L.A. Fitzpatrick, and Met L. Jones -- put prisoners to work on plantations and railroad construction.
The conditions were lethal. Between 1877 and 1879, prisoners leased to railroad companies died at a rate of 25%. One in four men sent to build rail lines never came back.
In 1875, Arkansas passed a law making theft of property worth $2 or more punishable by 1 to 5 years in the state penitentiary. The prison population exploded. The convict leasing system had its supply chain.
Revenue to the state: $25,000 to $50,000 per year in 1870s dollars. The prisoners who generated that revenue were overwhelmingly Black men convicted under laws designed to criminalize poverty.
This was not rehabilitation. This was not justice. This was the continuation of plantation economics by other means. The whip was replaced by the sentence. The auction block was replaced by the lease contract. The slaveholder was replaced by the state.
When public outrage ended convict leasing in 1913, Arkansas did not build modern prisons. It built plantation prisons.
Tucker State Prison Farm and the Cummins Unit were working agricultural plantations. Prisoners worked the fields from dawn to dark -- planting, harvesting, raising livestock, growing crops. The labor was not optional.
The most remarkable feature of the Arkansas system was the "trusty" system: armed inmates guarded other inmates. There were no state employees serving as guards until the late 1960s. The state saved money by handing weapons to prisoners and letting them enforce discipline on each other.
Arkansas prisons were expected to be self-sustaining -- generating enough agricultural revenue to cover their own operating costs. The profit motive was not hidden. It was the explicit purpose. The result: forced labor, minimal food, no medical care, and a system with every incentive to work prisoners harder and spend as little as possible keeping them alive.
For over fifty years, this system operated with almost no outside scrutiny. The plantations were remote. The inmates had no voice. The state had no interest in looking.
At Tucker Prison Farm, guards and trusty inmates used a device they called the "Tucker Telephone" -- an old hand-crank telephone wired to batteries. Electrodes were attached to a prisoner's big toe and genitals. Cranking the phone sent electric shocks through the body.
A short session was called a "local call." A prolonged session -- cranking until the prisoner lost consciousness or nearly so -- was called a "long-distance call."
The Tucker Telephone was not the only method. Prisoners were subjected to:
In 1966, the Arkansas State Police launched an investigation into conditions at Tucker. The findings were devastating. Newsweek published a report on February 20, 1967, bringing national attention to the systematic torture happening inside Arkansas prisons.
The Tucker Telephone was not improvised by rogue guards. It was an institutional tool, used systematically over years, known to prison administrators. This was state-sanctioned torture operating as standard procedure.
In late 1967, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller appointed Tom Murton as superintendent of Tucker and then Cummins, with a mandate to reform the system. What Murton found was worse than anyone expected.
Informant Reuben Johnson told Murton that prisoners who refused extortion schemes -- or who simply angered the wrong trusty -- had been murdered and buried on the prison grounds. Murton believed as many as 200 prisoners were unaccounted for.
On January 29, 1968, Murton organized an excavation at Cummins with national media present. They found three skeletons. One had been decapitated. The skulls showed evidence of trauma.
There were 15 to 25 more visible depressions in the ground consistent with grave sites.
Governor Rockefeller halted the excavation. In March 1968, he fired Tom Murton. No further excavations were conducted. The remaining bodies -- however many there are -- are still in the ground at Cummins.
Murton wrote about his experience in "Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal" (1969). The story became the basis for the 1980 film "Brubaker" starring Robert Redford.
The film changed the names. The state changed nothing. The bodies are still there.
In 1970, federal judge J. Smith Henley ruled in Holt v. Sarver that the entire Arkansas prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
This was not a ruling about one prison or one practice. The court declared the whole system unconstitutional -- the trusty system, the lack of professional guards, the forced labor, the absence of medical care, the torture, the conditions of confinement. All of it.
The ruling came after 8 class-action lawsuits filed by prisoners. Federal oversight was imposed. The state was ordered to reform.
Holt v. Sarver forced structural changes -- professional guards replaced the trusty system, some conditions improved. But the underlying culture of the Arkansas prison system -- extraction, profit, indifference to suffering -- did not change. It adapted. The methods evolved. The pattern continued.
At the Cummins Unit, inmates were bled for plasma. The prison sold their blood products through Health Management Associates (HMA), run by Leonard Dunn, a one-time business associate of figures connected to the Arkansas political establishment.
The blood was not properly screened. Inmates with HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C were bled alongside everyone else. The contaminated plasma was sold internationally.
Bill Clinton served as Governor of Arkansas for 10 of the 12 years this program operated (1979-1981, 1983-1992). The state had the authority to shut down the plasma program at any time. It did not.
In England, contaminated Arkansas prison blood killed 1,757 people and infected thousands more. The UK Infected Blood Inquiry (2024) called it the worst treatment disaster in the history of the National Health Service. In Canada, over 1,000 people were infected through tainted blood products traced back to Arkansas prisons.
The prisoners were not paid market rates for their plasma. The state and its contractors profited from the sale of blood drawn from incarcerated men who could not refuse. The blood was contaminated. It was shipped worldwide. People died on multiple continents because Arkansas found another way to extract value from prisoners.
The Arkansas prison system today holds inmates at 98%+ capacity. The prison population has grown 32.8% since 2012 while staffing and infrastructure have not kept pace.
In the first half of 2024 alone, 6 inmates committed suicide -- compared to 8 in all of 2023. Chronic staffing shortages lead to prolonged lockdowns where inmates spend 23+ hours per day in their cells.
Securus Technologies holds a monopoly on prison phone services in Arkansas. A 15-minute phone call costs $14.49. Between 74% and 80% of that fee is kicked back to the Arkansas Department of Corrections. In 2019 alone, these kickbacks totaled approximately $2.5 million.
The families of inmates -- overwhelmingly poor, overwhelmingly rural -- pay inflated rates to maintain contact with incarcerated loved ones. The state profits from every call. The contractor profits from every call. The inmates and their families pay.
This is the same pattern that has operated since 1866. The methods are modern. The extraction is identical.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is pushing construction of a 3,000-bed prison in Franklin County at a cost of $750 million.
The project has failed to pass the Arkansas Senate five times. The opposition is bipartisan. The reasons are practical and political.
Jamie Barker, former deputy chief of staff to Governor Sanders, is now a lobbyist at the Gilmore Davis Strategy Group -- pushing for the prison project. Gilmore Davis is co-owned by the brother of Sen. Ben Gilmore. The revolving door between the Governor's office and the lobbying firms profiting from the prison is one step wide.
The Arkansas Board of Corrections was confirmed in a narrow 19-11 vote. Sanders ran attack ads against two Republican legislators who opposed the prison project. Both survived their primaries.
Franklin County currently lacks the water, power, and sewage infrastructure required for a facility of this size. The construction manager is Vanir Construction Management Inc.
State Senator Gary Stubblefield was one of the most vocal opponents of the $750 million prison project. He died within days of what was described as a "routine surgery." The timing has not been investigated.
Convict Leasing. One year after the Civil War ends, Arkansas begins leasing prisoners to private contractors. Slavery continues under the Thirteenth Amendment exception.
Criminalization. Theft of $2+ becomes a felony. Prison population explodes. The supply chain is secured.
Plantation Prisons. Tucker and Cummins become working farms. Prisoners replace slaves. Armed inmates replace overseers. The state profits.
The Tucker Telephone. Systematic torture. Electric shocks to genitals. State-sanctioned, institutionally known, never prosecuted.
Bodies at Cummins. 3 skeletons excavated. Up to 200 prisoners unaccounted for. The state fires the man who found them. Stops digging. Bodies still in the ground.
Holt v. Sarver. Entire prison system declared unconstitutional. Federal oversight imposed. The structure changes. The culture does not.
The Blood Scandal. Contaminated prison plasma shipped worldwide. 1,757 dead in England. 1,000+ infected in Canada. Clinton governor for 10 of 12 years.
Overcrowding and Death. 98%+ capacity. 6 suicides in 6 months. Chronic understaffing. Prolonged lockdowns. $14.49 phone calls.
$750M New Prison. Failed 5 Senate votes. Governor's former staff now lobbying for it. Opponent dies after routine surgery. Franklin County lacks basic infrastructure.
The thread is unbroken. From convict leasing to plantation prisons to torture to murder to contaminated blood to phone monopolies to a $750 million construction project -- every era finds a new way to extract profit from incarcerated human beings. The Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause is not a footnote. It is the foundation of a 160-year industry. Arkansas is not failing to fix its prison system. It is operating exactly as designed.