Chapter 41
To show the public that its captive audience was also a productive one, Minnesota’s Correction Facility–Stillwater built an exhibit of twine for the state fair in 1936. Like many other states at the time, Minnesota used its supply of convicts to produce products the Industrial Revolution mandated—such as twine. When the McCormick reaper debuted in 1874, for example, it eliminated thousands of workers but increased the need for a material to bind the millions of bales of hay it harvested. By 1892, the prisoners produced one million tons of twine a year, enough to pay for the entire prison budget. The prison-industrial complex existed before the term even existed.
Paying for your crimes—literally—had been an established part of America’s correctional philosophy since at least the late 1820s, when the so-called Auburn system became popular. Originating in the Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York, the system balanced daytime work with nighttime solitary confinement. The system was the penological yin to the Pennsylvania system’s yang: the Keystone State’s approach emphasized solitary confinement alone and the pursuant contemplation of one’s inappropriate life choices (although later labor was tacked on). But the ROI of the Quaker-influenced meditative approach did not impress more financially prudent minds concerned with coin rather than conscience. By the time of the Civil War, roughly two dozen states had prisons mostly based on the Auburn system in which prisoners could be leased en masse to private concerns, perhaps, or given piecework tasks to complete for other businesses. At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 85 percent of all inmates engaged in such labor, with much of their exertions benefiting the state hosting them or the private enterprises exploiting them. It was a prototype for squeezing surplus and vulnerable labor that Minnesota did not have sufficient reserves of nice to resist.
Minnesota Historical Society
Initially established in 1853, the Stillwater State Prison (its original name) became the first state penitentiary in Minnesota when the territory was granted statehood in 1858. Its greatest claim to fame was the imprisonment of the Younger brothers (Jim, Cole, and Bob) portion of the James-Younger gang after their bungled robbery of the First National Bank of Northfield’s assets in 1876. The rest of its history in that era was as checkered as the tablecloth in an Italian trattoria: Warden “Bull Beef” Webber allowed a convicted murderer in his care to get fresh air by going on hunting trips in Wisconsin, sold beef and flour out of prison supplies to bootstrap his own financial upward mobility, and permitted an incarcerated prostitute (women and men both at one time were held in the prison) to ply her trade out of the prison hospital, relieving inmates of their pent-up tensions.
Commerce commenced in 1859, when John B. Stevens, a Stillwater-based manufacturer of shingles and blinds, first leased the prison workshop from the state for five years for the modest sum of a hundred dollars a year. By 1870, the system had grown to the extent that 48 prisoners produced $50,000 worth of tubs, buckets, and barrels for another employer, steadily expanding Seymour, Sabin and Co. Prisoners rose at 5:30 a.m. and worked for eleven hours in summer and nine in winter.
In the early 1890s, the prison started manufacturing twine under the brand name Stillwater Twine. Ever branching out, the prison in 1921 merged its various “shops” as the Industrial Department, producing, along with twine, shoes, high school scientific apparatus, and farm equipment (under the brand name The Minnesota Line), including corn harvesters, hay rakes, hay binders, mowers, manure spreaders, and more. But its twine stood apart, with almost a billion pounds produced and sold by the 1940s.
The lucrative—for the prison, at any rate—practice began to unravel nationwide when industry’s love of cheap labor woke up to the unfair competition of even cheaper convict labor. A multitude of bills to restrict the flow of prisoner-produced goods were introduced into Congress, like the 1929 Hawes-Cooper Act, which empowered states to ban prison-made goods from being imported. The Great Depression, with its stratospheric unemployment levels, added another spur to the movement. In 1935, Congress passed the Ashurst-Sumners Act, which barred states from selling inmate-made goods to customers in other states. The legislation’s prime movers came chiefly from the textile industry, since at that time, textiles accounted for almost 24 percent of all the goods manufactured behind bars. Prison industries’ decline during this period was remarkable: At the beginning of the century, about 85 percent of all inmates worked in prison industries; by 1940 the figure had plummeted to 44 percent, nearly a 50 percent drop.
Perhaps the oddest connection to the prison and its twine came by way of Hollywood. Jerome Odlum, a one-time editor with the Minneapolis News in the 1930s who had not so much fallen on hard times as crash-landed (even the rent on his typewriter was overdue), penned “Each Dawn I Die,” about a journalist framed for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to Stillwater State Prison.
To paint the novel with the obligatory verisimilitude, Odlum included fewer details on shiv-making than on twine-production. When Warner Bros. Studios picked up the book and began developing it as a Jimmy Cagney vehicle, the studio shipped William Buckley, the civilian supervisor of the real prison’s mill, to Los Angeles to oversee the scenes set in the sordid and dangerous world of twine production.
The prison’s state fair exhibits continued into the 1970s, eventually disappearing as a proper promotional vehicle for its rehabilitative efforts. The manufacturing of goods itself continues, however, in the form of MINNCOR Industries, which makes everything from lounge seating to women’s clothing.