Whatever Happened to the Southern Chain Gang?

Reinventing the Road Prison in Sunbelt Florida

VIVIEN MILLER

Prologue: The 1967 Jay Road Prison Fire

Florida’s Department of Corrections Road Prison (DCRP) at Jay, Santa Rosa County, near the Alabama state line, normally held around fifty-five “colored” male prisoners in the summer months of 1967. As part of the state prison system’s desegregation schedule, eighteen transferred to other facilities to free up space for incoming white prisoners in early July. Ten white men arrived on Tuesday July 11 and five more on Thursday July 13.1 State Road Department (SRD) personnel reported no immediate problems and no unusual incidents following the changeover. African American and white prisoners played softball and took part in other recreational activities on Saturday July 15. Nine prisoners attended church services the following morning. The afternoon visiting hours were also uneventful, but it was later reported that white prisoner David F. Cole had told his father that something was about to kick off.2 During early evening dormitory security checks on Sunday July 16, guards removed two “pornographic” books from the bunk of white prisoner Thomas Eugene Ard. In response, Ard apparently plotted with another white prisoner, Earl Frank Hoffman, and black prisoner Joseph Wynder “to create a riot for the purpose of putting the institution out of operation.”3

When the dormitory was secured at 5:30 P.M., there were three officers on duty: the wicket officer, A. O. Lovett; and two roving officers, R. E. Cobb and D. C. Nelson. At 9 P.M., “Lovett blew the whistle for the prisoners to return to their bunks for the ‘lights-out’ bed check and flesh count,” and all fifty-one men were accounted for.4 As Cobb and Nelson left the compound, they “heard a lot of noise and commotion coming from within the dormitory.” Lovett later testified that he saw Wynder “jump upon a bunk” and “with what appeared to be a broom handle began smashing the fluorescent light tubes.” Other prisoners allegedly broke the television set, commodes, wash basins, and bunks. Cobb and Nelson returned immediately to assist Lovett. Believing that a major riot had broken out, Cobb unlocked the weapon store as Nelson telephoned for assistance. Meanwhile, two fires had started in different parts of the dormitory. One was quickly extinguished, but the other spread rapidly from the northwest corner when flames were agitated by an exhaust fan. The wooden dormitory building then ignited like a “tinderbox.” Survivors recalled a wall of flames rolling across the ceiling. This was at approximately 9 P.M.. A Timex chrome watch, whose hands had stopped at 9:08, was among the items subsequently recovered from the shower area.5

Nine prisoners were pulled to safety through the chute (a barred metal entrance to the dormitory) after frantic efforts to unlock it, and seven prisoners escaped through a hole in the dormitory wall, which Lovett made with an axe. Nevertheless, “the fire became so intense and heat and smoke so great that the [guard and prisoner] rescuers were driven back.”6 Nearby residents alerted the Jay Fire Department, which in turn summoned help from colleagues within a thirty-mile radius. All arrived too late to save any other prisoners or the building.7 Survivors later told the county judge that the dormitory was destroyed in eight minutes; it had taken Lovett six minutes to unlock the chute. The terms “funeral pyre” and “tinderbox” appeared in many news reports.8 Thirty-five prisoners died in the dormitory. Of the sixteen who were rescued, two died at the scene, and another died three days later. Local newspapers described nineteen bodies “found huddled four high in the shower room where [the prisoners] apparently sought cool safety from the flames. Sixteen were stacked beneath a barred window.” Most victims were identified only by forensic dental methods because of the destructiveness of the blaze.9

Immediately after the fire, the eight African American prisoner survivors were transferred to the Santa Rosa County Jail at Milton (all were reported as being unharmed), and six white prisoners, five of whom were seriously burned, were sent to local hospitals.10 A Coroner’s Jury was impaneled and visited the scene in the early hours of July 17. Eight prisoner survivors, five Division of Corrections (DOC) officials, and one SRD official reported to the Coroner’s Inquest a few days later. Harrowing testimony was provided by prisoners still under shotgun guard. Some were shirtless when they arrived in court, and others wore t-shirts marked with ash and smoke.11 Jurors determined that arson was the cause, thirty-seven persons died either by asphyxiation or burning, and that Joseph Wynder, Earl Frank Hoffman, and Thomas Ard had deliberately started the fires. All three prisoners were dead and therefore unable to challenge this determination.12

Reinventing the Road Prison

The media coverage of the Jay road prison fire reminded readers that labor exploitation remained an integral part of Southern discipline and punishment during the period of the civil rights movement, black freedom struggle, and Black Power. Florida’s DOC reports show that for much of 1967, as many as 1,700 state prisoners (felons) labored on the roads; they accounted for nearly 25 percent of the total state prison population and were distributed among thirty-three road prisons. An additional 1,000 misdemeanants, usually serving terms of twelve months or less, were assigned to seventeen county-operated prison camps and were employed in the maintenance of local roads.13 A survey of prison road gangs in eleven Southern states by New York Times reporter James Wootens in 1971 found there were 16,000 prisoner road laborers in 1960; 11,000 in 1965; and 7,000 in 1970. Florida was reported as working 3,000 prioners in road gangs in 1960 and 1,500 in 1970. There were 2,400 road laborers in Georgia in 1960 and 800 by 1970, and the numbers for North Carolina were 4,000 in 1960; 3,500 in 1965; and 1,800 in 1970.14 Thus, outdoor physical labor remained a defining feature of the prisoners’ lot, even though state reliance on prisoner road labor was decreasing in these decades.

As this chapter demonstrates, state road prisons in Florida were redefined and reconditioned from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, as they moved out of the fiefdom of the SRD and were incorporated into the post-1957 DOC. The chapter highlights the difficulties of reforming a patronage-based system of appointments and professionalizing an entrenched white male guard corps and the challenges of recruiting and retaining a new type of correctional officer. It contemplates whether new classification systems and the extension of educational and vocational programs to prisoner road laborers did change road prison regimes and improve the prisoner experience by the late 1960s and early 1970s. It also considers whether SRD and DOC road prisons continued to operate because of conscience, that is, a specific penal rationale, or convenience, namely, a lack of capacity in the state’s other main close-custody institutions.

The collision of Jim Crow Florida with the emergent Sunbelt Florida between the 1940s and 1970s led the state to reinvent itself and many of its institutions. Civil rights–era DOC road prisons traced their roots to the classic chain gangs of the 1910s to 1930s, but in the postwar decades, many politicians and prison bureaucrats endeavored to reconcile prisoner road labor with the growing progressive emphasis on “corrections.” As DOC officials, penal experts, and legislators advocated productive prison work and sought tangible means of reducing recidivism and supporting desistance, road labor remained part of the currency of Florida corrections. By the late 1960s and 1970s, road prisons straddled both the newer correctional ethos in which work skills were essential to successful ex-offenders’ resettlement and reintegration and an older penal philosophy centered on labor exploitation. Road prisons also survived because the labor performed by prisoners was of value to key state transportation agencies and was legitimized within an enduring states-use system. Most of Florida’s state prison prisoners were unskilled, lower-class, young African American men, and there remained considerable political and popular support for punishments defined by hard labor and custodialism. As one Georgia prison guard remarked in 1971, “Been working these crews for 20 years now and it don’t ever change. White trash and n____s! You got to have road gangs because that’s all they good for.”15

The Jay road prison fire of 1967 was, without any doubt, a profoundly shocking and traumatic event. The deaths of thirty-eight prisoners and the physical destruction wrought by the fire had a lasting effect on prisoner survivors and DOC personnel. This tragedy is often used to signal the beginning of the end of Florida’s one hundred-year association with chain gangs and prison road labor—at least until the 1995 reappearance of chained prisoner squads amid the late modern shift away from rehabilitative punishment and toward more spectacular and punitive forms.16 The fire was a defining moment in the state’s penal history and served as an important catalyst for an accelerated program of road prison reform. However, this essay underlines that the fire occurred in the middle of a much more complicated story of DCRP transformation and survival. Seventeen older wood-frame road prisons were closed in the months after the fire, but road prisons in Florida continued, and newer masonry structures underwent further reinvention in the 1970s to emerge as Community Correctional Centers to house medium- and minimum-security prisoners. The histories of chain gangs and road prisons therefore remind us that the carceral experiences of prisoner road laborers in Jim Crow and Sunbelt Florida were very much defined by recycling and reinvention rather than dramatic reform and restructuring.

Whatever Happened to the Southern Chain Gang?

The chain gang and its successor, the road prison, are firmly embedded in the history of the political economy of the Jim Crow South, the collective memory of the Southern past, and in visual culture. Road prison or chain gang labor was never a uniquely Southern institution, and Heather Ann Thompson notes that persistent racialized, gendered, and brutal penal practices in other U.S. regions have often been obscured by preoccupation with “the South.”17 Nevertheless, post–World War II Florida road prisons connect to a much longer regional history of racialized forced labor stretching back to the colonial, antebellum, and New South periods.18 Recent prison studies have identified contractual penal servitude as the central feature of many U.S. prison systems during the long nineteenth century, as prisoner labor was sold by state governments to private business interests and then nominally returned to public control in the early twentieth century.19 Penal servitude was defined in distinctive gender, race, ethnic, and class terms and thus imbricated in the maintenance of elite white male political and economic hegemony. Prison officials’ desire for self-sufficient institutions and profitable prison labor further undergirded the early twentieth-century extension of road gangs in states like Florida.20

Not all Southern states used chain gang or road prison labor in the pre–World War II years, and there were differences between those that did.21 For example, the use of female road convicts was more extensive in Georgia than in Florida.22 However, scholarship on Southern convict road labor usually focuses on the Georgia experience: proposals by white officials to replace convict leasing with chain gangs from 1908; the horrendous conditions and abuses endured by a predominantly black convict force in a decentralized camp system; exposure and condemnation following Robert E. Burns’ 1932 indictment of the state’s penal conditions; and eventual reform by Governor Ellis Arnall in the 1940s.23 Yet, “abolition” of chain gang labor in 1940s Georgia meant the removal of chains from many, but not all, prisoners, replacing striped uniforms, (official) abolition of corporal punishment, and closure of some highway prison camps; it did not signal the end of outdoor prisoner road work in that state.24 The New York Times description of a Georgia convict road gang in October 1971 was eerily similar to those penned by interwar critics such as Frank Tannenbaum and John Spivak: “JASPER, Ga. It was noon on a recent summer’s day and a grimy, sweat-soaked band of convicts plodded listlessly through the heavy weeds along the highway, swinging their tools under a boiling sun and the dour stare of a gaunt guard.”25

Aside from occasional references to community correctional work camps, in 1960s California, for example, prison road laborers generally disappear from the post–World War II historical narrative.26 Studies of the mid-twentieth-century therapeutic and sociomedical punishment models and postwar rehabilitative and recreational changes usually focus on walled institutions outside the South. Further, the 1990s reintroduction of “chain gangs” in several U.S. states, including Alabama and Florida, generated a significant amount of press comment and scholarship, much of which moved seamlessly from the 1940s to the 1990s, often without considering what happened in between.27 Southern road prisoners certainly did not, however, disappear from either public sight or legislative scrutiny in the second half of the twentieth century, as this case study of Florida demonstrates.

Sunbelt Road Prisons

Many Florida state prison officials continued to champion road labor even after the end of the substantive construction projects that utilized chained labor squads in the 1920s and 1930s.28 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the SRD assigned (usually unchained) prisoners to road and bridge repairs, trash collection duties, and “highway beautification” projects, including planting shrubs and palm trees along key tourist routes. By the end of December 1952, there were 1,590 male prisoners assigned to thirty-six state road prisons or “camps”—eighteen for white prisoners and eighteen for “colored” prisoners, as Florida’s jails, prisons, and correctional institutions were all racially segregated.29 In 1955, 34 percent of white prisoners and 44 percent of African American prisoners were allotted to the SRD.30 Former SRD director (1934–1976) Lloyd Griffith recalled, “In the old days we would get the worst of the worst.… The only qualification was that they be able-bodied, so not only did you have the mean ones, but they were mean and strong.”31

Many prisoners were housed in permanent SRD structures that had been built in the 1930s or in facilities that had been taken over from disbanded New Deal agencies in the early 1940s. These included SRD Camp Number 14, a former Civilian Conservation Corps’ camp, located near Big Pine Key, between Homestead and Key West, and the road prison at Jay, which was a converted World War II army barracks. Several new road prisons were constructed in the 1950s, including Copeland (1952–2002) in the middle of the Everglades grapefruit groves.32 Road prisons were located in all types of counties: in Pinellas County at the center of the booming technological industries; in Leon and Alachua Counties, which contained key tertiary state educational institutions; and in poorer and more isolated Panhandle counties, such as Santa Rosa, Washington, and Jackson. The central feature of every road prison was the prisoner dormitory, usually “22-24 feet wide and 90–92 feet long with a porch on the middle front and a shower-bathroom and canteen built onto the middle back.”33

By the mid-1950s, the SRD prison network was one of four main custodial options for Florida’s 4,000 state prisoners; the others were the Florida State Prison (FSP) at Raiford, which was evolving into a maximum- and close-custody institution for black and white men; the Glades State Prison Farm in Palm Beach County for African American male prisoners; and the smaller Florida Correctional Institution (CI) for Women at Lowell. Road prisoner allocations continued to increase, for example, from 1,769 on June 30, 1957, to 1,891 on June 30, 1959, but SRD’s share of state prisoners was declining, from 31 percent to 27.5 percent in this two-year period. By June 1960, the road prisons held 1,784 prisoners, a net decrease of 107 persons, which was due in part to increased committals to FSP and the recently opened Apalachee CI but also to new classification procedures, under which minimum-, medium-, and close-custody prisoners would be assigned to different institutions.34

Prison capacity and classification systems faced many challenges at midcentury. With 2.8 million residents in 1950 and 6.8 million by 1970, Florida’s southern and coastal counties and their metropolitan areas experienced the most dramatic growth from migration and immigration.35 Florida’s prison population reached 6,989 in June 1960 and would grow to 8,793 in 1970, partly because of the exploding state population, as well as the state’s higher-than-average incarceration and court commitment rates.36 Sociologist Heather Schoenfeld argues that penal modernism or penal welfarism failed to take hold in pre-1970s Florida because of the inadequacies of key political institutions, such as a biennial legislature, weak state bureaucracy, and enduring white supremacist assumptions about the rehabilitative capabilities of black prisoners.37

Florida’s economic profile and tax base were changing, too. Economist William Stronge observed, “By 1960, the sunshine sector, composed of semitropical agriculture, winter vegetables, tourism, and retirement[,] had become the dominant part of the state’s economic base. The frontier sector, composed of lumber, naval stores, paper, cattle, and phosphate mining, lost its dominant position by 1940 and continued its relative decline in the 1940s and 1950s.”38 Stronge emphasized the unevenness and inequities of Sunbelt Florida’s economic development and the persistence of rural and racial poverty, in what Bruce Schulman termed “a Sunbelt that cast long shadows.”39 Inequality of educational opportunity, African American concentration in the low-waged and unskilled agricultural and manufacturing economies of peninsular and north Florida, and occupational segregation in cities such as Tampa and Miami accentuated racial poverty. At the same time, limited economic opportunity also defined many prison-dependent areas, such as Bradford and Union Counties, and prison towns such as Raiford, Starke, and Lake Butler. In the late 1950s, SRD prison guards’ wages contributed to the survival of local communities, but these men earned a lowly $150 per month for a seventy-two-hour work week. Many white working-class prison employees did not have the skills to compete for jobs in the “sunshine” economic sector or did not wish to relocate.

Prison jobs had been inextricably linked to Democratic Party patronage for decades, particularly that of the Commissioners of Agriculture, the conservative small-county coalition of “Pork Chop” politicians who controlled North Florida, and local county officials.40 Even though most of the state’s inhabitants lived in southern Florida by 1960, voters in north Florida counties continued to return the majority of the state legislators. Small-county political dominance translated into vested support in the legislative status quo, fiscal restraint, and entrenched racial politics and cultural values.41 In the view of one former governor’s aide, “the Division of Corrections is loaded with political appointees who were not chosen on ability but rather under a system of ‘know the right person,’ ” and this meant Florida was “way behind standards [of professional conduct and training] in more progressive states.”42

The employment history of Robert F. Holcomb, one of four guards dismissed for negligence following the escape of four prisoners from the SRD prison at Largo in January 1961, epitomized many of these shortcomings. Holcomb had been an SRD guard at Live Oak, Zephyrhills, Fort Pierce, Oviedo, Cocoa, Gainesville, and Largo road prisons between 1948 and 1961. He had been dismissed for unsatisfactory conduct on four occasions but had continued to secure prison guard positions. In January 1961, he was employed as the wicker guard, a night custodial officer in charge of the dormitory or close custody unit and separated from the main unit by a mesh screen. One of the wicker guard’s main functions was to conduct regular head counts, but Holcomb did not know how many prisoners were in the Largo dormitory during his evening shift and failed to notice that four were missing. He claimed repeatedly that he had an obscured view of the dormitory but was unsuccessful in his bid for reinstatement in 1961.43

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Florida politicians were increasingly sensitive about the state’s national image and to public criticism of the failings of the prison system. The perception that methods of prison discipline and control in Florida had changed little since the “chain gang era” was encouraged by a sensational article in the March 1961 edition of TRUE magazine.44 “They’ll Never Take Me Alive” featured Willie Reid, an African American prisoner who had escaped from the Ocala road prison in January 1952 and detailed his experiences of hard labor at the hands of brutal white guards, the chaining of prisoners, and the use of sweatboxes. An aide told Governor Bryant that the article had generated “a large number of wires, telephone calls, and letters from citizens throughout the United States protesting Florida’s ‘inhuman chain gangs system.’ The Director of the Division of Corrections felt that this article was hurting the good name of Florida’s present prison system.”45 Many readers wrote to Bryant to express their surprise and disgust at prison conditions in the state and denounce the cruel treatment of “human beings and American citizens.” The language and expressions used suggest some drew direct connections between Reid’s treatment and the wider black freedom struggle protests, while others were more perturbed by the uncouthness of Florida’s prison guards. By contrast, some correspondents, including former SRD employees, were affronted by this attack on Florida’s “fine prison system.”46 In a stern rebuke to the editor of TRUE, the governor declared, “ ‘Chain gangs’ are a thing of the past in Florida.”47

When Reid escaped, road prisons were still operated by the SRD. When Reid’s story appeared in TRUE, they were being transferred to the DOC, which had been created in 1957 as a centralized coordinating agency for the major prison and correctional institutions.48 The thirty-six road prisons had remained under dual DOC-SRD supervision until there were sufficient funds and personnel to complete the reorganization by July 1961.49 The DOC was to lease all road prison land and buildings from SRD for an annual “nominal fee” and bill SRD and other agencies on a monthly “production hour basis” for the prisoners’ labor. Total state road prisoner capacity was set at 1,875 and could not exceed 2,000. SRD retained ownership of equipment and fixtures but was no longer responsible for the “security or welfare of the prisoners.”50 Corrections Director H. G. Cochran observed that “the State Road Department wanted to get out of the prison business” but still wished to retain the economic benefits of prison labor.51

Road Prison Modernization

Schoenfeld credits Louie L. Wainwright, a former captain of the guards at FSP and acting superintendent at Avon Park CI and who was appointed DOC director in July 1962, with initiating a marked and important modernization of Florida’s prison system. There was considerable resistance to this, from an entrenched guard corps that included many individuals who had worked in the same prison for years and from legislators unwilling to increase prison funding. She observes that Wainwright “drew on national resources and ideas and his position within state politics to professionalize his staff, create a system of accountability, institute standards for both personnel and procedures, and bring education and training opportunities to prisoners—both white and black.”52 Indeed, Wainwright was recognized nationally for his reform agenda, but key SRD reforms had already commenced before he took charge.53

After a series of major disturbances at FSP, legislators approved over $23 million of investment in the state’s penal estate between 1957 and 1961.54 Many SRD road prison structures were rebuilt or renovated, but several dilapidated DCRPs had roach and rat infestations, blocked showers and lavatories, and rotting wood and crumbling masonry. Each monthly DCRP report contained extensive notes on individual institutions, necessary repairs and renovations, and progress reports on the upgrading of facilities. In March 1963, DCRP Oviedo required the following: “New floor in inmate barracks, shakedown room and new porches for prison barracks and guard building. The walls of the inmate dormitory need reinforcing. The filter bed needs rebuilding. Also, need to replace shutters with glass windows.” “Completely renovate office, refloor inmate dormitory, seal walls in inmate dining room and renovate officers’ quarters,” were among the list of much-needed improvements at DCRP Tavares. The electrical wiring at DCRP Tallahassee was deemed to be a fire hazard and warranted immediate replacement. These detailed descriptions also show that the DOC was standardizing facilities; thus, all road prisons were being equipped with hobby rooms (minimally supervised indoor recreation areas) and “shakedown” rooms, which illustrated enhanced emphasis on increased vocational opportunity alongside the centrality of discipline, order, and control. Corrections officials also complained that the continued use of “nineteen old wooden facilities” contributed to the DOC’s very high maintenance costs.55

Well into the 1960s, white male SRD-DCRP road prison wardens were routinely addressed as “captain,” and the prisons were frequently referred to as “camps,” thus recalling their chain gang heritage. Further, an important historical distinction remained between unskilled road labor under the gun, performed by “gunmen,” and that of privileged “trusties,” who were complicit in the institutional supervision, brutality, and control of gunmen.56 At Largo, for example, trusties were housed in a separate “trusty barracks” that was partitioned from the main prison dormitory. They performed maintenance work, such as constructing picket fences, gates, ballparks, and visitor facilities; replacing windows; painting; and undertaking general carpentry and repairs as well as cooking and laundry duties. Trusties also maintained the small truck gardens at each road prison. In March 1963, DCRP Jay had 2.5 acres of corn, one acre of peas and tomatoes, a quarter-acre of okra and cucumbers, and a quarter-acre of watermelon and squash.57 This further underscored the continuing official emphasis on institutional profitability and local self-sufficiency that had characterized the state prison system for many decades.

Traditionally, Florida’s most economically productive and able-bodied convict road laborers had limited access to the tools that many penologists considered essential for successful rehabilitation: vocational education and the acquisition of employment skills to aid transition after release, purposeful recreation, and religious instruction. In the 1960s, this would change to some extent. Wainwright remained committed to the expansion of prison education and vocational training across the different institutions, including DCRPs, and these reforms were linked to important changes in prisoner classification and assignment. By 1960, SRD classification officers assessed the custody levels of road prison prisoners, interviewed individual prisoners at regular intervals, and provided counseling and vocational information where necessary. This work was extended following the SRD-DOC merger.58 Road prison laborers deemed capable of rehabilitation were assigned to education programs. Monthly reports detailed prisoner attendance: “ARCADIA—The classes are compulsory for those inmates with very limited education. Every effort is put forth to keep attendance above 30. BARTOW—47 attending in three separate classes two nights a week[,] two hours a night.” It was noted in the entry for DCRP Deland that “40 inmates are attending on a compulsory basis. Interest is much better due to the fact that some inmates detrimental to the program were removed from the road prison.”59 Educational provision was as much a reward for good behavior as a tool for reducing recidivism.

A series of road prison escapes brought unwanted publicity and public criticism in the early 1960s and fueled complaints over recent classification changes. Commissioners in Clay and Duval Counties demanded that DOC institute tighter security at the Doctor’s Inlet Road Prison in Nassau County following the escape of seven “heavily armed” and “extremely dangerous” prisoners in August 1964 (which had attracted television news coverage).60 However, DCRP Largo’s high escape rate when it was a closed-custody prison for white prisoners, was lowered in November 1962, by replacing the white laborers with minimum-custody African American prisoners. Local residents and prison officials were reported as being “extremely pleased with the changeover.”61

Wainwright suggested to Governor Bryant that escapes had increased in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) ruling, but this was also a period of ongoing prisoner protests, riots, and prisoner mistreatment scandals in what appeared to be increasingly unstable major state penal institutions.62 Wainwright highlighted judges’ greater use of probation for the “more salvageable persons” to suggest that the state prison population was changing to include rising numbers of hardened or recidivist prisoners. If Florida’s prison population was changing in the ways that officials perceived, one possible outcome was fewer lower-custody prisoners for future road work. Wainwright cautioned against any short-term plans to close DCRPs in 1964 but promised to “keep a close eye on the situation and if it appears after further study that the Division will no longer have enough suitable inmates to fill the road prisons,” then closure of some facilities would be considered.63

Wainwight noted also that “the general policy used to be to transfer the worst prisoners to road prisons and leave the best inmates at Florida State Prison. This policy was reversed shortly after the Division of Corrections was formed and since that time the policy has been to hold the worst inmates at Florida State Prison.”64 Yet, some DCRPs, including Jay, continued to house close-custody prisoners and different levels of risk-assessed prisoners throughout the 1960s. Road prisons were also still being used to discipline prisoners who were unwilling to submit to the disciplinary regimes at other institutions. For example, Glen Boerner was sentenced in April 1966 to an indeterminate sentence of six months to three years and, following DOC classification, was sent to Apalachee CI in May. Boerner’s one-day escape from that institution in September led to an additional two-year sentence and a new classification. He was subsequently sent to DCRP Number 57 at Oviedo in November, where he was punished “on February 9, 1967, for Insubordination and Cursing,” then six weeks later was transferred to DCRP Number 53 at East Palatka, where he was “placed in punitive segregation on April 13, 1967, for Disobeying an Order.”65

Recruitment and retention reforms also framed changing DCRP conditions. After the SRD-DOC merger, all former SRD custodial staff were automatically transferred to the expanding DOC and renamed “correctional officers.” Road prison personnel typically worked longer hours and weeks for less pay than their counterparts at FSP and Apalachee CI, for example.66 Legislative changes in 1961 and 1963 sought to ensure all correctional officers worked a five-day week, were awarded equitable pay rises, and received full cash salaries.67 The DOC expected to recruit an additional 150 personnel for all the main institutions. As a result, it established a civil service system and implemented minimum qualifications, aptitude tests, and better employee training from the early 1960s. For example, a “comprehensive two-week training course” was initiated at Marianna for all new road prison personnel as well as existing employees who were transferring to different road prisons.68

By 1964, the starting salary for new officers was $315 per month, and there were incremental pay ranges for those employed as Road Prison Guard I and II. However, many unattractive features remained: a working week of over forty hours, outdoor work, boredom, and “fear of prosecution under the Civil Rights Act if guards shot fleeing prisoners.” In 1964–1965, there were 356 Road Prison Guards I, thirty-six Road Prison Guards II, thirty-nine Road Prison Sergeants, and thirty-nine Road Prison Captains, which together comprised 31.8 percent of all 1,723 DOC positions. However, the 48.9 percent annual turnover rate for road prison employees remained “uneconomically high.” Additional wage increases were approved by the Cabinet Committee for the DOC in Summer 1965, in a bid to replace patronage appointments with “capable, career-minded applicants for correctional officer positions.”69

Prison Protests, Civil Rights, and Desegregation

The evolution of a “prison-made civil rights movement” and the symbiotic relationship between class-based solidarity and hierarchically divisive prison labor systems, racial protest both inside and outside the prison walls, and interracial challenges to entrenched penal control models have also been addressed in recent scholarship.70 Florida’s jails and prisons were imbricated in the civil rights protests of the early to mid-1960s. Crowded jail cells became even more packed in some counties during the later 1950s and early 1960s, as peaceable protestors were arrested and processed by the lower courts and held in county prisons. Others were confined at the main state prisons following violent interracial confrontations in the major Florida cities.71 Mass arrests by his officers during the St. Augustine protests in the summer of 1964 led the St. Johns County sheriff to request DOC permission to house misdemeanants at the St. Augustine road prison. The state prisoners already at this DCRP were temporarily moved to FSP on June 12 to make room.72 This further demonstrates the adaptability of these smaller custodial institutions within an expanding state prison system generally. Their strategic value to both state and local authorities during periods of police brutality and civil protest or disorder was probably another key reason for road prison survival in the 1960s.

The hard-won 1964 Civil Rights Act forced state prison officials to address a different set of challenges. In November 1964, Wainwright informed cabinet officials that he would like to see the 1965 Florida legislature “eliminate the statutory requirements of separation of races” at all state prisons and county jails.73 Desegregation of the state prison system commenced in 1966. Sumter, Apalachee, Glades, and Lowell CIs were all completely desegregated during that year; Santa Fe Correctional Farm desegregated in July 1967; the Reception and Medical Center at Lake Butler had opened on a “completely desegregated basis” on July 5, 1967; and Avon Park CI was desegregating. By contrast, FSP was still almost completely segregated.74 All DCRPs gradually desegregated during the eighteen-month period from March 1966 to August 1967. The total numbers of road prisoners remained fairly stable in this period. For example, in January 1967, 713 white males and 953 “colored” males were housed in thirty-five road prisons, and there were 707 white males and 942 “colored” males in the remaining thirty-three DCRPs on July 31, 1967. Even so, there was considerable disruption within the SRD network because of the way in which desegregation occurred—that is, one small racial group of prisoners was substituted for another. As table 2 indicates, DCRP Jay was the second last road prison earmarked for desegregation, probably because it was one of two wooden facilities designated for closure in 1967–1968.75 The devastating fire on July 16 therefore occurred during Jay’s last months in operation. There were also lingering suspicions that racial tensions had led to prison violence at the DCRP.

Table 2  Changes to Division of Corrections’ road prisons, 1966–1967
Division of Corrections Road Prison		Date of Desegregation		Still Operational in mid-1969
Live Oak (wood frame)		Closed in 1966
Caryville (masonry)		March 16, 1966		Y
Loxahatchee (m)		March 24, 1966		Y
Copeland (m)		April 15, 1966		Y
Oviedo (w)		April 28, 1966
Deland (w)		April 28, 1966
Niceville (m)		May 18, 1966		Y
Gainesville (w)		May 18, 1966		Y
Perry (w)		June 3, 1966
Tallahassee (m)		June 3, 1966		Y
Panama City (m)		June 28, 1966		Y
Largo (m)		June 30, 1966		Y
Lake City (m)		July 7, 1966		Y
Callahan (w)		July 7, 1966*
Zephyrhills (m)		July 15, 1966		Y
Bartow (m)		July 15, 1966		Y
Fort Pierce (w)		September 14, 1966
Pompano Beach (m)		September 14, 1966		Y
Doctors Inlet (m)		November 3, 1966		Y
St. Augustine (w)		November 3, 1966
Marianna (w)		November 28, 1966
Florida City (w)		November 28, 1966
Big Pine Key (m)		November 28, 1966		Y
Fort Myers (w)		January 11, 1967
Arcadia (m)		January 11, 1967		Y
Tavares (w)		February 8, 1967
Kissimmee (m)		February 8, 1967		Y
Ocala (w)		February 10, 1967
Floral City (w)		February 10, 1967
Citrus Center (m)		February 14, 1967		Y
Cocoa (w)		February 14, 1967
East Palatka (m)		March 23, 1967		Y
Brooksville (m)		March 23, 1967		Y
Pensacola (w)		June 30, 1967*
Jay (w)		July 11, 1967*
Bronson (w)		August 15, 1967*
LaBelle (m)		No date given		Y
		*closed by November 1967
Sources: “Florida Division of Corrections Progress toward Desegregation,” November 1, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7. The Department of Corrections Road Prisons at Callahan, Live Oak, and Pensacola were already designated for closure before desegregation commenced. The last road prison earmarked for desegregation was Bronson, but it closed on August 15, 1967, as part of the planned phasing out of wooden structures, so technically it was not “desegregated.”

Road Prisons after the Fire

Governor Claude R. Kirk (1967–1971) ordered an immediate investigation into the outbreak of prison violence that had occurred at DCRP Jay on the evening of July 16, as well as fire prevention measures and emergency procedures at all DOC institutions.76 “Where were the fire extinguishers?” demanded Senator Dempsey Barron of Panama City. Legislators had also questioned whether the three correctional officers on duty that night could have assessed the situation more accurately with better training. Lovett, Cobb, and Nelson determined they were dealing with a major riot that required an armed response and so reached for the keys to unlock the arsenal rather than grabbing water hoses.77 The official investigation determined that thirty-seven prisoners “came to their death as result of a riot followed by fire”; the thirty-eighth victim died in hospital from his injuries; the fires were deliberately set by Wynder, Hoffman, and Ard; and DOC personnel were not negligent.78 Several aspects of the official version of events were later questioned and disputed by relatives of the prisoners killed in the fire, including the father and wife of David Cole.79

Corrections officials adamantly rejected any suggestion that a race riot had occurred. But news reports that the Jay fire was the result of a racial disturbance at the road prison led one constituent to warn of the catastrophic consequences of desegregation and to call for the re-segregation of the state prison system: “Gov. Kirk you can find thousands of citizens of the state of Fla. both white and negro that will tell you that integration of the Fla prisons will not work out and in the long run will cause riots, death and property destruction for even the Negroes do not want it, they had much rather have their own cells and the company of each other.”80 To many white Southerners, school desegregation, bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, and high-profile marches had led to violence and disorder, so why should prison desegregation be any different? Further, news reports of the road prison fire usually appeared on the same page as articles on racial violence in Minnesota and New Jersey cities. However, Captain J. R. Albritton, in charge of another wooden DCRP at Fort Pierce, offered reporters a different view: “Other than the normal conflicts to be expected among a large number of men confined to a small area, Albritton said that racial integration of the road camp, accomplished last year, has brought about no special problems. ‘Overall I’d say that our institution is a better one since integration,’ he continued.”81

Desegregation of the road prisons undoubtedly disrupted power relations within the bunkhouses and may have heightened hypermasculine jostling for deference and respect at Jay and other DCRPs.82 Nevertheless, the profiles of the men accused of starting the Jay fire suggest that the assignment of close-custody prisoners to road prisons (ostensibly for lower-risk prisoners) was an additional factor. Wynder, age twenty-one, was a first-time offender serving a four-year term for three counts of grand larceny. He had been placed at the wooden road prison at Pensacola so that his sister could visit but was transferred to Jay on June 26 when that DCRP closed. Ard, age twenty-eight, was a misdemeanant, convicted of robbing a service station of $100 and cigarettes but was serving a state sentence for escaping from a county prison. He also had previous convictions. He had been unhappy with his transfer to Jay and told his mother, “I don’t know why they put me here. I can’t stand it here hardly.” Hoffman, age forty-one, was “an ex-Seebee” with a “psychopathic personality” who had spent five years of a seven-year sentence (1960–1964) for burglary in solitary confinement at FSP.83 Both Ard and Hoffman appear to have been close-custody rather than minimal-supervision prisoners.

A thorough reevaluation of the safety of the state prison estate, and the road prison network in particular, was undertaken, not least because state officials had admitted the wooden structures were fire hazards.84 Fire marshals inspected the remaining thirteen wood-frame road prisons at Marianna, Perry, St. Augustine, Bronson, Ocala, Deland, Tavares, Oviedo, Cocoa, Fort Pierce, Florida City, Fort Myers, and Floral City. They recommended that these institutions should be closed as soon as possible and significantly upgraded until that occurred.85 All prisons and correctional institutions were to review their fire drill programs and institute improvements. Meanwhile, a five-man committee, which included Wainwright and Ralph Davis of SRD, met on July 25 to ascertain how to close down nearly half of all remaining DCRPs at a time of serious fiscal pressures and growing numbers of state prison prisoners. Senator Louis de la Parte (D-Tampa) introduced bills to appropriate $928,000 to immediately phase out all wooden road prisons, hire seventy-two additional correctional officers, establish new minimum-security facilities, and implement a work-release program. There was furious debate between those who characterized de la Parte’s proposals as a “slap in the face” for DOC and legislators demanding significant changes to the state corrections apparatus.86 Yet, de la Parte’s proposals were very similar to those advocated by Wainwright in March 1967.87

On August 8, Wainwright informed Commissioner of Agriculture Doyle Conner that plans to phase out the DCRPs at Bronson and Ocala were already under way. Both were closed within one month. Bronson prisoners were redistributed to several institutions, and all Ocala prisoners were transferred to the Florida CI at Lowell, which now housed female and male prisoners. The Ocala transfers were still under contract to SRD, which would continue to cover the costs of maintaining these men.88 DOC was under legislative pressure to close at least six wooden road prisons by the end of 1967, but Wainwright had also told Conner that this “will not be possible.… with the finances currently available.” Meanwhile, all remaining DCRP prisoners were to “be screened so that none with records of known propensity for arsen [sic] or destruction of physical facilities be assigned to wooden buildings in the Road Prison System.” A critical program of upgrading fire prevention measures at DCRPs commenced to ensure that road prisons remained operational. In December, SRD superintendent Griffith reported that the main buildings at the Perry, Cocoa, and Marianna DCRPs had been painted with fire-retardant paint. Fire hose boxes had been installed in the wicket and prisoner dining room at Oviedo.89

In the end, DOC did move fairly rapidly to phase out the problematic wooden facilities, but the “loss” of 850 “beds” following the closure of seventeen road prisons by the end of 1968 was reported as having contributed to overcrowding at other institutions, just as committal rates for both property and violent interpersonal offenses were beginning to rise significantly.90 Displaced road prison personnel were also reassigned. For example, nearly 300 road prisoners and DCRP guards were transferred to Sumter CI. By early 1969, there were twenty-six road prisons of masonry construction still in operation, with 372 personnel, including part-time physicians and chaplains, and nineteen DCRPs by August 1969, with 303 employees. However, with 1,170 prisoners in June 1969 and 1,203 in June 1970, road prisoners still comprised the second largest prison population next to FSP, which had 3,455 prisoners in June 1969 and 3,428 in June 1970.91

DCRP reforms occurred during a radical overhaul of state government and politics during the Kirk administration. A new state constitution was drafted and approved by the electorate in 1968 and implemented in 1969. Gubernatorial power and authority increased, and the legislature was transformed from a part-time institution to “a modern, full-time, annual body with an improving retinue of aides.” There was also a massive reorganization of state agencies and reduction in the number of state bureaus. DOC became one of eleven separate divisions in the cumbersome Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, which also included youth services, psychiatric hospitals and mental health, as well as general health.92 Nevertheless, because DOC was now situated within a wider complement of community programs, Wainwright was able to press ahead with plans to expand penal welfare and educational provision.

By the late 1960s, road prisoners had increased access to academic study, vocational training, religious instruction, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, pre-release employment counseling and referrals in conjunction with the Florida State Employment Service, and better health care provision. The DCRPs therefore began to incorporate many of the features of a “modern” correctional system, in a period when ideas about “rehabilitation” itself were evolving and perhaps more fluid than previously.93 The Road Prison Vocational Program, supported by local county schools through the Minimum Foundation Program, offered courses in trowel trades, auto mechanics, welding, woodworking, and appliance repair. However, the total enrollment of seventy-one prisoners in early 1968 comprised less than 5 percent of the road prison population. By July 1969, nearly all DCRP prisoners were attending education programs, and custodial staff were being encouraged to “up-grade their educational level.”94 Prisoner responses to these reforms should certainly feature in future investigations of vocational reforms, particularly as sit-down protests and DCRP strikes continued in the same period.95

Ironically, road prisons seemed peculiarly well placed to respond to “the new trend in modern correctional administration which is towards community oriented treatment programs; programs which take advantage of the resources of our communities, involve the community in the treatment process, and re-orient the offender to the responsibilities of community life to which he will be returning.”96 Created as an alternative to closed institutions, the community treatment concept, which sought to bridge the gap between institutional life and reentry into the free world, gained significant state and federal support during the 1960s, as many larger traditional institutions became overcrowded and increasingly volatile.97 A long-standing champion of cultivating prison–community relationships, Wainwright envisaged converting the remaining structurally sound road prisons into Community Correctional Centers (CCCs) specifically for minimum-security prisoners.98 Five DCRPs had been converted by 1972, including Zephyrhills, which became a work-release center (although it reverted to a correctional institution in 1977).99 By June 1973, there were fourteen DCRPs, with a total of 850 prisoners, and fourteen CCCs were operating by 1974. Consequently, the direct descendant of the chain gang in Florida is not the “supermax” but the “Community CC.”100

The End of the Chain Gang Story?

For Wootens, Schoenfeld, and others, Florida’s decentralized road prison network was a major obstacle to the modernization of the state’s penal estate and adoption of a liberalizing corrections philosophy. In his 1971 article, Wootens had also suggested that Southern road gangs had finally “fallen into broad disrepute” with progressive-minded corrections officials and the public and were “fast fading into the archives of Southern crimes and punishment.” Economic explanations—principally the cheaper costs of privately contracting road maintenance—security concerns, and incompatibility with rehabilitation goals were given as the main reasons for discontinuation.101 Florida’s wooden road prisons were a financial and operational burden, and the Jay fire was an important catalyst for their closure. The fire also presented Wainwright with an opportunity to accelerate the gradual program of modernization that he had outlined to Governor Kirk in March 1967.

Yet, this is a story of two halves, as the less financially burdensome masonry road prisons were not so much obstacles to modernization but important drivers of a new round of recycling and repurposing, that dovetailed with the ambitions of progressive-minded corrections officials and their political allies.102 CCC creation was arguably an imaginative refitting of road prisons, which fused elements of conscience with administrative convenience, but prisoner responses to these changes need to be examined to provide more persuasive and nuanced analyses. Several Florida prison officials, including Wainwright, were interested in progressive or cost-saving reform but did not necessarily envisage full-scale implementation of these reforms. Selective implementation and incremental reform were always politically more viable. Thus, CCCs never completely replaced road prisons.

In the 1970s and 1980s, officials and many prisoners argued that road prisons promised better food, better work details, and gain time privileges and thus were a palatable, even attractive, alternative to the main custodial institutions. Demanding physical labor under the gun on Florida’s “hard road” had seemingly been replaced by incentivization and a “softer” minimum-security route of highway maintenance and tangible community project building, which included Little League baseball fields, playgrounds, and bicycle paths.103 Road prisons were successfully incorporated into an official corrections’ rhetoric of rehabilitation, reward for good behavior, and penal welfarism. Yet, a central ideological link, of labor to individual reformation, endured through the transformation of the chain gang to the road prison to the CCC. Initially, outdoor back-breaking physical labor by chained squads of predominantly African American prisoners under the gun and threat of corporal punishment was linked rhetorically to the benefits of hard labor and healthful occupation, particularly for a class of prisoners who, many believed, had limited capacity for rehabilitation per se. From the late 1960s, assignment to a road prison was to benefit the individual prisoner who could use vocational training, education, and work release to acquire work skills to aid his or her rehabilitation—but prisoners were still employed in outdoor highway maintenance work by a state prison system that continued to confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans.

Just as the chain gang had been at the forefront of prison modernization in the early twentieth-century South, the road prison-turned-CCC became a vehicle for reinvention later in the century. Road prison conversions continued during the 1970s, of the DCRPs at Pompano Beach and Kissimmee, for example, as part of an ambitious “six-year plan to phase out all road prisons by 1980.”104 Some were converted into forestry camps for low-level offenders, as in California, and thus linked to post-1960s environmental management, conservation, and stewardship of national parks and forests in Florida. Indeed, the Berrydale Forestry Camp at Jay in Santa Rosa County opened in 1976.105 It was reported in the New York Times that in 1982, Florida’s Department of Transportation paid $6.5 million to the Department of Corrections for the labor of 700 prisoners (when the total state prison population was 27,000) who were still living in road prisons in each of the main DOC administrative areas.106

Surviving DCRPs would be overshadowed by the symbolic “chain gangs” of the 1990s that defined Florida’s “punitive turn,” but they did not disappear and would remain part of Florida’s late modern penal portfolio after the revived chain gangs proved too costly to maintain.107 Consequently, a complicated fusion of different rehabilitative, custodial, and punitive philosophies continued to shape Florida’s state prison system. When the Tallahassee road prison closed in June 2011, four others were still operating at Largo, Arcadia, Loxahatchee, and Big Pine Key.108 The sixty-year-old Big Pine Key institution finally closed in mid-April 2017.109 Will road prisons finally fade into the archives? Or should historians still be wary of calling time on a Florida institution that has been refitted and recycled over many decades?

Notes

1. Florida Division of Corrections, Special Investigation—Destruction of Property, Arson and Death of Inmates, August 1967 (hereafter referred to as DOC Jay Fire Report), 1, Record Group 102, series 923: Governor Claude R. Kirk, Jr., Administrative Correspondence (1967–1971), box 69, file folder 2 (hereafter identified as S923 box 69 FF2), Florida State Library and Archives, Tallahassee.

2. DOC Jay Fire Report, 3–4.

3. DOC Jay Fire Report, 6.

4. DOC Jay Fire Report, 4–5.

5. DOC Jay Fire Report, 1.

6. DOC Jay Fire Report, 6; “Convicts, Guards Tell of Fatal Prison Fire,” Panama City Herald, July 18, 1967, 1. Lovett was later commended by the governor and cabinet for his actions.

7. DOC Jay Fire Report, 7.

8. “Prison Camp Fire ‘Deliberately Set,’ ” Fort Pierce News Tribune, July 18, 1967, 2; “Prison Inferno Plotted, Fire Survivors Testify, Governor Sets Investigation,” Fort Walton Beach Playground Daily News, July 18, 1967, 1, 2.

9. “Convicts, Guards Tell of Fatal Prison Fire.”

10. DOC Jay Fire Report, 7.

11. “Prison Camp Fire ‘Deliberately Set.’ ” News reports identified four prisoner survivors: Roy C. Regan, age twenty-six; Gary A. Powell [Powe in prison report], age nineteen; James Clyde Donaldson Jr., age twenty-five; and prisoner cook Henry W. Lambert. Donaldson was the only African American prisoner identified by name.

12. DOC Jay Fire Report, 9. Arson was not uncommon in Florida prisons. For example, there had been a fire in the Florida State Prison laundry in July 1963, and arson was suspected. It was the scale of the devastation and the number of victims that set the Jay fire apart from other prison incidents. See Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Farris Bryant, “Report on Fire in Laundry at Florida State Prison, July 25, 1963,” August 21, 1963, Record Group 102, series 756: Governor Farris C. Bryant, Administrative Correspondence (1961–1965), box 63, file folder 3 (hereafter S756 box 63 FF3).

13. L. W. Griffith, Department of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report July 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7; “Phasing out of Road Gangs Being Planned,” Panama City News Herald, October 16, 1968, 2.

14. James T. Wootens, “Prison Road Gangs Fading Fast in South; Prison Road Gangs Fading Fast in Modern South,” New York Times, October 23, 1971, 35, 66. It was reported that Mississippi had discontinued use of road labor on the eve of World War II, and Louisiana followed suit in the mid-1940s, as did Arkansas and Texas in the 1950s, then Tennessee and South Carolina by the end of the 1960s. For additional commentaries on Georgia convict road labor in the early 1960s, see O. P. Hanes, “Chain Gang Image Still Alive: More Revamping for Georgia Prisons,” Telegraph Herald, June 27, 1963; and O. P. Hanes, “Georgia ‘Chain Gangs’ Are Gone,” Daily Reporter, January 30, 1963.

15. Wootens, “Prison Road Gangs Fading Fast,” 35.

16. See, for example, “Florida Inmates Work on Chain Gangs without Chains,” New York Times [online], February 20, 1983, http://ezproxy.nottingham.ac.uk/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.nottingham.ac.uk/docview/122319336?accountid=8018; Jack Strickland, “Honduras Jail Fire Recalls Horrific Florida Prison Blaze Where 38 Died Amid Lingering Questions,” Tallahassee News, February 21, 2012. On the “punitive turn,” see David Garland, Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stephen Mennell, The American Civilizing Process (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2007); Loic Wacquant, “The Great Penal Leap Backward: Incarceration in America from Nixon to Clinton,” in The New Punitiveness: Trends, Theories, and Perspectives, ed. John Pratt, David Brown, Mark Brown, Simon Hallsworth, and Wayne Morrison (Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2005), 3–26; and John Pratt, “Elias, Punishment, and Decivilization,” in Pratt et al., New Punitiveness, 256–71; John Pratt, Penal Populism (London: Routledge, 2007).

17. Heather Ann Thompson, “Blinded by a ‘Barbaric’ South: Prison Horrors, Inmate Abuse, and the Ironic History of American Penal Reform,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74–95.

18. See, for example, Walter Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1933); Milfred C. Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Convict Lease System, 1865–1933 (New York: City University of New York, 1994); Matthew C. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Dennis Childs, “ ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,’ Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (June 2009): 271–97; Sara Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Talitha LeFlouria, this volume.

19. See, for example, Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Heather Ann Thompson, “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (2011): 47–63; Mary Ellen Curtin, “State of the Art: The New Prison History,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 8, no. 3 (2011): 97–108; Henry Kamerling, Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post-Civil War America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017).

20. Baynard Kendrick, Florida Trails to Turnpikes, 1914–1964 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964); Howard Lawrence Preston, Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885–1935, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 115; Vivien M. L. Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012), esp. chaps. 1, 2 and 6; Tammy Ingram, Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900–1930, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 129–61.

21. See, for example, Fred E. Haynes, The American Prison System, 1st ed. (London: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 173; Susan W. Thomas, “Chain Gangs, Roads, and Reform in North Carolina, 1900–1935” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2011).

22. Sarah Haley, “ ‘Like I was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia,” Signs: Journal of Women In Culture and Society 39, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 53–77; Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

23. See, for example, Foreword by Matthew J. Mancini, to Robert E. Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! Brown Thrasher ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Irina V. Rodimtseva, “On the Hollywood Chain Gang: The Screen Version of Robert E. Burns’ I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! and Penal Reform of the 1930s–1940s,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 66, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 123–46.

24. Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 26–29. It was observed in one major law journal in the late 1940s that “Southern road gangs have been particularly criticized [for continued mistreatment of prisoners]. While the wearing of chains has been generally abolished, many of the accompanying abuses have evidently continued.” See “Prisoners’ Remedies For Mistreatment,” Yale Law Journal 59 (1949–1950): 800n2. Evidence of continued shortcomings after the 1943–1946 reforms was included in Johnson v. Dye, 175 F.2d, 250–257 (3rd Cir. 1949).

25. Wootens, “Prison Road Gangs Fading Fast,” 35; Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1924); John L. Spivak, On the Chain Gang, 2nd ed. (New York: International Pamphlets, 1934); John L. Spivak, Georgia Nigger (London: Wishart and Company, 1933), recently republished as Spivak, Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang (Columbus: University of South Carolina Press, 2012).

26. Larry E. Sullivan, The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990), 84; Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (December 2009): 702–26; Janssen, this volume. Janssen’s recent examination of California’s postwar conservation centers and correctional forestry camps in which 5,000 prisoner “volunteers” were assigned to fire fighting and disaster relief underscores that state prison and correctional systems embodied a variety of custodial and open-prison forms, that were often linked to postwar security risk assessments, gendered classification determinations, and prison reward schemes.

27. See, for example, Phillip Rawls, “Alabama Plans to Put Chain Gangs Back on the Road: Penology: Critics Call Effort to Revive Prison Work Crews in Leg Irons Mean-Spirited and Misguided,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1995; “Frugal Alabama Still Chained to the Past,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 8 (Summer 1995): 18–19; Tessa M. Gorman, “Back on the Chain Gang: Why the Eighth Amendment and the History of Slavery Proscribe the Resurgence of Chain Gangs,” California Law Review 85, no. 2 (March 1997): 441–78; Vivien Miller, “Back on the Southern ‘Chain Gang Lite,’ ” in The Persistent Prison: Problems, Images and Alternatives, ed. Clive Emsley (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2005), 144–72.

28. For a full discussion of these changes, see Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time, chaps. 6 and 10.

29. Florida, Thirty-Second Biennial Prison Report, 1951–1952, 8. Florida State Library and Archives, Tallahassee, Florida.

30. Heather Schoenfeld, “The Delayed Emergence of Penal Modernism in Florida,” Punishment and Society 16, no. 3 (2014): 274.

31. Quoted in Jonathon King, “Softer Times on the Hard Road, Road Gangs Aren’t What They Used to Be,” Sun Sentinel, November 29, 1987, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-11-29/features/8702080643_1_gangs-road-prisoners/2.

32. “Jay Prison Called Unsafe,” Panama City News, February 28, 1969, 2; Jerry Wilkinson, “History of Big Pine Key,” Keys Historeum, http://www.keyshistory.org/bigpinekey.html; “Deep Lake Prison,” Abandoned Florida, August 31, 2013, http://www.abandonedfl.com/deep-lake-prison.

33. T. W. Burkhart and C. W. McPherson to W. T. “Tommy” Knight, July 31, 1967, 2, in S923 box 69 FF2.

34. Florida, Division of Corrections, First Report, June 1960, 16, 41, Florida State Library and Archives, Tallahassee, Florida. Florida road gangs had always contained white male prisoners, and at times, their numbers were higher than that of African American convict road laborers (although numbers of black prisoners were always disproportionate compared with their state population numbers). For example, in July 1954, 858 of the 1,587 men assigned to SRD work were white and 729 were African American. L. W. Griffiths, “State Road Department Prison System,” in Florida, Thirty-Third Biennial Prison Report, 1953–1954, 17, Florida State Library and Archives, Tallahassee, Florida.

35. Gary Mormino, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 2; William B. Stronge, The Sunshine Economy: An Economic History of Florida since the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 230. The increases in foreign-born residents are more dramatic from the late 1970s as Florida became a key gateway for Caribbean and South American arrivals. See Raymond Arsenault and Gary R. Mormino, “From Dixie to Dreamland: Demographic and Cultural Change in Florida, 1880–1980,” in Shades of the Sunbelt: Essays on Ethnicity, Race, and the Urban South, ed. Randall M. Miller and George E. Pozzetta (Boca Raton: Florida Atlantic University Press, 1989), 161–92.

36. Louie W. Wainwright to Honorable Farris Bryant, January 28, 1963, 3, in S756 box 63 FF5; Heather Schoenfeld, “The Politics of Prison Growth: From Chain Gangs to Work Release Centers and Supermax Prisons, Florida, 1955–2000” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2009), 98.

37. Schoenfeld, “The Delayed Emergence of Penal Modernism,” 259. See also Heather Schoenfeld, Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), chap. 2.

38. Stronge, The Sunshine Economy, 184.

39. Ibid., 203; Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 177. See also Marvin Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).

40. See Edmund F. Kallina Jr., Claude Kirk and the Politics of Confrontation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 14–17.

41. See David R. Colburn, From Yellow Dog Democrats to Red State Republicans: Florida and Its Politics since 1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

42. Jack Ledden [former aide to Governor Kirk, then executive director, Police Minimum Standards Council] to [state senator] Mrs. Elizabeth J. (Beth) Johnson, October 12, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7.

43. Transcript of Commission Hearing, H. G. Cochran Jr. vs. Robert F. Holcomb, February 8, 1961, 6, 39, in S756 box 63 FF1.

44. Copy of “They’ll Never Take Me Alive!” in S756 box 62 FF1. Public perceptions of Florida prisons were also shaped by Donn Pearce’s 1966 novel Cool Hand Luke and the iconic 1967 movie of the same name.

45. Ray E. Marchman Jr. to Governor Bryant, February 27, 1961, in S756 box 62 FF1.

46. See, for example, Eugene C. Culbertson [of Virginia] to Office of the Governor, May 30, 1961; Governor to Mr. Bill Mims [of New Mexico], March 21, 1961; Governor to Mrs. Bernard G. Howley [of Massachusetts], March 14, 1961; Governor to Reverend W. L. Boggs [of Tennessee], March 9, 1961; Alexander Evans [former FSP prisoner, sentence commuted December 1960] to Hon. Richard W. Ervin, February 28, 1961; H. O. Warlick to the Hon. Farris Bryant, March 10, 1961; Governor to Mr. H. O. Warlick, March 20, 1961, all in S756 box 62 FF1. Complainants received a standardized reply, much of which was dictated by Cochran. This highlighted Reid’s long arrest record dating back to April 1939 and his convictions for assault, his fifteen-year sentence for assault with intent to murder at the time of his escape, and several punishments for “fighting or assaulting other inmates” at Ocala. Complainants were also informed of the many improvements to road prisons that had occurred in the nine years since Reid’s escape. See H. G. Cochran Jr. to Mr. W. V. Wilson III, February 14, 1961; H. G. Cochran Jr. to Mr. Lawson E. Card, February 23, 1961; H. G. Cochran Jr. to Honorable Farris Bryant, March 2, 1961; Governor to Mr. C. W. Stiteler, March 8, 1961, all in S756 box 62 FF1.

47. Governor to Honorable Douglas S. Kennedy, March 6, 1961, in S756 box 62 FF1.

48. “Road Camps Transferred,” Fort Pierce News-Tribune, September 13, 1961, 14. The other state penal facilities were Apalachee Correctional Institution, Florida Correctional Institution, Avon Park Correctional Institution, Florida State Prison, and Glades State Prison, the Sunland Training Center Farm Camp, the County Jails and County work and road camps, and the prisoners under medical supervision at the Florida State Hospital. By the early 1960s, there were 134 prison facilities in Florida, including county jails, stockades, and road prison camps and the larger custodial and correctional state institutions.

49. “The State Correctional System (as Pertains to the Florida Division of Corrections),” c. 1959; “Organizational Structure of the Florida Division of Corrections,” c. 1959; and “Comprehensive Report of Progress Made in State Government during Administration of Governor Collins,” September 1960, 2, in H. G. Cochran Jr. to Honorable William L. Durden, September 16, 1960, in LeRoy Collins Papers, box 185, University of South Florida, Special Collections, Tampa; L. W. Griffiths, “State Road Prison Transfer,” Division of Corrections, Second Report, July 1, 1959–June 30, 1960, 19, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida; “Legislative Interim Study Committee on Prisons and Convicts, January 1, 1961,” and “Minutes of the Cabinet Committee on Division of Corrections, January 30, 1961,” 5–6, in S756 box 62 FF1; “Road Camps Transferred,” Fort Pierce News-Tribune, September 13, 1961, 14.

50. H. G. Cochran Jr. to Honorable Harry O. Stratton, December 28, 1960, in S756 box 62 FF1.

51. “Minutes of the Cabinet Committee on Division of Corrections, January 30, 1961,” 5, in S756 box 62 FF1.

52. Schoenfeld, “The Politics of Prison Growth,” 120–25, 131–42, quote on 131. Jessica Mitford was decidedly less impressed by Wainwright when she attended the American Correctional Association meeting at Miami Beach in August 1971. See Jessica Mitford, The American Prison Business (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), 35–37.

53. Malcolm M. Feeley and Edward L. Rubin, Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165; Martin A. Dyckman, Reubin O’D. Askew and the Golden Age of Florida Politics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 76.

54. Increased financial appropriations followed in the wake of the 1956 riot and 1958 maximum security scandal at the Florida State Prison and disturbances at other institutions in this period. See Martin A. Dyckman, Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor Leroy Collins (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 127, 153.

55. See L. W. Griffith, Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report for March 1963, 8–9, S756 box 63 FF4.

56. Robert T. Chase, “ ‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1980,” in Life and Labor in the New New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 187–88.

57. See L. W. Griffith, Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report for March 1963, 3–5, in S756 box 63 FF4.

58. L. W. Griffith, Superintendent of Road Prisons, to Mr. Louie L. Wainwright, August 28, 1964, 3, in S756 box 63 FF6.

59. L. W. Griffith, Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report for March 1963, 13–14, in S756 box 63 FF4. Sixty-five public school teachers offered classes at the road prisons as part of the local county adult education programs. Vocational training courses were also being offered in five DCRPs in partnership with local county school systems. By the mid-1960s, thirty-eight full-time certified teachers were employed in the major institutions, and there was a DOC coordinator of education. See Florida, Division of Corrections, Fifth Biennial Report, July 1, 1964–June 30, 1966, 13, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida.

60. Resolution of the Board of County Commissioners of Duval County, Florida, Relating to Escaped Convicts, August 17, 1964; Report on WJXT Channel 4 Newsnight on prison escapes, August 17, 1964; Governor to Mr. S. Morgan Slaughter [Clerk, Board of County Commissioners, Duval County], August 28, 1964; all in S756 box 63 FF6.

61. Louie L. Wainwright to Mr. Jon C. Moyle, February 15, 1963, in S756 box 63 FF5. This provides an intriguing counterpoint to Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s study, which shows how “white criminality gradually lost its fearsomeness,” especially in northern and then southern states through the decades of the twentieth century, and African Americans retained their criminal identities for much longer. An equally important question relates to the ways in which the stereotype of the compliant black prisoner still functioned in 1960s Florida. See Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), quotation on 5.

62. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion on Clarence Earl Gideon’s Sixth Amendment rights on March 18, 1963, there were approximately 4,500 Florida prisoners who had not been represented by counsel at the time of their conviction. The Florida Supreme Court adopted Criminal Procedure No. 1 on April 1, which set out the scheme for prisoners to challenge their convictions. By June 30, 1964, 5,223 motions had been filed, which led to over 3,500 court orders. Wainwright reported that 1,839 prisoners had been “lost from custody” as a result, and bed space was available at all institutions as the perennial problem of overcrowding had been “temporarily relieved.” See Florida, Division of Corrections, Fourth Biennial Report, July 1, 1962–June 30, 1964, 19, and Fifth Biennial Report, July 1, 1964–June 30, 1966, 99, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida; Schoenfeld, “Politics of Prison Growth,” 103–4; Charles J. Eichman, “The Impact of the Gideon Decision upon Crime and Sentencing in Florida: A Study of Recidivism and Sociocultural Change” (MS thesis, Florida State University, 1965).

63. Memo on “Escapes from Road Prisons,” Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Farris Bryant, August 28, 1964, 1–2, in S756 box 63 FF6. Escapes from road prisons continued to appear in official correspondence and Griffiths’ reports throughout the 1960s. See, for example, “Officials Defend Camp 35,” Panama City News Herald, January 14, 1968, 1–2. There was also at least one road prison strike in September 1964. See Louis L. Wainwright to the Honorable Doyle Conner, December 20, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF6.

64. Memo on “Escapes from Road Prisons,” Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Farris Bryant, August 28, 1964, in S756 box 63 FF6.

65. See Memo Re: Glenn R. Boerner, 016257 from Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Claude R. Kirk Jr., April 23, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF1.

66. Florida, Division of Corrections, First Report, June 1960, 14; Third Report, June 1962, 16–17, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida.

67. SRD guards’ salaries included a mandatory deduction of $30.00 per month for lodging and meals at the road prison, regardless of whether they were used. Complaints about the low pay of prison guards and sick-pay restrictions were often sent to governors. See, for example, Mrs. Shurman Z. Hamilton to Honorable Farris Bryant, March 15, 1963, in S756 box 63 FF5.

68. Laws of Florida, 1963, Ch. 63-450; Florida, Division of Corrections, Third Report, June 1962, 13, Florida Legislative Library in the Capitol Building, Tallahassee, Florida; Louie L. Wainwright to All Road Prison Captains, Sergeants, and Guards, June 19, 1963, and Copy of press release, July 15, 1963, in S736 box 63 FF3.

69. “Prison Aids Are Needed in Florida,” Playground Daily News, February 1, 1964, 12; Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Farris Bryant, “Escapes from Road Prisons,” 2, August 28, 1964, in S756 box 63 FF6; Minutes of Cabinet Committee Meeting, March 23, 1964, in S756 box 64 FF2; Cabinet Committee for Division of Corrections, Discussion of Certain Pay Plan Changes, July 21, 1965, and Minutes of Meeting of the Cabinet Committee for the Division of Corrections, July 21, 1965, in Record Group 102, series 131: Governor Haydon Burns, Administrative Correspondence (1965–1967), box 16, file folder 1, Florida State Library and Archives, Tallahassee.

70. Chase, “ ‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt,” 177–213. See also Zoe Colley, “Prisons and Racial Protest in the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras” (PhD diss., University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Althea Legal-Miller, “The Unmentionable Ugliness of the Jailhouse: Sexualized Violence, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Leesburg Stockade Imprisonment of 1963” (PhD diss., University of London, King’s College, 2011); Zoe A. Colley, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012).

71. See, for example, Dunn, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century; Glenda Alice Rabby, The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Abel Bartley, Keeping the Faith: Race, Politics, and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Irvin D. S. Winsboro, ed., Old South, New South, or Down South? Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2009). On the St. Augustine protests and arrests, see David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877–1980 (New York: Columbia Press, 1985); David J. Garrow, ed., St. Augustine, Florida, 1963–1964: Mass Protest and Racial Violence (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1989); Abel A. Bartley, “The Triumph of Tradition: Haydon Burns’s 1964 Gubernatorial Race and the Myth of Florida’s Moderation,” in Winsboro, Old South, New South, or Down South?, 176–97; Charles R. Gallagher, “The Catholic Church, Martin Luther King Jr., and the March in St. Augustine,” Florida Historical Quarterly 83, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 149–72.

72. Information on the use of the state road prison to accommodate the “overflow” of St. Johns County misdemeanants appears in cabinet minutes and a series of letters relating to the amount that St. Johns County commissioners were to pay the State Road Department for the use of this DCRP. See Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable L. O. Davis, Sheriff, June 18, 1964 and September 9, 1964; Louie L. Wainwright to Mr. Ralph Davis [SRD executive director], June 18, 1964; John R. Phillips [SRD chairman] to Mr. Louie L. Wainwright, June 22, 1964; Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Division of Corrections, November 3, 1964, 2–3; Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable James W. Kynes, December 22, 1964; all in S756 box 63 FF6.

73. Minutes of Cabinet Committee on Division of Corrections, November 3, 1964, 2–3, in S756 box 63 FF6.

74. “Florida Division of Corrections Progress toward Desegregation,” November 1, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7.

75. See “Monthly Reports of Prisoners Received, Released, and Inmate Allocations,” January, May, and July 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7 (total state prison population on July 31, 1967, was 7,331); Division of Corrections, Fifth Biennial Report, July 1, 1964–June 30, 1966, 31, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida; Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Doyle E. Connor, August 8, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF1; “Jay Prison Camp Was Fire Hazard,” Panama City Herald, July 19, 1967, 5.

76. Governor Kirk to Mr. Louie L. Wainwright, July 17, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF1; “Prison Probe Begins,” Panama City Herald, July 20, 1967, 1. The Jay prison fire also spurred inspections of Georgia’s prison work camps. See “Fire at Jay Spurs Probe in Georgia,” Panama City Herald, July 19, 1967, 5.

77. “Senate Bill Would Close 13 Wooden Prison Camps,” St. Petersburg Times, July 26, 1967, 1B.

78. This was in agreement with the Coroner’s Jury findings: “We, the Jurors, find further that according to testimony given, there was no sign of racial violence and there was no negligence on the part of the prison officials.” See DOC Jay Fire Report, 8. Death certificates were signed by Friday July 22, and the bodies, in numbered bags inside wooden coffins, were released to relatives for burial. The remains of eight African American prisoners were not claimed by relatives.

79. See William H. Stafford Jr. to Mr. Jack Ledden, November 29, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7. Stafford had visited Mrs. Laraine Cole after she had written to Governor Kirk and “determined that her major complaint was that no one had ever contacted her and she could not understand why David was transferred from the Niceville camp, where she alleges he was doing so well, to the Berrydale camp. In addition, she felt that Guard A. O. Lovett did not act properly” because “some people who live near the prison camp supposedly said they heard the prisoners crying to get out and that Guard Lovett stated that he was not going to open the door.” Stafford stated that he answered all of Mrs. Cole’s questions and assured her that all the guards had acted properly. He suggested that this widow’s “anxiety would be greatly relieved if some official from the Division of Corrections would make a personal call on her or at least communicate with her.” Several relatives brought suits against the state and legislators did consider but rejected compensation claims. See “State Considers Compensation for Jay Prison Camp Victims,” Playground Daily News, February 26, 1969, 3.

80. “Rioting Convicts Set Prison Afire, 37 Burn to Death,” Panama City Herald, July 17, 1967, 1 and 2; Herman J. Morris to Hon Claude Kirk, July 18, 1967; and Governor to Mr. Herman J. Morris, July 20, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF1. Kirk responded to Morris with a form letter: “The fire at Jay, Florida in which 37 [sic] prisoners perished was certainly tragic. A thorough investigation is being made to determine the exact cause of the fire. Your interest in this matter is appreciated.”

81. See “Fort Pierce Camp Takes Precautions,” Fort Pierce News Tribune, July 18, 1967, 1.

82. “Rioting Convicts Set Prison Afire; 37 Burn to Death; Only 14 Escape Flash Inferno Near Milton,” Panama City Herald, July 17, 1967, 1.

83. “Convicts, Guards Tell of Fatal Prison Fire,” Panama City Herald, July 18, 1967, 1; “What Kind of Men Set Fire?,” Panama City Herald, July 20, 1967, 1, 2.

84. “Fort Pierce Prison Camp Takes Precautions,” Fort Pierce News Tribune, July 18, 1967, 1, 2; “Jay Prison Camp Was Fire Hazard,” Panama City Herald, July 19, 1967, 5.

85. T. W. Burkhart and C. W. McPherson [fire investigators] to W. T. “Tommy” Knight [chief deputy fire marshal], July 31, 1967; W. T. “Tommy” Knight to Honorable Broward Williams [state treasurer and state fire marshal], July 31, 1967; Broward Williams to the Honorable Doyle Conner, July 31, 1967, all in S923 box 60 FF2.

86. Fort Pierce News Tribune, July 26, 1967, 2; “Senate Bill Would Close 13 Wooden Prison Camps.” DOC recommendations for the 1967 legislature had also included establishing furlough and work-release programs and raising the minimum age of confinement to sixteen years. See Division of Corrections, Fifth Biennial Report, July 1, 1964–June 30, 1966, 97, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida.

87. Memo Louie L. Wainwright to the Honorable Claude R. Kirk Jr., March 30, 1967, in S923 box 58 FF6. Wainwright successfully lobbied legislators for the creation of “work release” programs to enable some prisoners nearing the end of their sentences to undertake nonprison work during the day. These programs were piloted by the Parole and Probation Commission in Marion County jail in 1967, and a similar program for state prisoners followed. By 1970, at least one thousand prisoners at the major institutions were at community work placements, but the rural locations of many DOC prisons limited the numbers of potential employment opportunities. Consequently, DOC used a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) planning grant to plan for four urban “community corrections centers” as “a common sense approach to bridging the gap between the prison and the community.” See Florida, Division of Corrections, June 1970, 15, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida; Schoenfeld, “Politics of Prison Growth,” 148–50.

88. Louie L. Wainwright to the Honorable Doyle Connor, September 22, 1967, in S923 box 23 FF7; L. W. Griffith, Florida Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report of December 1967, 3–4, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida. Bronson prisoners were transferred on August 9, 1967, and Ocala prisoners were transferred on September 8, 1967.

89. Louie L. Wainwright to the Honorable Doyle E. Conner, August 7, 1967, in S923 box 60 FF2; James A. Balls, for Louie L. Wainwright, to the Honorable Doyle Conner, August 8, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF1.

90. “Road Camps Phased Out,” Playground Daily News, July 22, 1968, 1. In Florida, property crime increased by 94 percent and violent crime by 123 percent during the 1960s. See Schoenfeld, “Politics of Prison Growth,” 98. Homicide rates were rising throughout the United States in this decade but were climbing more slowly in the South (defined as the former Confederate states) than in other regions, although this remained the most murderous region. Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics showed the number of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100,000 population dropped from 173 percent of the national average in 1962 to 147 percent in 1969. See Michal R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 242.

91. Division of Corrections, Sixth Biennial Report, July 1, 1966–June 30, 1968, 12, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida; Louie L. Wainwright to Officer John H. Smith, October 30, 1968, and Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Doyle Connor, November 1, 1968, in S923 box 61 FF5; “Prisons Full; Old Dorr Field May Be Used to House Inmates,” Panama City Herald, November 26, 1968, 2; L. W. Griffith, Florida Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Reports for February 1969, July 1969, and August 1969, in S923 box 63 FF3; Florida Division of Corrections, Seventh Biennial Report, July 1, 1968–June 30, 1970, 79, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida. Efforts to reduce the FSP population to “a workable level” had stalled, so officials sought “additional bed space” for close custody prisoners through, for example, the acquisition and repurposing of Dorr Field, a former mental health facility, to house minimum- and medium-security prisoners.

92. Edmund F. Kallina Jr., Claude Kirk and the Politics of Confrontation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), 142.

93. See Philip Goodman, “ ‘Another Second Chance’: Rethinking Rehabilitation through the Lens of California’s Prison Fire Camps,” Social Problems 59, no. 4 (November 2012): 437–58.

94. L. W. Griffith, Florida Division of Corrections Road Prisons, Monthly Report for December 1967, 4, in S923 box 59 FF3; and Monthly Report for July 1969, 4, in S923 box 63 FF3; “Camp 35 Inmates Receive Education,” Panama City News Herald, January 21, 1968, 1; Louie L. Wainwright, “A Plan for Expansion and Development of Education Departments of the Florida Division of Corrections,” February 1968, in S923 box 59 FF5.

95. See, for example, Jane War Hunter to Honorable Louie Wainwright, June 13, 1968, in S923 box 59 FF5.

96. Florida Division of Corrections, Seventh Biennial Report, July 1, 1968–June 30, 1970, Florida Legislative Library, Tallahassee, Florida.

97. Robert M. Freeman, Correctional Organization and Management: Public Policy Challenges, Behavior and Structure (Woburn, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999), 35–37; Larry J. Siegel, Introduction to Criminal Justice, 12th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2009), 595; Edward J. Latessa and Paula Smith, Corrections in the Community (Burlington, MA: Anderson Publishing, 2011).

98. “Phasing out of Road Gangs Being Planned,” Panama City News, October 16, 1968, 2.

99. Allen C. Morris, comp., The Florida Handbook, 1973–1974 (Tallahassee: Peninsular Publishing Company, 1973), 260; Gary S. Hatrick, “Zephyrhills Correctional Institution Touts Connection with Community,” Pasco Tribune [online], November 3, 2012. The first Florida CCC for male offenders opened in Jacksonville in 1970.

100. Louie L. Wainwright to Honorable Doyle Connor, November 1, 1968, in S923 box 61 FF5; Schoenfeld, “Politics of Prison Growth,” 146. In my view, the genealogy of the supermax in Florida originates with the construction of the Flat Top segregation unit at the FSP at Raiford (now Union Correctional Institution) in the early 1930s, FSP’s shift to a maximum and close-custody institution from the 1950s, and the developing system of administrative segregation at Raiford (and also at the FSP at Starke, formerly the East Unit at Raiford, when it became a separate prison in July 1972). See, for example, “Main Prison, Administrative Segregation,” December 22, 1967, in S923 box 59 FF2.

101. Wootens, “Prison Road Gangs Fading Fast,” 35, 60.

102. “Camp 35 Inmates Receive Education,” Panama City News Herald, January 21, 1968, 1; “Florida News Briefs,” Panama City News Herald, February 2, 1968, 2.

103. King, “Softer Times on the Hard Road.”

104. Schoenfeld, “Politics of Prison Growth,” 149–50; “Remaining Road Prisons Doomed?,” Fort Pierce News Tribune, January 19, 1970, 8; “Road Prison Camp Holds Open House,” Playground Daily News, April 6, 1973, 6A; “Road Prisons Changed,” Naples Daily News, January 8, 1975, 5B; Dyckman, Reubin O’D. Askew, 161, 189.

105. See Florida Department of Corrections Timeline, http://www.dc.state.fl.us./oth/timeline/1976-1979c.htm.

106. “Florida Inmates Work on Chain Gangs without Chains,” New York Times [online], February 20, 1983, http://ezproxy.nottingham.ac.uk/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.nottingham.ac.uk/docview/122319336?accountid=8018.

107. John Barry, “Return of the Florida Chain Gang: New Justice or Old Cruelty,” Miami Herald, May 30, 1995, 1A, 8A; “Criminal Law, Prison Labor, Florida Reintroduces Chain Gangs. Act of June 15, 1995, Ch. 283, 1995 Fla. Sess. Law. Serv. 2080, 2081 (West),” Harvard Law Review 109, no. 4 (February 1996): 876–81.

108. “DOC Announces Plans to Close Three Prisons,” Sunshine State News, March 16, 2011, http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/doc-announces-plans-close-three-prisons.

109. Kate Atkins, “Inmate Road Crews Will Disappear with Closing of 60-Year Old Prison,” Miami Herald [online], January 22, 2017, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article128069634.html; Kate Atkins, “Last Clang of the Bars for Keys Prison as Inmates Are Moved to the Mainland,” Miami Herald [online], April 23, 2017, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/florida-keys/article146273179.html.