The Forgotten History of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm: Part Two

In part two we discuss the prison’s history of forced labor and lack of healthcare in the overcrowded facility.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Welcome to It could happen here today. I'm your host,
Garrison Davis, and this is part two of our three
part series on the history of the old Atlanta Prison Farm,
made in collaboration with the Atlanta Community Press Collective. Last episode,
I talked about how one of the initial motivations for

(00:33):
running a city prison farm was to save money on
the project of incarceration, or perhaps even starts generating money.
This remained the case throughout its existence, though exactly how
well it performed at that was often questioned. Use of
prison or slave labor for government projects was not a

(00:53):
new concept in Atlanta, though around the time of its
incorporation in the mid nineteenth century, this it even and
as population was around one fifth enslaved persons. City Hall itself,
along with many other iconic buildings and roads, was built
using convict lease labor from the Chattahoochee Brickworks, notorious for

(01:16):
its brutal conditions and was owned by a former Atlanta mayor.
The City Prison Farm produced various crops, livestock, and dairy,
but it also provided workers for other city projects. In
nineteen forty six, Superintendent H. H. Gibson bragged that he
was cutting the city prison food budget in half, as

(01:39):
well as quote furnishing the city eleven thousand, nine hundred
sixty one man days of work on city streets by
prisoners unquote within a sixth month period. In ninety nine,
they began saving further money on incarceration by getting the
women prisoners to make the new uniforms, adding that quote

(02:02):
the city can buy better materials because the labor is
free unquote. They attempted to incentivize overtime work by offering
quote extra credit for each hour of overtime worked for
reduced sentences. The prisoners were forced to build some of
their own cages as well. One of the older prison

(02:26):
buildings was designated for use as a hospital for people
with manereal diseases. That meant that prisoners would need a
new building and they had to build it themselves. Quote.
Most of the work was done with prison labor, with
the city providing the materials unquote. They were also responsible
for the cleaning and maintenance of the buildings in order

(02:50):
to pass health inspection. According to an Atlantic Constitution article, quote,
the dormitory scrubbed daily by men and women whose drunkenness
and traffic violation sations placed them behind a mop or
tractor for an average fifteen day stay one four health rating.
In nineteen fifty eight, prisoners were even made to rescue

(03:12):
a guard's furniture from a fire. By the nineteen seventies,
the farm provided more than half the food and dairy
products for inmates in city detention centers. By the nineteen eighties,
the prison farm had stopped growing crops, but still provided
for of the pork and beef eaten by the prisoners,

(03:33):
both at the farm and at the city jail. The
work heavily subsidized city operations and was considered crucial. H. H. Gibson,
the head of the prison farm in nine, said, quote,
idleness is the root of all evil in prison management.
To be completely exempt from work, a prisoner should be

(03:55):
minus both arms and both legs unquote. In the Warrior
Journal article where he makes those claims, The publication also
accepts Gibson's claims that he quote took care to see
the guards did not overwork prisoners, and that the guards
are not permitted to strike or even curse prisoners unquote,

(04:17):
and this would of course be later proven very much untrue.
White guards were known to send black women to a
less occupied area, supposedly to do extra work, but upon arrival,
the prisoners would be raped by the guards. If they refused,
they were quote given a hard way to go unquote.

(04:40):
These same guards had the power to assign extra work
to prisoners. This was supposed to have been fixed several
years earlier with the hiring of a black woman guard,
but according to the Pittsburgh Courier, she was quote only
a matron in the name. The white guards continued to
provides the colored women inmates unquote. The same statement details

(05:05):
a beating with a broom handle. It claims that black
women were forced to farm in the rain while white
women were allowed to stay inside and read newspapers, and
called for further investigations since the banning of the bucking
chair used for whippings, solitary confinement end quote. The whole
unquote was the official punishment for not working at the

(05:30):
standards set by their prison guards and wardens. We know
little about the conditions of the whole in earlier years,
but in nineteen sixty five, a new administrator named Ralph
Halsey took over operations of the prison farm. A scathing
report from journalist Dick Herbert, who went undercover as a prisoner, alleged,

(05:53):
among many other things, that the whole was quote where
men were starved and degraded unquote. His report drew much
negative attention to the conditions on the farm, the whole
being one of them. At the time, Holsey said that
he was quote not happy with it as it is,
but it is necessary for a discipline unquote. The whole

(06:16):
was described as an eight foot by four foot windowless
room where troublesome inmates are kept in solitary confinement. It's
described as quote. Furnishings now include a pale and two buckets,
no bed, no mattress or plumbing. Holsey allegedly planned to

(06:37):
fit such cells with an iron lattice, bunk and toilet facilities,
but we have no indication that this was ever followed
through on, and the whole continued to be used regularly
up until the mid eighties. Lead ship of the prison

(07:01):
farm changed hands many times throughout its history, and at
each passing of the torch there were claims of improvement
the dawn of a new, better era, bleak and cruel
conditions remained no matter who was in charge. Archival research
shows that for over half a century. Life on the

(07:21):
farm was subject to hard labor, long days, harsh punishments, overcrowding,
poor sanitation, and constantly lacking healthcare. J. D. Hudson, the
superintendent of the prison farm in later years, who was
hyped up by press as a sort of humanitarian reformer,

(07:42):
described the previous conditions of the prison farm as slave labor.
He bragged frequently of his intention to give prisoners quote
a measure of self respect so they could lead decent lives. Again.
Upon being instated, he announced his intention to empty solitary
confinement and forbid guards from hitting or abusing inmates, something

(08:05):
which we must point out had been declared many times
before already. He also made statements saying that inmates are
quote written with guilt about their lives, and they want
to be mistreated and abused, and they want to be
denigrated as some sort of atonement for their sins unquote.

(08:25):
So this might explain why the great reformer himself was
still in charge when the a c l U sued
the city in two for conditions on the farm, citing
quote illegal and unconstitutional punishments such as leg irons and
excessive time in solitary confinement unquote, along with the long

(08:46):
track record of unsanitary conditions. Mayor Andrew Young said of
the suit, quote, it's simply a problem the city hasn't
gotten around to handling yet unquote. At that point, the
whole was still in use as solitary confinement and described
as a room seven feet long by four ft wide

(09:07):
that is virtually without heat in the winter and without
cooling in the summer. Prisoners were held there twenty three
hours a day, with an hour out for baths, often
held for many days at a time. The suit was
settled in nineteen eighty five with a forty dollar settlements
split between three former prisoners, but the city never actually

(09:29):
admitted guilt. Prison farm staff were also ordered to avoid
using isolation cells like the whole and told to build
twenty new individual cells. The a c l U and
those supporting the suit hoped that this lawsuit would push
the city to make changes, but in nineteen eighty seven,
just two years later, the city tried to build twenty

(09:51):
more solitary confinement cells at the prison farm, and this
project only fell through because white contractors they hired were
caught take job contracts slated for minority run businesses by
using a front. And hopefully you don't need me to
tell you that solitary confinement is still used as punishment
in most prisons today. It's been ages since I looked

(10:14):
at this newspaper clothes document and just there's so much
Atlanta may well take pride and the fact that It's
City prison Farm has won such recognition as a model
progressive institution that decided as a model in other metropolitan
areas for municipal penal systems need improvement. I mean, that's

(10:34):
the same thing they're trying to do with Cops City. Yeah,
and this is this is from that. That was one
of the surprising things that that we found was that
so many aspects of like the specific fights that are
being had about Cops City have happened fifty sixty years ago.
Like they were trying to expand the prison farm I

(10:56):
think eastward more into the Cab County in the forties,
and that the Cab County residents were like, no, you
can't do this to our county. But it was because
they didn't want the black prisoners near the white elementary school.
And like nine that was like wasn't long after when
they like formally disallowed whipping. Yeah, Like that's like it's

(11:21):
there's still like obviously it's they're still doing brutal stuff
in terms of like solitary and other forms of torture
and rape, but like posing it as this like model facilities,
like you just got in trouble like a few years previous,
for like whipping all of your prisoners, tying people down
to a chair. Like and then one of my favorites

(11:42):
guards shoot two women prisoners while firing vainly at each other.
I can't remember if we put that one in the
article or not, but two prison guards were shooting at
each other because they were, I don't know, cranky or
whatever and ended up just like shooting to prisoners. Since then,
inside the report for last year on the history of
the Person Farm, there's like almost like a hundred citations

(12:04):
and a whole bunch of background stuff. How once you
kind have had this question of like is there unmarked
graves at this site? How can we go about researching it?
What were the kind of techniques and things you used
to gather all of this information, um and then let alone,
like how do you start sorting through all that to
pick out you know, which which seems more incredible than others.

(12:27):
You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of
conflicting history in in in some regards. So how what
was like the whole entire research process, Like because looking
at just the list of citations, it is a little overwhelming. Yes,
it's very overwhelming. So our rather co author and Laura,

(12:49):
they did so much of the research, um, Like I
have to give enormous prompts to them. Like they even
made a couple of trips to things like the State
Archives which are slightly south of the city. I think
kind of snuck into a university library because a lot
of a lot of these like in person resources were

(13:14):
still closed at the time due to COVID restrictions. A
lot of them aren't open now unfortunately. So like we
have a huge document of just like newspaper quotes. A
big big source for us were historical newspaper articles, mostly
because because we initially started looking for official documents um

(13:37):
this this is a pub this was a public entity.
The city is required to keep records UM and what
we found was just a huge dearth of them, and
most of the articles that are not articles but like
official documents that are still around are how used in
a really great collection at Georgia State univer City in downtown.

(14:02):
But a lot of those things are they're just fairly limited,
or if they're like year to year reports, it's like
just one from the fifties, there is one from the sixties.
There's no consistent documentation available. So then we went to
public record, which was newspaper articles, and oh my god,

(14:22):
there are so many newspaper articles about the prison farm.
I never want to read a newspaper again. And we
kind of used things that happened at the prison farm
that we're noteworthy enough to make it into the newspaper too.
I guess you could say guide what the biggest beats
in the history of the prison farm work. And that

(14:45):
kind of led us to what was something that we
didn't know when we started our research, which was just
how poorly or just how mangled the history of the
prison part has become. This land approximately nineteen five started

(15:07):
becoming a police training academy, so there has been some
sort of police training facility on this land since approximately
There was even a slight version of a mock city
in the eight They had an intersection that was for
training for urban encounters. If you will. So this is

(15:32):
the kind of information that we're digging to try to
find the history. We're literally seeing legal notices in the newspaper,
so advertisements, and this is how we're piecing this information together.
When the pandemic hit for the first time in recent memory,
there was a large scale public discussion on how the

(15:53):
structure of the prison system is detrimental to the health
of incarcerated persons. Public health experts advocated that the best
way to limit the spread of disease is simply to
have less people in prison. We'll talk more about COVID's
impact on prison populations in a bit, but first let's
note how overcrowding and lack of medical treatment in prisons

(16:16):
leading to disastrous and deadly health outcomes is no new issue.
When Dick Herbert went into the Atlanta prison farm undercover
for the Atlanta Journal Constitution in nineteen sixty, one of
his main findings was quote non existent medical treatment. He
reported quote tubercular, coughing, sickly men waiting to die, society's

(16:42):
discards herded into an unwashed stock aide, only to be
turned out again without even a smattering of help. Unquote.
This was the case from the early days of the
prison farm and remained the case for long after. Already,
by nineteen thirty eight, the prison farm was described by
Mayor Hartsfield as an ungodly mess and was likely facing

(17:07):
issues with communicable diseases, as evidenced by a call for
quote separate hospital wards for diseased prisoners unquote, but it
took city council until nineteen forty one to even quote
study a proposal to equip the new building nearing completion
for a five hundred bed emergency hospital unquote. The completed

(17:28):
building was still not furnished by nineteen forty three, and
in nineteen forty four, instead of making the new building
into a health facility, they moved the prisoners into the
new building and fitted the twenty year old prison building
out to be a city detention hospital for treatment of
those infected with venereal disease, and then, rather than be

(17:50):
used as a hospital ward for the prison farm, it
was then used to treat a maneial disease bastions from
throughout the city. This was expected to quote meet demand
for years to come, but by there were already calls
to close the entire prison farm and convert the whole
thing into a maven aerial disease quarantine clinic due to

(18:11):
an increasing load. Obviously, those calls were never adopted, and
the prison farm remained in operation in a grossly recursive
mirror of the present. In an October one, nineteen fifty
seven edition of the Atlantic Constitution, a quote Asian flew
outbreak prompted the immediate release of quote any person who

(18:34):
is ill and who has a home to return to unquote.
Even this was qualified, though H. H. Gibson, who was
heading the prison at the time, said that only some
of those who had been convicted of just light in
fractions would be released. He also said that older men
with a history of tuberculosis would be released due to

(18:55):
the risk of their contracting pneumonia. Quoting Gibson, quote, none
of the men who had temperatures of one hundred and
one or more were released. Some of these older men
have no places to go, and if we released them
with a possible case of flu and higher temperature, chances
are we would find them dead in the woods or
somewhere a day later. Unquote. There was no mention of

(19:19):
efforts to mitigate spread within the prison of Farm facility,
and the fate of those who were forced to stay
is unknown to us at the present moment. In December
of nineteen fifty seven, the Decab County Grand Jury presented
findings from an investigation that found that the prison farm
was severely lacking in healthcare. They advised that a building

(19:41):
should be provided so that prisoners who are ill can
be held aside from the ones who are not sick,
meaning that in the twenty years since this was first proposed,
it had still not been implemented. They recommended that prisoners
who were sick be given examinations and a record to
be kept of those prison ers, and the prison farm
should quote employ a proper nursing staff unquote. Their final

(20:05):
recommendation was that quote some sort of sick quarters should
be put into effects the prisoners who are ill can
be held aside from the ones who are not sick unquote.
The implication from these recommendations, of course, is that none
of these practices were in placed at the time of investigation.
A year later, in November of nineteen fifty eight, a

(20:26):
second Decab grand jury quote found fault with its medical facilities,
along with the lack of fire safeguards in the prison farm.
Of course, thanks to Dick Herbert's undercover investigation for the
Atlanta Journal Constitution, we now know that by nineteen sixty five,
nearly ten years later, medical treatment was still found to

(20:47):
be non existent at the prison farm, and by nineteen
sixty seven, a prisoner quote with a record of hospitalization
for tuberculosis and heart trouble, collapsed and died unquote just
bite the order that medical records for sick patients be kept.
There was no record on file that this patient had
ever seen the doctor. Recorded sections from a meeting between

(21:11):
the prison Farm and the Department of Prisons indicate that
they planned to hire a full time registered nurse in
nineteen seventy two to assist the on site doctor. Other
plans included tests for tuberculosis, PEP tests for female prisoners,
and basic height, weight and blood tests. They also indicated

(21:34):
that they were not currently providing vision, hearing, or dental care.
In Atlanta Voice article from nineteen seventy three claims there
are quote unquote new improvements in this area, with the
quote employment of a physician and two nurses, a detoxification
program for alcoholics, health tests, and a humane approach to

(21:55):
prisoner problems unquote, but by nineteen seventy six we still
see such things being raised as simply proposals. An interoffice
communication at Grady Memorial Hospital states the need for quote
a nurse clinician to be hired by Grady and paid
by the state under contract to provide screening and triage

(22:17):
services on site and referral when appropriate to Grady Hospital.
One of them suggests entering this contract for reasons that
it will generate one dollars in income and quote minimize
public criticisms of inadequate healthcare for prisoners unquote. It also

(22:38):
states that currently prisoners quote get only crisis oriented emergency care.
A May nineteen seventy six Community Relations Commission report indicates
that many of the healthcare issues are caused by the
reluctance of guards to respond to prisoner complaints and quote
brutality at Grady hospit bittle by Atlanta police officers unquote.

(23:03):
Another proposal from Grady one month later suggests that rather
than hiring a nurse specifically for the prison farm, they
use a nurse from the central Referral office to act
as a liaison with non clinical personnel at each of
the eight detention centers in the city and give recommendations
over the phone. They note that this would save the

(23:26):
prison thousands of dollars a year. A nineteen seventy seven
letter from Shirley Millwood, interset Grady Hospital, indicates that prisoners
were still being transported to Grady for the administration of medication,
and that even that was not often done. One of
her patients was supposed to be brought in every day
for medication, but Millwood claimed, quote, the jail personnel have

(23:50):
not complied. The patient had been experiencing chest pain and
shortness of breath all afternoon, but was not brought in
until ten thirty p m. Quote. I feel that this
is negligent on their part, and it is certainly detrimental
to our patients. If something happens to this patient, will
the jail be liable for the problems that result from

(24:11):
him not being properly medicated? Unquote? In an undated document
entitled health Program City of Atlanta Prison Farm, pulled from
the same archival collection as the other Grady Hospital records,
does indicate that since nineteen see a doctor is on
site five days a week for one hour each day,

(24:35):
and a nurse is on duty twenty four hours a day.
It states that wherever feasible, treatment should be done on
the prison farm property, but lays out several procedures to
follow for serious medical emergencies, usually involving transportation to Grady Hospital. However,
it points out that quote unattended heart attacks, poison or suicide,

(24:58):
overdose cases, and har and withdrawal in jail frequently occur.
The report also says that in the case of public intoxication, quote,
minor medical skill and routine capacity in easing interpersonal tensions
can reduce difficulty for arresting officers, reduce the arrests needed,

(25:18):
and initiate more constructive rooting than directly to jail unquote.
The report points out that in diabetic patients, their convulsions
and the similar smell of their breath to acetone can
lead to incorrect conclusions with permanent health effects. It also
mentions that delirium treatment's condition associated with withdrawal of alcohol

(25:41):
and other substances can quote endanger and inmates life, and
more than one has died unquote without proper healthcare or
separation of sick and healthy prisoners, and in the midst

(26:03):
of a decades long tuberculosis epidemic, overcrowding would certainly be
a major contributing factor to sickness and death in prison scenarios.
Archival research found that overcrowding was a recurring complaint throughout
the over half century of the prison farm's existence, despite
frequent expansions, often motivated by the overcrowding in the first place.

(26:29):
Overcrowding is a common occurrence in prisons and jails throughout
the country. A longitudinal study by the Vera Institute of
Justice found that quote as jail populations have exceeded capacity,
county policy makers have turned to jail expansion rather than
alternatives to incarceration. In some cases, decision makers also argue

(26:50):
that replacing older facilities will provide safer living and working
conditions for the increasing numbers of people in the jail unquote. However,
institute researchers note that quote Larger jails built to accommodate
an overcrowded population often see their populations continue to increase.

(27:11):
This is because expansion alone fails to address the root
causes of overcrowding, leaving in place the very policies and
practices that drove the jail's population increase in the first place. Indeed,
there is a risk that the existence of a larger
jail with more beds may reduce the incentive to make
policy changes that address the factors driving overcrowding due to

(27:35):
the temporary relief expansion provides unquote. This is precisely what
we see play out here in the case of the
old prison farm, and in fact, is still an ongoing
issue in Atlanta area incarceration systems today. Since early on
in the COVID nineteen pandemic, it's been made clear that
the most effective way to mitigate the devastation of endemic

(27:59):
COVID nineteen prisons and jails is to reduce the number
of people behind bars. And wow, perhaps that would be
a good idea in general, not even related to this
specific pandemic. The United States locks up a larger portion
of its population than any other nation in the world,
and just the state of Georgia has the fourth largest

(28:19):
incarceration rate in the entire world. If you compare individual
US states to all other entire countries. Throughout only three states,
New Jersey, California, and North Carolina released a significant number
of incarcerating the people from prisons, parole boards also approved

(28:41):
fewer releases in the first year of the pandemic compared
to the year prior. The response of governments was so
bad that in total, fewer people were released in prisons
and jails compared to As a result, at the end
of the first year of the pandemic, nineteen state prison

(29:03):
systems were at nine capacity or higher. Incarcerated people are
infected by the coronavirus at a rate more than five
times higher than the nation's overall rate, according to research
reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association from
July of The reported death rate of inmates thirty nine

(29:26):
deaths per one hundred thousand, is also much higher than
the national rate of twenty nine deaths per one hundred thousand.
As of April sixte more than six hundred and sixty
one thousand incarcerated people and staff have been infected with coronavirus,
and at least two thousand and nine hundred and ninety

(29:47):
have died, according to The New York Times, and getting
data more recent than that is actually almost impossible because
many carstral agencies have simply stopped collect and releasing information.
The number of infections and deaths is likely even higher
than the reported number. Because jails and prisons are conducting

(30:10):
limited testing on incarcerated people, many facilities won't test incarcerated
people who die after showing symptoms of COVID nineteen. A
lack of data reporting by carstral agencies has prevented the
public from being able to understand the full impact of
the pandemic on InCAR strated persons. Organizations like the u

(30:31):
c l A Law, COVID nineteen Behind Bars Project, the
Martial Project, and the COVID Prison Project have been working
to collect data and information as there's been a lack
of transparency from agencies in providing adequate or correct data
on the number of cases, safety protocols, and deaths within
their jails and prisons. Many states Department of Corrections rolled

(30:55):
back or stopped reporting their COVID nineteen data altogether in
the summer of one, during the delta variant surge and
way before the ownercron wave that hit last winter. For example,
in Georgia, the Georgia Department of Corrections has not reported
any new COVID deaths since Marche and last year halted

(31:20):
all public reporting data among all the correctional systems in
the United States, the Georgia Department of Corrections has the
second highest case fatality rate or percentage of those people
who have reported infections and later die. So this has
been a problem in Georgia for a long time, whether

(31:41):
that be with the old Atlanta prison Farm or the
current day jail's prisons and penitentiaries. I'm going to close
out this episode with this little tidbit from one of
the conversations I had with members of the Atlanta Community
Press Collective. I think, just something that's count penuously not addressed. UM.

(32:03):
I know a lot of people like to focus on
positive things or more inspiring things. I guess as far
as prison stuff goes, because I know I've had people
repeatedly asked like, hey, were there strikes? Were their uprisings?
Which is really inspirational. I agree. But there's also a really,

(32:26):
really sad history that a lot of people aren't addressing
and how many people died by suicide here or attempted
to die by suicide, and it's really sad that no
one seems to care about that aspect that there were
horrific atrocities. There were frequent rapes and beatings. There's a

(32:53):
photo from the a j C that literally says black woman.
I think it's like from the forties and they are
moving around chemically infused sludge. It literally says sludge as fertilizer.
We have proof of these atrocities, and people just like

(33:18):
to focus on things of like, oh, hey, there was
arsenic in a lake. I've never been able to find
anything about that. I have no idea where that came from.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but there are so
many concrete examples of horrific things that happened here. We
don't need to make up stories. They exist and they're here.

(33:42):
You just have to pay attention and read about it.
There's literally a woman who attempted suicide six times because
she hated being in the whole so bad. The isolated
confinement self labeled the whole like six times. And nobody

(34:03):
addresses this kind of stuff, even as forest offenders, like
we owe it to ourselves to educate our community about
exactly what happened here, even the worst of it, and
then we'll go fucking raid in the woods, because you've
got to take care of yourself too. But even as

(34:24):
we acknowledge this land, we need to know the history
of it too, that doesn't for us Today. In the
next episode will be going over the details of possible
grave sites and how further research into the prison farm
could be done, as well as more updates on the
happenings in the fight to defend the Atlanta Forest. See

(34:46):
you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
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(35:07):
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