Huntsville Penitentiary

Foundation

Although Texans considered building a prison under Mexican rule, construction did not begin until after U.S. annexation in 1848. Its model was the industrial penitentiary at Auburn, New York, dedicated to regimented labor rather than solitary penitence. Through most of the 19th century, Huntsville's rule books required prisoners to march in drills, eat in silence, and put in long hours at the textile factory and other workshops. During the Civil War, Huntsville became a vital source of cloth for the Confederacy, so much so that officials imported runaway slaves to staff the mill.

Convict Leasing

The end of slavery transformed Huntsville. Before the Civil War, the prison confined only whites, as Texas law stipulated that free blacks and slaves were to be punished only by whipping, hard labor, or hanging. After emancipation, however, a rapid influx of African American prisoners—many of them convicted of petty offenses such as “stealing a cap”—soon crowded the Walls. Pressed for cash and reluctant to build another penitentiary, lawmakers responded in 1867 by hiring out prisoners to the highest bidder. Thus, like other southern states, Texas adopted the convict lease system—the most ignominious punishment regime in American history.

Photo 2 Huntsville Rodeo Clowns

As Texas's flagship institution, Huntsville provided a safer, generally less brutal punishment environment than other sites. While the state shipped out most black and Mexican convicts to isolated mining, railroad, and agricultural camps, Huntsville remained largely white and devoted to skilled industry. Moreover, enlightened administrators such as Thomas Jewett Goree, superintendent from 1877 to 1891, as well as a succession of physicians and chaplains, kept a close eye on its operations, ensuring that modest education and recreation programs developed.

Nevertheless, convict leasing generated its share of turmoil at Huntsville. In the 1870s, investigators discovered that juveniles as young as seven were languishing in its filthy cells and that lessees were engaging in “lascivious conduct” with black women prisoners. A group of federal soldiers held briefly at the Walls complained of spirit-breaking toil and a crude genital torture device called “the horse.” Partly because Huntsville housed a number of well-educated prisoners, these wretched conditions engendered a literary protest movement around the turn of the 20th century. One convict writer complained that he was held in an “abject manner as a slave,” while another described his time at the Walls as “fourteen years in Hell.”

Reform and Retrenchment

Huntsville underwent another dramatic transformation in 1910, when legislators abolished leasing after [Page 453]a protracted campaign by labor leaders, muckraking journalists, and progressive clergymen. A new team of administrators dedicated to “order” and “humane treatment” reasserted state control and enacted far-reaching changes: new shower and laundry facilities, a new reformatory for women, convict wages, and the abolition of whipping. Within three years, however, budget cuts, combined with uncooperative guards and mutinous convicts, precipitated a fierce backlash and swept away many of these reforms.

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