Whatever Happened to the Southern Chain Gang?

Abstract

The chapter offers a critical evaluation of Florida’s post-1960s liberalizing corrections philosophy. Beginning with a devastating prison fire that killed thirty-eight prisoners in 1967, the chapter reevaluates traditional narratives that have cast the calamitous fire as the beginning of the end of Southern prison road work. The chapter uncovers an already ongoing institutional history where the movement away from Southern penal traditions mired in the political economy of the chain gang became part of a post-1960s turn toward new Sunbelt values of “corrections” and a new “community-treatment” concept ostensibly intended to offer prisoners vocational training, less high-level security supervision, and a role in community building. In an era of prison uprisings, prisoners’ rights suits, and desegregation of prisons, the chapter concludes that Florida’s highway maintenance program was simply redesigned road work and a Sunbelt version of “community corrections” masked as a liberalizing reform.