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This week, The Marshall Project published an illuminating piece Prison Plantations about Bruce Jackson‘s work from inside Texas and Arkansas in the 60s and 70s. As far as I am aware, it is the best presentation of Jackson’s work on the web. 27 images.

Jackson a professor in history, writer and photographer, focused on the work songs of prisoners to trace the progression of arable land in the South from plantation to prison. For a century, between the outlaw of slavery and the era of mass incarceration (approx. 1865-1975), the Texas Department of Justice bought up old family plantations on which to house and work inmates.

Maurice Chammah writes for TMP:

For the black men who had once been slaves and now were convicts, arrested often for minor crimes, the experience was not drastically different. As Jackson writes in his introduction to the 2012 photo collection Inside the Wire:

“…Everyone in the Texas prisons in the years I worked there used a definite article when referring to the units: it was always “Down on the Ramsey,” not “Down on Ramsey,” and “Up on the Ellis,” not “Up on Ellis.” It made no sense to me until I realized that nearly all of those prison farms had been plantations at one time, so it was like an abbreviated way of saying “I’m going to the Smith family’s plantation,” or “I’m going to the Smiths’.”

This was the end of an era. Right after these photos were taken, in 1980, William Wayne Justice, a federal judge, issued a sweeping decision in the prisoner rights case Ruiz v. Estelle. Justice forced Texas prisons to modernize in all sorts of ways, from adding staff to improving working conditions to stopping the policy of allowing prisoners to guard one another with weapons. Jackson photographed prisoners with rifles, an image unthinkable today.

It’s a great little piece putting into stark perspective our very recent history. And Jackson’s pictures take us straight back there. Read Prison Plantations.

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