Inside the wire: A fascinating look inside Southern prison farms that were built on slave plantations in the 1960s and '70s


Documentary photographer Bruce Jackson has created a striking photographic record of Southern prison farms of the 1960s and '70s, when he was given unsupervised access to prison grounds, guards and prisoners themselves.



In his book, Inside the Wire, Jackson documents a prison culture that 'is a direct descendant of the 19th century slave plantation,' the Texas and Arkansas prison systems, where he shot photographs between 1964 and 1979.



'Not only were southern agricultural prisons based on the structural model of the American slave plantation, but many of them occupied land that had literally been slave plantations before the Civil War, and secular plantations on which work and living conditions were not much changed after it,' writes Jackson in Inside the Wire.



Jackson's initial intention was to study black convict worksongs and folk culture, and his used his camera only to record details for his research.



However, he soon realized the opportunity he had to document the arachaic and brutal world of the southern penal system.



Given relative freedom inside the prisons, Jackson was able to explore the lives and hardships of the inmates he met there.



'Those guards and their prisons had been nailed in the movies: if you've seen Brute Force (1947) or Canon City (1948), you've seen Missouri Penitentiary in the 1960s,' writes Jackson.



Recently, he tried to revisit the places he came to know 40 years ago, but found that world now closed off and hidden.



'Those places do not want witnesses. They don't want us to see what occurs inside the wire. I can't show you what happens inside the wire now. But the images in this book will, I hope, give you an idea of what happened not so very long ago. I doubt that world has changed much in the interim, other than that it is even more crowded and more mean.'

The book is available on Amazon and is pu blished by the University of T exas Press.

Returning: Prisoners returning from their days' labor walk through the sally port gate in Arkansas, 1972

Hard labor: Aside from the very old or very sick, all prisoners worked, and they worked 'with hoes and spades, except when they were picking cotton with their hands'

Under the gun: Convicts 'did an astonishing range of work with the hoes, from weeding to building roads, and the spades were used to move large amounts of dirt around'

Rodeo: Most of the southern agricultural prisons had convict rodeos because they were good PR and they made a lot of money since just about all the labor was free (the convicts) or already on salary (the guards)

Inked: Many men in the prison had tattoos, some from the outside and some done other convicts in jail. Jackson says the man in the back is the only man he 'ever saw in prison taking a shower with his shorts on,' Arkansas, 1975

Identification: Jackson acquired some very old prisoner identification photographs in 1975 which are spread throughout the book

Take it easy: A field lieutenant drinking coffee from a glass while behind him convicts pick cotton, Arkansas 1975

Wide angle: Jackson says this Widelux image shows the three men he was photographing in context: 'Sometimes people in that photographic moment are watching the moment in a very different way from the photographer'

Spade squads: Since the ground they worked was often muddy, the spades all had holes drilled in them to let the water drain out, Arkansas, 1973

Through the lens: One of the inmates tries his hand with Jackson's camera, to the amusement of his fellow prisoners