Senator Joseph Brown Defends Convict Leasing

Background: Senator Joseph Brown gave this testimony to the governor and attorney general of Georgia in 1887. Here, Brown defends the practice of whipping at his Dade County mines, emphasizing “the strap” as the only method to quell “insubordinate” and revolting convicts.

It is not worth while to to try to disguise the fact that the clamor that has been raised in favor of the convict of Georgia has reached them in their camps. Many of them, who are ignorant, believe that the Governor and Legislature are making efforts for their release, and that at no distant day will they all be discharged.

Such convicts have become much more insubordinate and harder to govern than they were before they had conceived these erroneous ideas of sympathy and support, and it becomes necessary to inflict corporal punishment more frequently, and make it more severe, than it would be if the spirit of insubordination referred to did not exist among the convicts. And let me say to you in all candor, that if our people continue on this line, to sow to the wind, it will not be many years before they will reap the whirlwind. The insubordination in the convict camps will manifest itself in combined action and deeds of violence on the part of the convicts and they will have to be shot down, or they will take the lives of those in charge of them, and scatter to the woods and make their escape. It is necessary to the best interests of the State and to the protection of society that the convicts should feel that they are placed in the penitentiary for punishment, and that they should feel while suffering that punishment that they are not the objects of popular sympathy or public clamor.

Subordination and discipline must be maintained. You cannot do this by imprisonment, as the convicts are already imprisoned. The thumb screw, and other modes of punishment sometimes resorted to in prisons is much less humane than reasonable whipping. You have no other alternative but the strap. As there is no other way to enforce discipline with more humanity, you are obliged, when the necessity arises, to do it by whipping . . .

Source: “The Convict Question. Senator Brown’s Argument Before the Governor in Defense of Dade Coal Company,” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), October 4, 1887.