Inside Burning Hell — The Texas Farm Where Men Crippled Themselves to Get Out

Inside Burning Hell — The Texas Farm Where Men Crippled Themselves to Get Out SUBSCRIBE - One institution. One year. Reconstructed from the record.    / @behindthewallshistory   --------------- --------------- --------------- --------------- --------------- --------------- Retrieve Prison Farm, Brazoria County, Texas, 1947. Men there called it Burnin' Hell, and some of them cut the tendon above their own heel rather than walk back into its fields. That April, eighteen state legislators spent two days inspecting Retrieve and the prison farms around it, room by room, man by man. They wrote down what they found in their own hand. Solitary confinement. Mutilation cases. Criminal acts, prevalent among the prisoners. They recorded shoes issued too small to wear, a ration of four spoonfuls of gravy and three biscuits for men in solitary, and a manager who told them to their faces that it made no difference what they thought of how he ran the place. What the committee saw led to the resignation of the man who ran the whole prison system by the end of that year, and to reforms that changed how Texas held its prisoners for a generation. It did not save Retrieve from its own worst year. Less than two years later, a man was beheaded with a cane knife in the farm's dining hall, during supper.The farm operated for another five decades before it was renamed, and then closed for good in 2020.Built from the legislature's own 1947 investigation, held in the Texas State Archives, and the documented history of Retrieve Plantation and the Texas prison system. Legislative Committee on Investigation of State Penitentiaries and the Farm System, Committee Report on Investigation of Penitentiaries, 1947, Records of Governor Beauford Jester, Texas State Library and Archives Commission Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Fear, Force, and Leather: The Texas Prison System's First Hundred Years, 1848 to 1948, online exhibit, Reform and Reaction section Paul M. Lucko, Retrieve Plantation, Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association Paul M. Lucko, History of the Texas Penitentiary System, Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association Wikipedia, Retrieve Unit, citing Texas Department of Criminal Justice unit directory records and The Brazosport Facts Albert Race Sample, Racehoss: Big Emma's Boy, Eakin Press, 1984, as reported in the Houston Chronicle University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection, photograph captions dated September 1947, Texas prison farms Three sources carry most of this script: the committee's own 1947 report, the Texas State Library's Fear, Force, and Leather exhibit, and the Handbook of Texas entries on Retrieve and the prison system. The rest supply single, specific facts (the nickname, the unit's later history, the photographic record) rather than sustained narrative. SUBSCRIBE. One institution. One year. Reconstructed from the record.    / @behindthewallshistory