Listed in Arkansas Register of Historic Places on 12/06/23

Summary

Cummins State Farm, also known as Cummins Unit, is the state’s oldest operational state prison farm. Envisioned as a self-operating and self-sustaining institution, in 1902 the State Penitentiary Board bought more than 16,000 acres of land that had formerly been Cummins and Maple Grove Plantations. The prison farm had solely African American prisoners, male and female, until the 1930s, when white males were also sent to Cummins. Life on the prison farm was brutal, with ten to fifteen hour working days, physical abuse, and poor medical care and food supplies. Following the discovery of bodies near Cummins, which many thought belonged to murdered inmates, the public became aware of the abuses and conditions at Cummins. The entire prison system was declared unconstitutional in 1970 after eight class-action lawsuits were filed against Cummins and Tucker, and reforms finally began to be seriously implemented. The prison built new facilities, introduced educational programs, overhauled the mental and physical healthcare system, and created rehabilitation programs. Despite incidents such as the Arkansas prison blood scandal, the state’s prison system was declared constitutional again in 1982, and Arkansas became the first state to have their prison system returned to legality after being declared unconstitutional. Cummins Unit received full accreditation by the American Correctional Association in 1996. For its importance as the oldest prison farm and its importance to reforming the justice system in the state, Cummins State Farm is being nominated to the Arkansas Register of Historic Places under Criterion A: Politics/Government with state significance.

Narrative Description

The incarceration of criminals has always been a feature of Arkansas’s governmental system and is one of the oldest institutions in the state. Jails were often the second, if not first, structures to be built when a town incorporated, and small county jails proliferated across the state to deal with incarcerating minor offenders for drunkenness, loitering, and other crimes. One of the first jails was constructed at Arkansas Post in 1731 during its use as a French military outpost. In the 1830s, advocates for a centralized prison system began to call for a state prison which was completed in 1842 where the State Capitol now stands.^[1] The convict-lease system was codified by law in 1873, and the state profited from “leasing” inmates to private companies and individuals.^[2] Brick manufacturers, farms, mines, and railroads paid the state nominal amounts of money, as little as 35 cents a day per prisoner in the 1870s, to employ inmates confined at the state penitentiary. The inmates, of course, were not paid for their labor, and many suffered abuse, did not have enough to eat, and lacked adequate medical attention. Governor George Donaghey attempted to end the convict-lease system with little success. Instead, he pardoned 360 inmates, more than 33% of the prison population at the time, to draw attention to the injustice of the practice.^[3]

In March of 1893, the convict-lease program was revised and put the penitentiaries under the control of the Arkansas Penitentiary board, which was also given rights to “purchase or lease farms upon which certain classes of convicts could be employed.”^[4] In 1897, the owners of the Altheimer plantation offered to sell their land to the state for $87,000, but the offer quickly became a politically charged issue when Attorney General George Murphey and others accused Governor Jeff Davis of trying to pocket almost $12,500 of the purchase price.^[5] The controversy became a moot point in 1902, when The Penitentiary Board received a letter from W. H. Miller, the owner of the Cummins and Maple Grove Plantations. He offered to sell both plantations, nearly ten thousand acres in total, to the state for $140,000. About 2,500 acres were “highly improved, with a good dwelling house and all the cabins, wells, fences and the like in excellent condition.”^[6] The Penitentiary Board accepted the offer and established Cummins State Farm as the first working prison farm in Arkansas. Later that year, the Board bought an additional 6,000 acres, bringing the prison farm up to about 16,500 acres of land.^[7]

Prisoners arrived on the Cummins farm in December 1902, almost immediately after the land was purchased, and they lived in shacks and crude cabins near to the ferry stop on the Arkansas River that serviced the newly established prison farm.^[8] The Penitentiary Board and the Commissioner of Agriculture, John H. Page, had the inmates build a railroad line to the new prison shortly after its purchase by the state, thereby making the ferry stop obsolete.^[9] Within a few months, the prison population had swelled to 267 inmates, necessitating the construction of more facilities, including a wooden barracks for women called the “chicken coop”, a dining hall, seven cabins, and a kitchen. Supplies for the buildings were delivered by the railroad line.^[10]

The unit at Cummins held African American inmates, both female and male, and the prisoners were required to work in the fields picking cotton and growing crops such as cucumbers, wheat, corn, and other garden staples. The prison sold most of the produce, and the profits went towards maintaining Cummins State Farm and paying the few state employees charged with security.^[11] The leftover produce went to feed the inmates. The farm proved so successful that half of the bond the state had taken out to pay for the Cummins plantation in 1902 was repaid by 1904.^[12] In fact, the Department of Corrections did not spend a single dollar that wasn’t from the farm profits at Cummins until the 1960s.^[13] The inmates continue to work on the “Hoe Squad” in the fields or in the dairy or poultry barns to the present day and they are not paid for their labor.

The demographics of the inmate population changed in the 1930s. The Walls, another penitentiary that had housed the death row inmates and the execution chamber, closed in 1933, and adult inmates were transferred to both Cummins State Farm and Tucker State Farm, including the first white prisoners.^[14] The housing barracks, however, were still segregated by race. In 1951, white females were incarcerated at Cummins for the first time, and women continued to be placed at Cummins until the construction of the Pine Bluff Unit, when both white and Black women were moved there in 1976.^[15]

Only a few employees at Cummins in the early 1900s were paid employees. Until 1975, no more than eight guards were employed by the state. The few paid employees at Cummins instead relied on “trusties”, inmates who were given guns and allowed to police their fellow prisoners.^[16] Trusties essentially ran the prison, patrolling the perimeter and the barracks at night when most guards left to go home. They also had the ability to leave the prison during the day, and they frequently smuggled in alcohol, weapons, medical supplies, and other items to sell to the other inmates. The trusty system, while cheap for the state, exacted a heavy toll on non-trusty inmates. The trusties frequently abused their power, beating other prisoners with the strap, sometimes going so far as to cause their victims’ deaths, and requiring payment before inmates could seek medical attention, or procure food, mail, and protection at night from stabbings and sexual assault.^[17] Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens noted that “It was within the power of a trusty guard to murder another inmate with practical impunity…Some inmates were apparently whipped for minor offenses until their skin was bloody and bruised. The ‘Tucker telephone,' a hand-cranked device, was used to administer electrical shocks to various sensitive parts of an inmate's body."^[18] The trusty system remained in use until 1975.^[19]

Inmates tried many times to bring the conditions at Cummins into the public eye. In the 1920s and 30s, reformer Laura Cornelius Connor used inmate testimonies that they mailed to her to petition for the removal of Tucker Unit’s superintendent on grounds of abuse and torture. The Penitentiary Board refused to do anything and dismissed her allegations.^[20] Though she ultimately failed, Connor continued to advocate for prison reform the rest of her life. In 1941, the Penitentiary Board began an investigation of their own after the 1940 prison break at Cummins, which was the largest prison break in Arkansas history. Thirty-six inmates escaped from the prison farm on Labor Day, 1940.^[21] All were eventually recaptured or killed. Four managed to escape to Louisiana, and their execution by hanging was the last of its kind in that state.^[22] The prisoners claimed that terrible conditions at Cummins forced them to run, and the ensuing investigation did report squalid living conditions, inedible food, and physical abuse. Physical conditions improved somewhat after the 1941 investigation. The prison installed air-conditioners in 1949 and built two new barracks to combat overcrowding in 1952, but ultimately, nothing substantive was done to address the prisoners’ allegations.^[23]

In 1966, Winthrop Rockefeller was elected governor and he set prison reform squarely on his agenda. Orval Faubus, the previous governor, had ordered a series of investigations in the 1960s that led to a report delivered to him just prior to the end of his term. The report included the same testimonies of abuse that had characterized previous accounts and included a section on a riot that had recently occurred at Cummins. One-hundred forty-four inmates staged a strike to protest working conditions in the agricultural fields. They were tear-gassed by the state police who had been called to break up the strike.^[24] Rockefeller appointed criminologist Thomas Murton, a professor in Illinois and former prison expert in Alaska, to lead efforts to reform Cummins and Tucker.^[25] Murton kept open communication with many press outlets which reported on the infamous finding of three bodies buried at Cummins. Murton claimed the bodies belonged to murdered inmates and that the official inquest into their deaths, which found no evidence of violence, was a cover-up.^[26] (One body has since been identified as an inmate murdered by another inmate). The event, however, was widely reported in the press and horrified the public, ultimately leading to many necessary and long-overdue reforms. Murton remained in his position for only eleven months before he resigned, claiming that the prison system was so resistant to reform attempts that he couldn’t do his job.^[27]

The next year in 1969, inmates at Cummins brought a class-action lawsuit against the Arkansas prison system, contending that solitary confinement, the failure of guards to protect inmates from physical assault, and denial of medical access constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Judge J. Smith Henley ordered the prison commissioner, Robert Sarver, to resolve the specified conditions, but the commissioner’s report was not accepted by the court after the prescribed 30 days. Henley decided to keep the lawsuit open due to the unresolved nature of the inmates’ complaints. The following year in 1970, the three original cases were combined with five new lawsuits. Henley again presided over the case, Holt v. Sarver II. This time, the inmate petitioners contended that the cumulative abuses of the prison system at Cummins and Tucker violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Henley agreed, and in a landmark ruling declared the entire Arkansas prison system to be unconstitutional.^[28]

Terrell Don Hutto became commissioner of the Department of Corrections in 1971 and he began to modernize the prison system. His most lasting legacy was the dismantling of the trusty system and expanding the prison’s number of professional, trained guards. Hutto also established a school system for Arkansas prisons, and the first GEDs were awarded to 67 inmates at Cummins State Farm.^[29] An industry building, a rodeo arena, a grain elevator, and a farm office were constructed during Hutto’s tenure, and Cummins created a graphics art training program.^[30] Perhaps the greatest indicator of changing conditions was shown by the Cummins Prison Stike of 1974. Prisoners at Cummins heard of the decision passed down by the U.S. 8^th Circuit Court of Appeals the week prior that found Arkansas’s prisons had not made enough progress in reforms to be declared constitutional. To protest the conditions, over two hundred inmates sat down and refused to work on the Hoe Squad. The guards managed to get the prisoners to work without violence twenty minutes later. For a prison as notorious for violence as Cummins had been, the incident proved that conditions, though slowly, were changing for the better.^[31]

The prison continued to see an expansion of its physical footprint throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. A two-story barracks for minimum-security inmates was constructed in 1975, the Cummins Chapel was financed through fundraisers and completed in 1977, and four new barracks were built in 1980. The prison also saw the construction of an execution chamber in 1978. Death row inmates were still housed at Varner Unit’s Supermax facility, but they were transferred to Cummins for execution.^[32] With changes to the healthcare system, better food, cleaner facilities, and access to educational opportunities, the prison system was ruled constitutional on August 9, 1982, and Arkansas became the first state to have its prison system thus recognized.^[33]

From the 1990s onwards, Cummins had two more noteworthy incidents. The first was the so-called “prison blood scandal.” Prisoners at Cummins and other state correctional facilities could sell their blood plasma $7 per donation through a program started in 1963 by Dr. Austin R. Stough, who was forced to retire in 1967 after the discovery that he was conducting medical experiments on inmates. On average, 300 to 500 units of blood plasma was collected each weekend and shipped to countries like Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom, where the plasma sold for more than $100 per unit.^[34] Knowledge of the blood’s contamination with HIV and hepatitis C sparked an investigation in 1986 under Governor Bill Clinton, which found no evidence of malpractice or cause for concern, despite outside investigators citing multiple examples of unsafe practice and little to no screening for disease on donated blood.^[35] The contaminated blood attracted international attention in the mid-1990s, especially in Canada, which estimated that at least 30,000 people had been given contaminated blood.^[36]

In addition to the prison blood scandal, Cummins recently drew national attention for its mismanagement of COVID-19 cases inside the prison during the 2020 pandemic. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and Disability Rights Arkansas sued the Department of Corrections in April 2020, requesting stricter cleaning measures, masks for prison employees, and medical release for medically vulnerable inmates. Families of inmates also protested outside the Governor’s Mansion, calling for the release of their families and friends as COVID cases climbed at Cummins. Ultimately, Cummins was the subject of several national reports and had the densest number of COVID-19 cases out of any prison in the nation.^[37]

Cummins continues to be the largest of the state’s prison farms and is constantly expanding its facilities and programs, including Paws in Prison where rescue dogs are trained by inmates and increased access to college, high school, and vocational training classes. Inmates continue to work in the fields and in the industry building, making furniture, athletic pads, and graphic art. A ten-classroom school building was recently completed ca. 2019 as well as a barracks designed to hold 300 inmates in 2011.^[38]

Cummins State Farm began in 1902 as a self-sustaining, profit-generating prison owned by the state. The prison farm had a reputation for violence until the 1970s, when the entire prison system was declared unconstitutional as a result of class-action lawsuits filed by Cummins inmates. Reforms continued through the 1970s and 1980s, and the prison system was finally declared constitutional once more in 1982. Cummins received accreditation by the American Correctional Association in 1993. For its importance as the oldest prison farm and its importance to reforming the justice system in the state, Cummins State Farm is being nominated to the Arkansas Register of Historic Places under Criterion A: Politics/Government with state significance.

Bibliography

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