Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government

10. Lighting the “Dark and Evil World”: Judge J. Smith Henley, Arkansas, and the Federal Judiciary’s Reform of the Southern Prison

10 Lighting the“Dark and Evil World” Judge J. Smith Henley, Arkansas, and the Federal Judiciary’s Reform of the Southern Prison Gregory L. Richard Southern prisons after Reconstruction quickly became one of the most dangerous and mysterious places in the nation. Very few southerners could comprehend what took place within the prison walls, and even fewer cared. Penitentiaries served their purpose, for prisoners needed to be segregated from law-abiding society and punished for their crimes. It represented the perfect “see no evil, hear no evil” scenario. But changes within American society, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, began removing the blinders of not only southerners but those outside Dixie as well. The civil rights movement began to cast light on the particularly brutal conditions of southern prisons. And while prisons throughout the nation were barbaric, it was the peculiar nature of southern prisons that made them particularly heinous in the eyes of many. Southern prison systems after the Civil War reeked too much of slavery for most to handle. Fortunately, the work of a few courageous federal court judges helped bring some of the cruelty of southern prisons to a halt. Judge J. Smith Henley was one such jurist. His years of involvement with the reform of Arkansas ’s prison system left a lasting mark on prisons not only in the South but throughout the nation, producing the spark that would ignite the judicial review of many state prison systems in the decades that followed. The Birth and Evolution of the Penitentiary Understanding the roots of the penitentiary, its growth and evolution in colonial America, and its divergent history in the growingly schismatic 288 · Gregory L. Richard United States approaching the Civil War creates the proper context within which to study the reform of southern state prison systems. At the very core of the prison rested the relationship between those in power and the powerless. Power, though, is different from physical force, violence, or that which causes pain to the body. It is created by the position of relationships, especially that which could make an otherwise free subject do something he or she did not want to do—in other words, altering the will of others. Early in the classical period the state chose physical punishment to display power to the populace, arranging public executions as state celebrations and events. Theaters of execution became a visceral means to demonstrate the reins of power. The body became something regulated, arranged, and supervised. Eventually, the focus shifted from pure physical punishment to reformation and rehabilitation, as did concepts of individuality , the delinquent, and reforming the soul. Transforming the prisoner to delinquent followed; someone who should be set apart from society. The working of the carceral system with the growth of the human sciences spawned the creation of the delinquent. Evolutions of discipline and power maintained that similar structures could control not only those within the prison walls but those outside as well. Thus the modern penal system evolved to turn the structure of criminal justice on its head. The once physically punished body, a show for all, now became the delinquent, hidden yet capable of reform. Adam Jay Hirsch studied early Massachusetts to reveal that America, by the 1820s, had become disillusioned with Cesare Beccaria’s deterrent approach to handling criminals through the drafting of criminal statutes.1 Thus, Jacksonians, in what Hirsch questionably calls a “novel—and distinctly American” idea, set out to rehabilitate criminals and return them to the community as reformed citizens. Other European nations followed similar trajectories to identify “the root cause of crime . . . in the social environment, rather than in misconceived criminal codes.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, along with England and France, began to realize that rehabilitation and healing of the soul represented sounder criminal punishment rather than physical punishment to the body.2 Rationalism took root in the eighteenth century, during which theorists began rejecting scripture in favor of logic and reason. The harm crime caused to others in society was its worst effect, thus the prevention of future harm represented the most rational purpose of punishment. Rationalists Arkansas and the Federal Judiciary’s Reform of the Southern Prison · 289 such as John Locke claimed that environmental stimuli, not innate characteristics or moral principles, guided human behavior—an idea Cesare Beccaria built upon by postulating that the certainty of punishment contributed far more to...