"T. Don Hutto: The Godfather of Privatized Prisons (CCA, aka CoreCivic" | US Archipelago Ep. 3
The man who built the corporate prison system from a slave plantation...
This past year, on October 22, 2021, America lost the don of privatized prisons, Terrell Don Hutto—known by the abbreviated version of his name, T. Don Hutto—and this man, despite his unremarkable appearance and relatively obscure stature in American history, was the operational executive of a burgeoning correctional industry in the United States that put a corporate face on a classically American business model. ‘The privatized prison,’ as we know it today, is really a throwback to two different penitentiaries and their philosophical successors in the modern era. And as a testament to these institutions’ staying power and overall utility, both these prisons are still in operation today:
Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, the old plantation model reliant upon slavery in its original incarnation.
San Quentin State Prison in California, using a “rent-a-prisoner” model that’s used today by privatized schemes like UNICOR (a federal program that employs prisoners to build anything from furniture for federal buildings, to components of missiles for companies like Raytheon) or CoreCivic, the brainchild of Hutto…
But to be perfectly honest, the former of the two options—the slavery plantation model employed by Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, or Mississippi’s Parchman State Farm—are some of the oldest prisons still in operation, but also the most troubling for the history they harken back to in the American South.
It’s probably the more attractive model, as it pertains to government malfeasance. Scrupulous wardens would easily take a side income by fixing cheap labor for local businesses. If prisons can compete with free-world contractors, the opportunity for these institutions to not only pad their roll-count by picking up random working-age males for petty crimes—thus depriving businesses of their potential labor force—but businessmen could also ask prison wardens for some very unethical favors.
There have been examples in history of judges rounding up trade unions, for example, in the case of general strikes; vagrants and drifters being picked up and held without trial for months, even years; and in one case, off the top of my head, it was found that one judge had a direct financial incentive within a particular private-modeled prison in his district…
These are the most abhorrent examples, and I’m not going into great detail because they’re unrelated to the man himself. T. Don Hutto was an executive above several lower executives (i.e. a position akin to the Attorney General of the United States as it relates to a single US Attorney’s office), so blaming him for the specific cases of excess, in my judgment, would be completely wrong and disparaging to his memory.
CAPTION: Tom Beasley (L) and T. Don Hutto (R). The men were two of three founders of the company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
Hutto’s “At-Profit” System
In a time not unlike our own, when corruption and government excess had swollen the government—crime was spiking, the failed Drug War was beginning, and the economy was suffering as well—many larger cities were in a state of dilapidation and despair that are only just now rivaled by cities like L.A., Chicago, and the “Big Apple” of New York City.
This was when the American prison system would begin its parabolic rise to the sky, the same years when Hutto was beginning his career on Ramsey State Farm.
In the late 1960s, Texas itself was having difficulty in running its Department of Criminal Justice, which was ballooning in cost overruns and government scandals; and in these times of strife—particularly because many eligible male workers were being drafted for the Vietnam War—there were unheard of opportunities for upward mobility for young men like Hutto.
T. Don Hutto was turning heads in DCJ by making a small prison farm profitable in East Texas’ cotton oases. He wanted to run the prison for the government “at-profit,” not just mitigating or lessening costs, but rather finding contracts to farm the prisoners out for businesses in the community just outside Houston. The prisoners in Hutto’s jails would be industriously employed in providing goods for use in the prison itself, but he’d keep options open to have prisoners move outside the fence if the situation could arise.
But let’s be perfectly clear about the at-profit system: there are two groups of accounting flows one can address to make any enterprise more profitable—one is the income that a prison can receive from manufacturing and the like, and the other are the expenses that the prison can make themselves in-house, or they can be skimped and trimmed from the budget.
It stands to reason that the conditions for prisoners can suffer, but I think this is the only proper course of action for a state-level prison system—to lessen costs, as long as the programming and possible schooling doesn’t suffer—and I say that as an ex-con, knowing full well that I’d have to suffer through the horrible conditions, if I were thrown back in jail.
The Early Career
Hutto entered the prison system as a teacher, and probably due to the war in Vietnam or the miserable nature of the job, he was given a position as an assistant prison warden before working his way up to warden at the Ramsey Prison Farm in southeastern Texas.
He passed the prison system accreditation exams and began working for the Texas’ Department of Criminal Justice. Having earned degrees in history and sociology at East Texas State University in 1958 while still in the military, Hutto might’ve been some kind of professor after the military if it wasn’t for Texas’ climbing crime rates.
But by the time that Texas administrators entrusted the young man with a prison camp to run, Hutto was an academic pursuing a chance to teach at Southern Methodist University and then Sam Houston State University, where he attended before bailing on his master's degree completely.
The Plantation Model
Given our horrifying racial history, it’d probably be just as disturbing to peer into T. Don Hutto’s early career in Texas as it would to watch the day-to-day activity on a slave plantation before the Emancipation Proclamation (i.e. just from an aesthetic perspective, black men picking cotton with white men on horseback with shotguns at the ready). White people were sharecroppers and convicts, too; but to the modern eye, with the public’s recollection of slavery times not at all fond, it just doesn’t look good to see this abject sight.
The W. F. Ramsey Unit, as it was known then, consisted of five former slave plantations that used a convict leasing system while also maintaining working farms that produced a number of different staples for consumption inside the prison itself.
Starting in 1967, Hutto made his home with his family in a plantation house on the prison farm where his wards took care of him in the fashion of an old-timey Southern gentleman.
The Reformer Goes to Arkansas
In 1971, Hutto was called upon by a new administration for Governor Dale Bumpers in the state of Arkansas; and at the time, the Arkansas Department of Corrections was basically in shambles due to a number of investigative reports highlighting the shoddy conditions, overcrowding, and frankly hellish and violent circumstances imposed on their wards.
When Hutto was just starting his job on Ramsey State Farm, Winthrop Rockefeller was elected as Arkansas State Governor; and pretty much on the eve of taking power, he received a shocking 67-page report by the Arkansas State Police that "… uncovered systematic corruption and brutality at Tucker Farm, where inmates and prison officials alike engaged in torture, beatings and bribery," according to a Wikipedia citation. The report listed the findings of a 1966 State Police investigation ordered by then-Governor Orval Faubus, just before Rockefeller was elected.
Back in the late ‘60s, there were only two prisons in former President Bill Clinton’s home-state—kind of a remarkable fact, because most states only had a couple prisons before the inception of the Drug War—and those two male prisons in Arkansas were 1) the smaller Tucker State Prison Farm for younger white prisoners, and 2) the 1,300-inmate Cummins prison, located along the Arkansas River, 75 miles southeast of Little Rock, for both white and black adult convicts.
There was an article that came out in Time magazine in 1968 called “Hell in Arkansas;” and funny enough, the harshest judgment that the journalist had uncovered was the fact that these prisons had been using forced labor to make millions of dollars over several years… which was the skill-set, or finest achievement of Hutto in his position back in Texas.
This seems to suggest that running a profitable prison wasn’t a problem at all—I can agree with my own suggestion here, that for the public stakeholders that pay for a state or federal prison system, “profitability ain’t bad”—but the corruption or extortion, the torture… the horrors of prison that are still prevalent today, but to a much lesser degree, those do nothing good for the public at all. You’re creating psychopaths with chips on their shoulders, which isn’t a good thing.
Against this backdrop, Hutto was hired by Governor Dale Bumpers in 1971 as the head of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, with a mandate of humanizing the convict farms. This whole episode was memorialized by the movie, Brubaker, in which Robert Redford plays a younger reform-minded warden that first goes undercover to see the conditions of the prison firsthand.
The Creation of CCA… later on, CoreCivic
After serving in position in Arkansas ‘til 1976, the future executive of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) served as the top-dog for Virginia’s Department of Corrections from ’77 to 1980 before retiring from public service to privateer under Ronald Reagan’s administration. By January 28, 1983, Hutto joined forces with two men named Robert Crants and Tom Beasley to form the creatively christened CCA with investments from Jack C. Massey (the founder of Hospital Corporation of America), Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
At the time CCA was founded, Tom Beasley had served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party—the GOP, for better and/or worse, has been the “law-and-order” party for most its history—while Robert Crants was the chief financial officer (CFO) of a real estate company in Nashville. Hutto had been involved in prisons for thirteen years by this time—not exactly a lifetime of service, compared to others in his field—but he brought the top-down, systemwide operational acumen that would be required for a world-class operation.
To round out the management team, a man named Maurice Sigler joined as a former chairman of the United States Board of Parole; and this fourth founding member would be instrumental in bringing contacts in the federal government.
Their first contracts were lodged with the now defunct Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) and other federal agencies (i.e. the US Marshals are the organization that housed me in a privatized prison); which I happen to think is one of the strokes of genius that blessed this company.
None of these federal agencies are designed to administer prisoners—they subcontract this work outside of a privatized outfit, which I imagine has been their best practice long before I ever did time—so to swoop in with a proven management team, they offered a solution to a problem most people weren’t even aware of.
The Org Chart
To this day, the fact that these men founded the company in Tennessee remains abundantly obvious in how the administration is designed. During extradition from Colorado to Illinois in 2014, I was transported to a county jail in the state of Kentucky—Daviess County specifically, just across the border from a state prison where I’d eventually do time that resembled Hutto’s “plantation model”—and interestingly enough, many of the corrections staff running our shipment were based out of Tennessee, even though they worked for a subsidiary in the CCA network of dummy corporations and holding companies that protect the bigger entity.
The specific corporation I’m talking about is called Prisoner Transport Services (PTS), and PTS is one of several subcontractors that work with the U.S. Marshals to house pretrial inmates; to handle transfers from state to state; and sometimes they handle court hearings inside federal district courts.
PTS was basically sued into oblivion at one point, and they bankrupted the entity only to revive the enterprise immediately under a different, more laconic label. You see, PTS had a scandal some years back where there was a fire on one of their buses; and from what I’ve heard, all the inmates were locked inside while the van was engulfed in flames.
Legacy of T. Don Hutto
Given that Hutto just passed away last year, he brought his business model into the 21st Century with a new identity—no longer called Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), instead called CoreCivic in a signal to its next move which I have mixed feelings about—the prison conglomerate is opening all kinds of treatment centers and halfway houses across the country, and really I don’t blame them at all: they’re way easier to open, the public isn’t opposed to them half as much, and there’s less overhead…
But at the end of the day, CoreCivic is a soulless company with Wall Street investors running the show. We’ve seen riots breaking out in their facilities because of cold indifference; and you can really ruin somebody's life with bad help.
Privatized prisons are not what’s referred to as a “growth industry,” so it’s pretty sad to see this soulless entity get into the “reentry” business with the next phase of their development.
No matter what, CoreCivic was and always will be reliant on public expenditure for its profit margins over time; and they’re not really invested in the community, ready to abandon any and all of their facilities if the waters get rough enough. Like a fast-food conglomerate, the private prison corporation is “invested in the land,” rather than the actual prisons.
But the answer to our corrections problem is the halfway house system, and I hope CoreCivic doesn’t ruin the promise of this rehabilitative community-based system where they’re dabbling as of late. Wherever you fall on this issue, it’s clear Hutto was a visionary in the corrections industry… for better or worse.
I’m going to do more research articles on the subject of privatized prisons, so stay tuned for more—both in podcast and written form, as well as videos on my YouTube channel—so check on Twitter for more prison news and video-essays.