Chuck

If you ran into, say, in Georgia and you were building a state road, if you ran into a chunk of stone mountain that was popping up out of the ground where you wanted your road to go, well, you would just set a bunch of convicts to work on it with sledgehammers.

And eventually they're going to wear it down to nothing if you give them long enough and work them hard enough.

That's what people did on chain gangs.

That's just what life was like.

And again, you were working outside, so you weren't protected in any way, shape, or form.

You were fed meagerly.

You were working as hard as anyone's ever worked in their life with the minimum amount of nutrition, the minimum amount of rest.

And if you put all that together, especially if you think about it accumulating, that's a brutal, brutal form of prison labor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, one of the other things, too, is there was a certain amount of usefulness to letting these chain gangs get these horrible reputations because the reach of these things reached out beyond the inside of prisons into the outside world.

Because if you were black and you were looking for a job and you could be arrested for not having a job,

And put onto a chain gang and you knew it, you would accept all sorts of terrible working conditions and low pay because at least that was better than being put on a chain gang, which if you didn't accept this job and got caught without a job, you would end up on a chain gang anyway.

That was another really kind of insidious effect that they had.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For some reason, I don't know where Yumi found out about it, but she was one of her...

well-liked movies.

I don't want to say it's one of her favorite, but she showed it to me.

What year was that?