Henderson Daily Dispatch

EXPECTING BETTER
WORK BY CONVICTS

Highway Department Assumes
Responsibility for
Prisoners at Work

Daily Dispatch Bureau,
In the Sir Walter
Hotel,
By J. C. Baskerville,

Raleigh, Dec. 7.—More and better work from the nearly 8,000 prisoners in the State Prison system is expected to result from the action taken by the State Highway and Public Works Commission here this week, putting all prison labor under the general supervision of the division and district engineers, and making the engineering branch responsible for the prisoners while they are at work on the roads. This action also ends the divided responsibility that has existed heretofore between the prison and engineering divisions.

From now on the prison division will be responsible for the prisoners only while they are in camp and for feeding, clothing and guarding them, while the engineering division will be responsible for them while they are at work on the roads. The various prison camp superintendents will no longer have anything to say about where the prisoners will work or how many shall be used on any particular job. Instead, the engineering division will plan all the work and merely notify the camp superintendents as to how many men they want and where each day, and the camp superintendents will send them. From the time the prisoners leave the camp until they return, the maintenance and engineering divisions will be responsible for them, including all escapes.

Heretofore there has been a feeling on the part of some foremen and engineers in the maintenance division that they had no responsibility in connection with the prisoners and that it was none of their business whether prisoners escaped or not while at work—that was up to the prison division. Some also did not seem to care whether they got much work out of the prisoners or not. But under this new plan, the maintenance division will be held responsible both for keeping and guarding the prisoners and for getting as much work as possible from them.

It is no secret here, of course, that a good many of the engineers in the engineering division of the highway department bitterly opposed using any prison labor in maintaining the highways of the State and that in spite of the action taken by the 1931 and 1933 general assemblies requiring the highway department to use prisoners in maintenance work that some have never given very noticeable cooperation. But under this new plan, the division engineers and all maintenance engineers are either going to have to cooperate and utilize the prisoners to the fullest extent—or new engineers will take their places. Division engineers are also going to have immediate supervision of the prison camps in their divisions and be responsible for the cost of operating all these camps. They will even have to approve all purchase orders and the total cost of prison operations in these districts will be charged to the maintenance divisions.

"It will now be up to the division and maintenance engineers to get the maximum amount of work out of the prisoners in their divisions, and to plan the work for them," an official of the highway department said today in discussing the change. "It will be their job to plan the work, and to see that the prisoners do it efficiently. It will also be up to them to see that the prisoners do not escape by cooperating with the prison division and the guards. In other words, the working and the keeping of the prisoners is now just as much the job of the engineering division as of the prison division."