Tuesday, May 19:
On “The Hill” at the Cheshire County Correctional Facility.
The Hill, as they call it, is working on the dairy farm, reportedly owned by the jail. I was wrong in my original assumption. According to the other prisoners, no milk from the farm is used at the jail, and it’s sold at cost. Here’s where i gets interesting. The farm is run by Dave Potnam, a local selectman for Westmoreland. It appears at least on its surface to be another example of government granting monopoly privilege to the bureaucrats’ friends and family – or themselves in this case.
I’m left wondering what his management fee is for a farm that requires no personal investment of his own for equipment, seed stock, facilities, repairs, etc. He gets the benefit of a paycheck – I wonder how much – without any of the risks other farmers take, while getting a never ending supply of free slave labor from the jail.
I sat down recently with Chris Wilber to recount his month long incarceration at the Cheshire County Caging Facility where he worked exclusively on The Hill. The Prisoners assigned to work on the farm have hours that most would be hard pressed to find in the free market: 2:30 a.m. – 6:00 a.m. then 9 a.,. – 12 p.m. then 2:30 p.m. – 6 p.m. With that daily schedule, you may be wondering when these guys are supposed to sleep. Remember they’re housed ina gymnasium where the lights are on from 7 a.m. – 11 p.m., people working other shifts are coming in and out at all hours, the TV is on; people are working out, playing cards, and talking, all in a gymnasium with no sound absorbing material.
As Wilber recounted his daily chores, I couldn’t help but notice his badly stained yellow hand. Wilber’s job on the dairy farm is the bag washer. After the milking device is removed, he washes the teat with a wet iodine cloth and dries them off with a separate cloth. His hands are yellowed with iodine because the gloves are too short to keep his hands dry.
Wilber recounted his second day on the job at 2:30 a.m. His pants, issued by the jail, were falling down because they fit poorly and didn’t have additional button holes cut to tighten them up. Given that the only notice given to the prisoners is a call over the loudspeaker 30 minutes before starting a new work schedule, Wilber was dragging a bit adjusting to the night shift. Potnam saw this and called Wilber a “wannabe ghetto ass motherfucker that’s never gonna get a real job.”
Other laborers from The Hill describe Potnam as seemingly miserable and wanting everyone around him to be miserable too. Potnam asked another laborer washing a cow, “Does that feel like your mothers tit?” Chattel slaves in colonial America were treated with equal disdain and disrespect. They were viewed as property to be used up and easily replaced if they became lazy or insubordinate in the eyes of their masters.
On Wilber’s right arm was a visible bruise. When asked about the cause, Wilber recounted being dragged by a cow that eventually kicked him in the arm. He didn’t want to let go of the animal’s collar for fear of punishment. Anyone who displeases Potnam or any of the other task masters are lugged. That means they’re taken out in handcuffs where they may be sent to solitary confinement, have visits eliminated, goodtime – the up to 1/3 of a prisoner’s sentence credited for good behavior – taken away, or commissary privileges removed. Wilber says he’s been kicked in the shoulder once and in the head on two other occasions.
The public lashings and brutality of chattel slavery is long gone, but the underlying mechanisms are still in place at the Cheshire County jail. The best part, it’s being done in your name You are after all paying for this “rehabilitation” with your tax dollars.
In Peace,
SamIAm
