Men for Mules

Some of the best mules of the Arkansas State prison farm near Tucker are dead and there is no money to buy more. Last week Superintendent Arthur Grenade Stedman was faced with a problem: how to get the prison farm's cotton patch seeded? For each dead mule, he harnessed six strapping convicts to a cotton planter. When five other machines had likewise been hitched with prison labor, he sent them forth to inseminate the good earth of Arkansas.

Although men and women serve as draft animals in China and Africa, the use of men for mules in Arkansas made news. Superintendent Stedman hastened to defend his farm from charges of cruelty:

"These men are husky and have raised no objection to doing the work. A cotton planter weighs less than 100 lb., the ground has been thoroughly pulverized and bedded twice, and it requires no great effort to pull it. The men are being worked for only a reasonable length of time each day, and certainly have shown no ill effects from the work."

The Chairman of Arkansas' Penal Board went to the farm, talked to the men-mules, tried pulling one of the cotton planters. He decided that Superintendent Stedman was right, it was no harder than usual farm work. But Arkansas' Governor Futrell felt differently. If draft work was not a cruel and unusual punishment, it was, he decided, at least too conspicuous. He ordered it stopped.

Arkansas was not the only State to consider the labor of convicts last week. President Roosevelt approved an NRA code for prisons--signed by 28 States. Its notable provisions:

1) Prisoners shall not be worked more than 40 hours a week.

2) Prison-made products shall not be sold below the prices of non-prison-made goods in the same region.

3) Prison-labor shall not be let out by States on contract at lower "wages" per unit of output than the wages of free labor.

4) A board of nine, three appointed by the President and six elected annually by the States, will have power to regulate prices, determine costs and forbid the expansion of prison industries that might upset competing businesses.

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