Ye olde prison farm daze of Brazoria

A blogger from Austin, ("Grits for Breakfast,") awakened us from our reverie to inform that local historian Marie Beth Jones has been writing up some local prison lore for a web site called The Back Gate.

We remember Ms. Jones from our days sitting in the Brazoria County Commissioners Court meetings. They were dreadfully dull affairs. There hardly ever was any real debate or discourse, presumably cause everything was settled outside the purview of a meeting open to the public, but at every meeting, sitting at the front, was Marie Beth, taking notes.

Luckily for her (and us) the happenings in the old days of Brazoria County are much more interesting that those mind-numbing commissioners court meetings of the modern era.

In her first piece for The Back Gate, Marie Beth wrotes about the old Retrieve prison farm, where a prison official made a bet with a guard that he couldn't stop a prisoner from smuggling a pig into the prisoner's dormity (this was an attempt to make a point that too many prisoners were smuggling too much contraband past the guards.)

In her second piece, she writes about the time in the '30s when newspapers around the state waged a campaign to clean up conditions in the state penal system.

Back then, prisoners mutilated themselves to escape work in the fields, and if a prisoner refused to work, he faced the lash, but at least in one case, a taste of the lash set one prisoner off on the road to rectitude ... so the moral, we guess, is spare the rod, spoil the convicted felon.