T. Don Hutto

Hutto worked from 1967 to 1971 as a teacher, assistant prison warden and warden at the Ramsey prison farm for African American prisoners in southeastern Texas.[8] The W. F. Ramsey Unit, as it was known then, consisted of five former plantations that used a convict leasing system on working plantations.[9] In 1967 Hutto and his family lived in a plantation home on the prison farm.[6][7][10]

While working at Ramsey Unit, Hutto met Bruce Jackson,[11]^:14 an ethnographer turned photographer, who was collecting photos as reference material for his research on the songs of African Americans inmates in prisons in Texas. The two became friends, which gave Jackson access to prisons in both Texas and Arkansas.

Soon after Winthrop Rockefeller was elected as Arkansas State Governor on January 10, 1967, he received a shocking 67-page report by the Arkansas State Police, that "uncovered systematic corruption and brutality at Tucker farm, where inmates and prison officials alike engaged in torture, beatings and bribery."[12][13] The report listed the findings of a 1966 State Police investigation ordered by then-Governor Orval Faubus, just before Rockefeller was elected.[12] By 1967, the two male prisons in Arkansas were the smaller Tucker State Prison Farm for younger white prisoners, and the 1,300-inmate[11] Cummins prison, located along the Arkansas River, 75 miles southeast of Little Rock, in Lincoln County[14] for "white and black adult inmates".[12] According to a 1968 Time article entitled "Hell in Arkansas", in the 1960s, the two state penal farms "averaged" profits of "about $1,400,000 over the years..." using prisoners as forced labor.[11][13][15]

As part of reform of the Arkansas prison system, Governor Rockefeller created a new Department of Corrections and hired the first professional penologist, Tom Murton, as prison superintendent in 1967. On January 29, 1968, Murton invited the media to witness the unearthing of three decayed skeletal remains in a remote part of the 16,000-acre grounds of the Cummins prison farm. They believed the skeletons were those of prisoners murdered at Cummins,[12] although this was never proven.[16][17]

According to a March 22, 2018 article in the Arkansas Times, during his short tenure of less than one year, Murton's aggressive approach to uncovering Arkansas' prison scandal with its decades-long systemic corruption, embarrassed Rockefeller and "infuriated conservative politicians".[12] Murton had attracted nationwide media attention and contempt for Arkansas,[14] as news of Bodiesburg, as it was called, spread.[12] Murton's co-authored 1969 book, Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal was the basis for the fictionalized 1980 film Brubaker starring Robert Redford.[18]

As well, in 1969 prisoners, Robert Finney, et al., started a litigation process naming Terrell Don Hutto, et al. The series of cases lasted almost a decade and resulting in the Supreme Court landmark case Hutto v. Finney 437 U.S. 678 (437 U.S. 678 (1978)). It was the first successful lawsuit filed by an inmate against a correctional institution. The case also clarified prison system's unacceptable punitive measures.[19]

Against this backdrop, Hutto was hired by Governor Dale Bumpers in 1971 as the head of the Arkansas Department of Correction,[1] with a mandate of "humanizing" the "convict farms".[11][15] In 1971, Jackson visited Hutto at Cummins prison.[11] Jackson had gone there to investigate how Hutto was changing Arkansas prisons. However, as he took photos he "found more and more that my interest was in documenting it visually."[15][20] In 2010, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University featured Jackson's Cummins Unit photo collection.[15][21]

After Bumpers was elected to the United States Senate and David Pryor was elected governor in 1974, Hutto resigned and moved to Virginia in 1976 to become deputy director of the Virginia Department of Corrections.[22]