The new prison was safer, more sanitary, and built in the shape of a cross, offering inmates a narrow path to redemption. Constructed in the shape of a Greek cross, it stood four stories high, boasted battlements atop and by 1934 was surrounded by an 18-foot stone wall. Plans were drawn for a new structure to be made of reinforced concrete and they made convicts break sandstone out of the nearby quarry to build the new prison. Overcrowding was so prevalent and persistent it drew comparisons to conditions inside the infamous Siberian prisons of the Soviet Union. In 1931, Brushy housed 976 men, roughly 300 more than its capacity.
In 1931, Brushy held nearly a thousand inmates, far more than it was ever meant to. Their nights weren’t any better, with men stacked into the original wooden buildings that were falling apart and just waiting to catch fire. While America was roaring through the ‘20s, convicts at Brushy spent their days in the dark of the mines, urged to dig faster with lashes from thick leather straps. There was never a death row at Brushy, but there was plenty of death, I promise you. Soon, blacks made up the majority of prisoners in the South. When federal troops left the South in 1877 after Reconstruction, state officials who were hostile to former slaves handed down long prison terms and life sentences even for petty crimes. Beyond that, officials could exploit the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery but allowed “involuntary servitude” for criminal punishment. The prison lease system was adopted throughout the South mainly because state governments couldn’t afford to build and maintain prisons or feed, shelter and clothe inmates and a convict lease program cut costs and brought in money. The Coal Creek miners were clever, holding strikes in winter when coal demand was high this tactic worked until a new convict lease program gave companies a cheaper, more compliant workforce. By the time their debt and rent were paid, they had little to show for a meager wage job with dangerous working conditions. When those companies opened onsite stores selling food, clothes and other necessities at inflated prices, already poor workers piled up debt. Because many of the state’s coal veins were located in remote areas, most mining companies providing housing by collecting rent from miners’ wages. The end of the Civil War led to a boom in railroad construction and the rapid expansion of the coal mining industry throughout Tennessee. For decades it was a coal mine for the state of Tennessee that originated in the wake of a bloody labor battle. Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary wasn’t just a jail.
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