Alabama's first chain gang in decades does not yet know the drill. On a lonely stretch of highway near the Alabama-Tennessee border, guards and bloodhounds look on as 320 convicts from the Limestone Correctional Facility try to negotiate the tricky business of walking in unison while shackled. Clad in immaculate white uniforms (emblazoned with the words chain gang lest anyone mistake them for pastry chefs), the men are equipped with a variety of tools and not quite sure whether they should be trimming, digging or picking up litter. One makes a desultory attempt to start up a work song, but no one else joins in. Perhaps they're too busy looking forward to their lunch of bread smeared with jam. Perhaps not.
Chain gangs are meant to be unpleasant, and this one is succeeding. "We don't like it," complains James Sears, convicted of harassment. "We think it's stupid." Civilians, on the other hand, seem fascinated by the sight of men in chains. Cars stop along the side of the road, and mothers with babies get out to watch. A Limestone County school bus passes by, and the children press their faces to the window.
Once a common sight along Southern highways, chain gangs fell victim to a reform movement that reached its zenith with the 1932 film exposa I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. By the late 1940s, the gangs were well on their way to joining stocks and public floggings in penological limbo. Thus there was little in the way of models when Alabama Governor Fob James decided last year to revive the practice. "We started from scratch," says Limestone warden Ralph Hooks, pointing proudly to a new, specially designed toilet that allows the men to relieve themselves in privacy while still linked to their colleagues.
In a single stroke, the gangs have fulfilled two of Governor James' dearest campaign promises: saving money (inmates, when chained, require fewer guards) and getting tough with criminals. Fortunately, today's crews do not have to wear the heavy ankle irons that used to cause "shackle poison" (the new, handcuff-like shackles are made of lighter metals). Nor, in theory, will the men have to endure the overwork, beatings and disease that led to death rates as high as 45% among "classic" chain gangs. Still, working on a '90s-style gang is no picnic: inmates will be toiling through 12-hour workdays in the hot Alabama sun, serving sentences as long as 90 days. "If they try to escape," vows state corrections commissioner Ron Jones, "our officers are going to shoot them." No failure to communicate here.
Not everyone is pleased. The Alabama Civil Liberties Union is weighing a legal challenge, while some Alabama businessmen fear the gangs will hurt the state's image and sour its business climate. Out on the roadside, chain gang member Sears sees things in more elemental terms. "They wouldn't allow you to chain five dogs together like this," he says. "We're moving backwards, not forwards."