On the morning of January 29, 1968, a 59-year-old lifer named Reuben Johnson stood in a treeless pasture at Cummins Farm in Lincoln County, Arkansas, and pointed at the ground. He told the men with shovels exactly where to dig. Watching him was Tom Merton, the newly appointed superintendent and the first professionally trained penologist the state of Arkansas had ever employed. Merton had done something no prison official in state history had done before: he invited the national press to watch.
The first skeleton was found within hours, then a second, then a third. The field around them held between 15 and 25 visible depressions in the earth, each the size and shape of a grave. Johnson told Merton there were as many as 200 bodies buried on the property. The story—dubbed “Bodiesburg” by the newspapers—went around the world within days.
It embarrassed a sitting governor, ended Merton’s career permanently, inspired a Hollywood film starring Robert Redford, and helped produce a federal court ruling that declared an entire state’s prison system unconstitutional for the first time in American history. Cummins Farm is the oldest and largest prison in Arkansas. The state bought 16,000 acres of delta cropland from two cotton plantations in 1902 and has worked it with prisoners ever since. It is the third chapter in a broader story this channel has traced across the American South, at Angola in Louisiana and Parchman in Mississippi: after slavery legally ended, these states bought plantations and put their prisoners to work on them.
Of the three, Cummins produced the most explosive scandal, the most consequential court ruling, and a mystery about what is actually buried in that ground that has never been fully resolved. The story begins with the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in 1865, with a specific exception: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. ” Every former Confederate state read that clause and understood what it permitted. Arkansas, like its neighbors, turned to convict leasing, renting its convicted population to private businessmen, planters, railroads, and mining operations.
The leasor paid the state for labor and took responsibility for housing, feeding, and guarding the men. The results were catastrophic. A leasor paid a fixed price for a man’s labor and had every economic incentive to extract as much work as possible, with almost no incentive to keep him alive beyond the lease. Historians consistently describe the system as producing conditions worse than slavery itself.
An enslaver had bought a person as a capital asset and had a financial interest in that person surviving to work another decade. A leasor rented a man for a fixed term; if he died in month four of a twelve-month lease, the state simply supplied another body. Death rates in lease camps across the South ran at levels that would have been a public health emergency in any other context. Arkansas leased prisoners to work timber, lay track, dig coal, and above all to farm.
For decades, the state collected its fee and asked few questions. The men were overwhelmingly Black, convicted overwhelmingly of minor offenses under laws written in the years after Reconstruction: vagrancy statutes, petty theft charges, contract-breaking laws that turned walking away from an exploitative labor agreement into a crime. The machinery operated in Arkansas by the same mechanism and to the same end as in Louisiana and Mississippi—manufacturing a permanent, renewable supply of unpaid labor to replace the one the 13th Amendment had just abolished. By the 1890s, political pressure to end convict leasing built to the point where Arkansas began looking for an alternative.
In 1893, the legislature placed the penitentiary under an Arkansas Penitentiary Board and authorized it to purchase or lease farms where certain classes of convicts could be employed. The logic appeared reformist: rather than hand prisoners to private operators with every incentive to work them to death, the state would run its own farm, supervise its own prisoners, and keep the profits. The search for a farm turned into a scandal before a single acre was purchased. In 1897, the owners of the Alzheimer plantation in Jefferson County offered to sell for $87,000.
The offer became bitterly contentious when the state’s attorney general and others accused Governor Jeff Davis of maneuvering to pocket part of the purchase price. The deal collapsed. In 1902, the penitentiary board received a letter from W. H.
Miller, who owned two adjacent properties in Lincoln County along the Arkansas River: the Cummins Plantation and the Maple Grove Plantation. Miller offered both—nearly 10,000 acres—for $140,000. Roughly 2,500 acres were described in the board’s own records as “highly improved,” complete with a good dwelling house and all the cabins, wells, and fences in excellent condition. That description tells the entire story of the place in a single sentence.
The cabins were already there. Arkansas was not building a prison; it was buying a working cotton plantation, complete with housing built for the enslaved people who had worked it, and simply changing the legal category of the people who would live in those cabins and work those fields. Governor Davis, still upset over the collapsed Alzheimer deal, fought the purchase. He lost.
The board accepted Miller’s offer and later purchased an additional 6,727 acres, bringing the total to over 16,000 acres of some of the most fertile land in the Arkansas Delta. The first prisoners arrived on December 3, 1902: 49 men brought by riverboat, along with several mules and a few tools. That was the entire founding population and inventory of what would become the largest prison in Arkansas. Everything else—barracks, fences, drainage, roads, levees—would be built by the men themselves.
There was no prison when they arrived. No wall, no cell block, no perimeter, no guard tower. Confinement was a function of geography. A man who ran faced miles of open ground with no cover, then swamp, then the river, in a rural county where a stranger on foot was conspicuous, and where the men most likely to catch him were other prisoners carrying rifles.
From the very first day, the population was defined by a single fact the state’s own records do not obscure: the prison held exclusively African-American prisoners, both men and women, for its first three decades. White male prisoners were not sent to Cummins until the 1930s. Arkansas had purchased two cotton plantations and staffed them by explicit policy with Black laborers convicted of crimes, who could therefore be worked without wages on the same land growing the same crop under armed supervision, 37 years after the Civil War ended. The continuity was not an accident; it was the design.
The expectation placed on Cummins was profit. Officials expected the prison farm to generate revenue to pay for itself, and ideally more. Arkansas formally abolished convict leasing in the 1910s and pointed to Cummins as evidence of reform. But the underlying economic logic had not changed; it had been brought in house.
The state was no longer renting prisoners to planters. The state had become the planter. Everything that happened at Cummins over the following 66 years flows from that decision. The system Arkansas ran at Cummins worked almost exactly as it did at Parchman.
The state did not hire enough professional correctional officers because they cost money and would have eaten into the revenue the farm was supposed to generate. Instead, the state armed the prisoners. Under the trusty system, selected inmates were given rifles and shotguns and the authority to guard, supervise, and discipline the other prisoners, known as “rankmen. ” Trustees lived separately in unlocked shacks with televisions and refrigerators, ate better, worked less, and held the power of life and death over the population they supervised.
What this produced was a closed economy of extortion. Trustees squeezed weekly payments from the rankmen. A man who could pay bought lighter work, better food, medical attention, or the absence of violence. A man who could not pay or refused had no recourse; the armed men extracting the payments were the same men responsible for reporting misconduct, and the free-world staff above them were too few and too invested in the harvest to look closely.
Contemporary reporting described trustees firing rifles inches over the heads of working men for entertainment, not punishment—for sport. The trustee system collapsed the formal separation between the punished and the punisher. The man extorting you, the man who would shoot you if you ran, and the man who would file the official report on your conduct were the same man. Complaining meant complaining to the people who had armed him and depended on him to bring in the crop.
The trustees selected were frequently men serving sentences for the most serious violent offenses. The institutional logic was that a man with a long sentence and no realistic prospect of parole had the strongest incentive to cooperate and the least incentive to run. The state was selecting men who had the most to gain from the arrangement and the most to lose from disrupting it, then arming them and pointing them at everyone else. A trustee cost the state nothing; every trustee with a rifle was a salaried correctional officer the state did not have to hire.
The brutality was not a failure of the system. It was the system functioning exactly as its economics required. The daily labor was punishing. Prisoners worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and at some periods the recorded working day ran to fifteen hours.
Men were excused from fieldwork only if the outside temperature dropped below freezing—not if it was dangerously cold, but if the air temperature was literally below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. A man worked in near-freezing rain. A man worked through the Arkansas Delta summer, routinely over 95 degrees, bent double in a cotton row with no shade for ten hours. Some men sent into the rows had no shoes.
They were supervised by guards mounted on horseback, riding along the ends of the rows, watching bent backs move down 16,000 acres. The image was precisely identical to the antebellum plantation, and the men living it never needed a historian to explain the resemblance. A mounted man is faster than a running man, sees further across flat ground, and looks down at the people he supervises—practical advantages all inherited directly from the overseer. Punishment for falling short was corporal and routine.
The primary instrument was a leather strap, wooden-handled, five feet long and four inches wide, applied across bare skin. A federal judge would later describe that strap with clinical precision in a written opinion because, by the time the case reached him, its use was not in dispute. Neither side denied it happened; the only question before the court was whether it was constitutional. The length is significant: five feet is a bullwhip’s working distance, not an instrument for a controlled, measured punishment at close range.
The men who used it were the same armed trustees running the extortion economy in the barracks. Conditions inside those barracks were, if anything, worse. The fields at least had supervision from free-world staff; the barracks at night did not. Judge Henley’s eventual findings and the surrounding reporting described thievery, violence, and rape as endemic features of nightly life in open dormitories holding large numbers of men, with no meaningful separation by offense, no functioning system for reporting what happened, and armed inmates in charge of order.
Medical care was minimal to non-existent. Food was poor enough that Merton’s dietary reforms at Tucker—simply adding meat, eggs, milk, and vegetables—registered as a dramatic intervention. Then there was the device that gave the Arkansas prison system its permanent place in the history of American torture: the Tucker telephone, named for the smaller sister prison farm where it appears to have originated, though its use was not confined there. The mechanism was improvised out of parts from an old crank telephone.
The wires that would normally have carried a voice were attached directly to a prisoner’s body, typically to the genitals and a toe, and the crank was turned, sending an electrical current through him. Operators could deliver a single shock or, in what was known inside the system as a “long-distance call,” a sustained series. Men subjected to it reported permanent injury. Two details deserve attention.
First, the name: someone in the Arkansas prison system looked at an improvised electrical torture device and decided the funny thing to call the extended version was a “long-distance call. ” That is not the language of a system that considered what it was doing shameful or aberrant. Second, the design: nobody bought this device. Somebody built it deliberately out of a hand-cranked telephone, having worked out that the magneto generates enough current to cause extreme pain without leaving the kind of external marks a strap leaves.
That is applied engineering. It required thought, effort, and intent, and it was carried out by employees of the state of Arkansas inside a state facility. It remained in use for years. The Tucker telephone was not the invention of a rogue guard operating in secret.
Its existence was formally documented in a 1966 Arkansas state police investigation into conditions at Tucker, carried out during the administration of Governor Orval Faubus. The findings were suppressed. The report was written, the practices documented, and the state did not release it. When Tom Merton started digging in 1968 and the state responded with outrage about his methods, the state was not being taken by surprise by revelations it had never encountered.
Arkansas had commissioned its own police force to investigate its own prisons, received a report documenting electrical torture, and responded by putting that report in a drawer. Faubus is a name most Americans know from a different context: the governor who deployed the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 to block the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. The same administration that made that decision received the Tucker Telephone Report and declined to publish it. It remained unpublished until 1967, when Arkansas elected Winthrop Rockefeller, its first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
Rockefeller was an unusual figure in Arkansas politics: a member of one of the wealthiest families in the United States who had relocated to a cattle ranch in the Arkansas hills, a Republican in a state that had voted Democratic since Reconstruction, and a governor with essentially no institutional debt to the machine that had run the state’s prisons for decades. On taking office, he was shown the suppressed report and was reportedly shaken by it, and by his own conclusion that the actual situation was worse than what the state police had documented. He released the report publicly—an extraordinary act for a sitting governor, releasing damning evidence about his own state’s institutions. Then he did something even more consequential: he went looking for someone to fix it.
The man he found was Thomas O. Merton. Merton was 39, held a degree in animal husbandry from Oklahoma A&M, had helped build the correctional system in Alaska after statehood, and had taught criminology in Illinois. When Rockefeller hired him, he became the first professionally trained penologist the state of Arkansas had ever employed as a warden.
Everyone who worked with him described the same combination: intelligent, conscientious, genuinely committed to reform, with a dry sense of humor, and almost pathologically incapable of managing his own superiors—abrasive, uncompromising, constitutionally unable to keep his findings to himself long enough for the people above him to prepare a response. Merton was assigned first to Tucker, and what he did there in 1967 was remarkable. He abolished the trusty system outright, replacing armed inmates with professional staff. He banned corporal punishment and personally dismantled the instruments used to administer it, including the leather strap and the Tucker telephone itself.
He overhauled the food, increasing meat, eggs, milk, and vegetables in a diet that had been producing documented malnutrition. He improved sanitation. He streamlined the parole process. In a matter of months, inside one of the most notoriously brutal prison systems in the United States, he demonstrated that essentially all of its worst practices could simply be stopped by an administrator willing to stop them.
The defense these institutions always offered for their conditions was that the conditions were inevitable—a function of insufficient appropriations, the character of the population, the sheer scale of the operation. Then, at institution after institution, somebody arrives who simply refuses to accept that framing and starts changing things. A substantial share of what was supposedly inevitable turns out to have been merely customary. Merton did not receive a large new appropriation.
He did not get more staff, at least not at first. He arrived, looked at a torture device bolted together out of a telephone, and took it apart. What this proves is that the specific practices were choices made by people, sustained by people, and reversible by people—which means that every year they continued was a year somebody with the authority to stop them had decided not to. Rockefeller, impressed, transferred Merton to Cummins, the larger and far more difficult institution.
It was at Cummins in January 1968 that Merton heard the rumors about the levee. They were not new. Men inside the Arkansas prison system had been passing versions of the same story for decades: that prisoners who died at Cummins under circumstances the administration did not want examined were buried quietly on the prison’s own land, their deaths recorded as something other than what they were. Reuben Johnson, the lifer who led Merton to the field, told a detailed and specific version.
Most of the men buried out there, Johnson said, had been killed after refusing to meet the extortion demands of the trusty guards. Their deaths had been recorded either as escapes or as deaths from other causes. Johnson described burials going back decades, including a mass killing of roughly 20 inmates around Labor Day 1940. At least one other prisoner, a man named James Wilson, corroborated the general pattern, adding that recaptured escapees were routinely murdered rather than returned to the population.
There was a piece of documentary evidence that made the claims impossible to dismiss. The number of Arkansas prisoners officially listed as escapees since 1915 was reported as more than 200. Johnson’s claim was that as many as 200 bodies were buried on the property. The two numbers matched almost exactly, and the mechanism Johnson described—recording a murder as an escape—would explain why.
On January 29, 1968, Merton ordered the digging to begin in a treeless pasture containing between 15 and 25 unexplained depressions, and he brought the press. He was not conducting a forensic excavation. There was no medical examiner, no archaeologist, no chain of custody, no controlled dig. There were prison workmen, shovels, a lifer pointing at the ground, a superintendent, and reporters with cameras.
Everything that went wrong with the evidentiary value of what came out of that field, and all the ambiguity that still surrounds it today, traces back to how that morning was run. Merton’s defenders would say he had every reason to believe the state would bury the findings if he did it quietly, given that the state had literally buried a police report on the same prison system two years earlier. His critics would say he turned a potential crime scene into a press event and destroyed the evidence in the process. Both can be true.
The three skeletons made international news within days. Time magazine’s account, published in early February, described three skeletons recovered from shallow unmarked graves: one decapitated, one with its skull crushed, the third with its legs broken back. Those details ran in a national news magazine and did the work that no summary of the trusty system or the Tucker telephone had managed in decades. Decades of documented torture had produced a suppressed report in a drawer.
Three skeletons in a field produced headlines on multiple continents inside a week. The story became more complicated than the version most people know. The immediate suspicion—Merton’s and almost everyone else’s—was that these were the bodies of murdered inmates. That suspicion was reasonable, given everything that had just been documented about how the Arkansas prison system operated.
But the state, deeply embarrassed, offered an alternative explanation: that the remains came from a potter’s field, a paupers’ cemetery, where deceased prisoners whose bodies went unclaimed had been buried over the decades. Time magazine noted at the time that the cemetery the state pointed to lay more than a mile from where Merton’s men had actually dug. The skeletal remains were eventually examined by Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist who would go on to become one of the most respected figures in his field. Snow spent his career reading violence out of human bone and later did landmark investigative work identifying the victims of state atrocities around the world, including the disappeared of Argentina’s military dictatorship and mass graves in Guatemala and Iraq.
He was, in the second half of the 20th century, essentially the best-qualified person on earth to determine whether a given skeleton belonged to a murder victim. Snow’s findings did not support Reuben Johnson’s testimony. He was careful and explicit about the limits of what three skeletons could establish, and he did not at the time take a public side between Merton and his critics. But in 1976, presenting a paper to the Arkansas Historical Association in Helena, Snow directly challenged the claim that the bodies unearthed at Cummins had been murdered.
He never published those findings formally; the single most authoritative analysis anyone conducted exists as a conference paper that was never written up for a journal. The conclusion most historians of Arkansas have reached—and the one the state’s own historical encyclopedia now records—is that the graves Merton opened most likely constituted a paupers’ cemetery for deceased inmates whose bodies were never claimed. Investigators looking into the identities of the three skeletons never surfaced credible information connecting them to any specific reported murder. Before Merton was removed, he located approximately 200 additional graves in the Cummins graveyard, the overwhelming majority of which could not be identified.
The headline was probably wrong. The document record does not establish that Merton dug up a mass grave of murdered prisoners. But the state’s version has never been airtight either. The potter’s field the state pointed to was more than a mile from the dig site.
Snow examined three sets of remains, not 200. The bodies were exhumed by prison workmen with shovels in front of television cameras, not by forensic specialists; whatever contextual evidence a proper excavation might have preserved was gone within hours. Johnson’s testimony, which the forensic analysis did not support, was corroborated in its general outline by at least one other prisoner. What can be said with confidence is that the murder claim was never substantiated and the weight of expert and historical opinion runs against it.
What cannot be said is that anybody ever definitively established what happened out there, because the evidence that would have settled it was compromised on the first morning. But the bodies were not the story that changed anything. What changed Arkansas was everything that came out alongside the digging—all of which was documented, none of which was ever seriously disputed, and all of which was already true before anyone put a shovel in that field. The armed trusty system was real.
The extortion economy was real. The leather strap was real, its dimensions recorded in a federal court opinion. The Tucker telephone was real, documented by the state’s own police in 1966 in a report the state then buried for two years. The ten-to-fifteen-hour working days were real.
The men sent into the fields without shoes were real. The absence of medical care, the thievery, the violence, and the rape inside the barracks were all real. All of it was eventually established in open federal court on an evidentiary record a federal appeals panel described as “overwhelming. ”
Two hundred unmarked graves of unclaimed prisoners is not evidence of mass murder.
It is evidence of something else that is, in its own way, just as damning: an institution that held human beings for decades, buried a substantial number of them anonymously in its own ground when they died, and kept records so poor that when someone finally went looking, 66 years of the state’s own paperwork could not say who those people had been. Merton’s own fate was sealed the moment the first camera crew arrived. Rockefeller’s administration was not implicated in any of the crimes alleged—all of which predated his taking office by years or decades—but it was humiliated by the international attention, and Merton had committed the unforgivable offense in institutional terms: he had given his findings to the public before formally reporting them to the state that employed him. Some critics accused him outright of grave robbery.
Rockefeller fired Merton in early March 1968, after roughly eleven months of service, complaining in writing of Merton’s “callous disregard” for the problems of his equals and superiors, which had produced what the governor called a “totally untenable situation. ” The firing ended Merton’s career in corrections permanently. He was never hired to run a prison again, not in Arkansas and not in any other state. American corrections in 1968 was a national profession with vacancies in every state, and Merton was the rare candidate who had demonstrably turned a facility around inside a year.
The message transmitted through the profession was not that Merton had been wrong about Arkansas—nobody seriously argued that—but that a man who took his findings to the public rather than to his superiors was unemployable. Every prison administrator in the country received it. By February 1970, Merton had moved his wife and four children to Alaska and was living on food stamps. He wrote a best-selling book about what he had found, Accomplices to the Crime, published in 1969 with journalist Joe Hyams, and a second book, Acquitted of Murder, the following year.
He continued writing about American prisons for the rest of his life from outside the profession that had shut its door on him, eventually teaching rather than administering. He died in 1990 at 62. The machinery Merton had set in motion was already beyond anyone’s ability to stop, including his own. In 1969, inmates of Cummins and Tucker began filing petitions in federal court challenging the conditions of their confinement.
The case reached Chief Judge J. Smith Henley of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Henley consolidated the petitions, certified them as a class action, appointed serious attorneys to represent the class, and then actually examined the evidence. Understanding why that was extraordinary requires understanding what American courts had been doing about prisons up to that point, which was nothing.
The federal judiciary operated under the “hands-off doctrine”: the principle that the internal administration of state prisons was a matter for state officials, not federal judges. The respectable version held that federal judges lacked the expertise to run prisons and that state officials deserved deference. The unrespectable version was expressed in nineteenth-century case law with a bluntness later courts found embarrassing: a convicted felon was, in the language of one much-cited Virginia decision, “a slave of the state,” having forfeited his liberty and with it essentially every claim he might otherwise have made on the Constitution’s protection. That framing is not incidental to a story about a prison plantation in the Arkansas Delta; it rests on the same exception in the same amendment.
For most of American history, the practical effect of the hands-off doctrine was that whatever happened inside a prison wall stayed inside it permanently as a matter of judicial policy. A prisoner being tortured with an electrical device in Arkansas had no realistic legal remedy, not because the practice was legal, but because no court would agree to look. Henley’s first ruling in 1969 addressed specific practices, holding that the prison could not withhold reasonable medical attention and instituting a ban on corporal punishment. The state’s response did not satisfy him; reports from Cummins and Tucker continued to arrive.
Rather than terminate the cases, Henley consolidated eight separate inmate petitions into a single class action and heard the whole thing on the merits. On February 18, 1970, he issued the decision in Holt v. Sarver that changed American prison law permanently. Henley ruled that the confinement of human beings at those prisons under the conditions described in his opinion constituted cruel and inhuman punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
He held that the entire Arkansas prison system violated the Constitution. He also held that the continued racial segregation of inmates violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and he described what he had found in a phrase that has outlived nearly everyone involved: “a brutal world run by brutal people. ”
The legal innovation in Holt v. Sarver was the “totality of conditions” argument the inmates’ attorneys made and Henley accepted: not any single practice considered in isolation, but the combined cumulative effect of everything about how the prison operated, taken together, violated the Constitution.
That framework became the foundation for prisoners’ rights litigation across the entire country. Henley banned the use of convicts as security officials, ending the armed trustee system by court order. He banned the use of violence to control inmates. He ordered the state to report back on its progress, and when the reports proved inadequate, he kept the case open, issuing further injunctions in 1971 requiring the prison to stop obstructing inmates’ access to the courts.
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld him, writing that Henley’s findings were supported by “overwhelming substantial evidence. ” The litigation ran for nearly a decade, eventually reaching the Supreme Court of the United States in Hutto v. Finney in 1978. Holt v.
Sarver ended the hands-off era. It was the first case in American history to find an entire state prison system in violation of prisoners’ constitutional rights, and it opened the door for every case that followed, including Gates v. Collier in Mississippi two years later, which ended the trustee system there on the same legal logic. Judge Keady’s ruling that Parchman was an “affront to modern standards of decency” was possible because Judge Henley had already established two years earlier, one state over, that a federal court could say such a thing about a state prison system at all.
One of the attorneys who represented the Arkansas inmates, Jack Holt Jr. , later became Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. In 1980, twelve years after Merton was fired, 20th Century Fox released Brubaker, starring Robert Redford as a reform-minded warden who arrives at a corrupt southern prison farm and starts digging up bodies. The character was based on Merton, who worked on the film as a historical consultant.
The film was profitable, well-received, and earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay. Merton made no money from it. Its release brought the 1968 scandal roaring back into Arkansas’s public conversation more than a decade after the state had done its best to close the file. So what happened to the land?
Nothing. Cummins was not closed, demolished, abandoned, or converted into a museum. It has never stopped operating for a single day since December 3, 1902. Today it remains the oldest and largest prison in Arkansas: roughly 16,500 acres in Lincoln County, along US Route 65 near Grady, Gould, and Varner, about 28 miles south of Pine Bluff and 60 miles southeast of Little Rock.
It holds somewhere in the range of 1,700 to 1,900 men. It runs the largest farming operation in the entire Arkansas Department of Correction—row crops, cotton, corn, rice, hay, livestock, a dairy, a feed mill, a slaughterhouse. In the department’s own description, it is a “self-sustaining prison farm,” the same phrase the penitentiary board used in 1902. The place has accumulated ordinary institutional history in the decades since the scandal.
Arkansas held its first prison rodeo at Cummins in 1972. Female prisoners held there since the founding were moved to the Pine Bluff unit in 1976. A modular unit opened in 1983. A tornado in May 2011 took out the dairy, the chicken and swine houses, and all three greenhouses.
In 2000, the state opened its first lethal electrified perimeter fence at Cummins, built—in a detail that requires no commentary—by inmate labor. The men built the wall again. The prison held Arkansas’s death row from 1974 until 1986, when the condemned were moved to the Tucker Maximum Security Unit and later to Varner. A new execution chamber had opened at Cummins in 1978.
When death row moved out, the chamber stayed. It is still there. Every execution the state of Arkansas carries out happens on the grounds of the plantation it bought in 1902. Arkansas moved the men it intends to kill to a different facility and kept the room; the condemned are now driven back to Cummins to die, across the same fields, past the same crops, to a building on the property the penitentiary board purchased for $140,000.
Arkansas has not executed anyone since 2017, when the state put four men to death across an eleven-day period in April. The reason for that compressed schedule was not an acceleration of the appeals process; it was an expiration date. One of the drugs in the state’s lethal injection protocol was about to become unusable, and Arkansas scheduled eight executions in four sets of double executions over eleven days to use the supply before it expired. Four of the eight were carried out.
It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of an institution organizing itself around inventory management. Arkansas has been unable to buy replacement drugs since, because pharmaceutical manufacturers have refused to supply them for that purpose. In 2025, the legislature passed and Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law authorizing execution by nitrogen gas, making Arkansas the fifth state to legalize the method. Ten men on Arkansas’s death row filed suit in Pulaski County Circuit Court on August 5, 2025, the day the law took effect, arguing that it hands the Division of Correction “absolute, unregulated, and undefined discretion” over the manner of their deaths, and that every one of them was sentenced at a time when lethal injection was the only method available.
As of this recording, no execution date has been set and the chamber at Cummins sits unused. Then there is the field. In mid-July 2026, the investigative outlet Prism published an account of current conditions at Cummins based on interviews with men incarcerated there. It described something called the “Hoe Squad”: hundreds of incarcerated men working without pay, spending their days on their hands and knees in the fields, picking weeds, planting seeds, clearing ground with a hoe, while armed guards on horseback watched from the ends of the rows.
One man, identified only by his initials because he feared retaliation, described spending nearly every day for five months on his hands and knees, with guards who at times verbally abused the men. He told the reporter that the conditions reminded him of slavery and that the officers on horses functioned as plantation overseers. The detail about the initials is not a small one. This is a man describing his working conditions to a journalist in the United States, and he will not give his name because he expects to be punished for saying it.
That is the same structural problem that kept the Tucker telephone in a drawer for two years and that made Reuben Johnson’s decision to point at that field in 1968 genuinely dangerous. The mechanism by which an institution like this stays hidden has never primarily been secrecy; it has been the entirely reasonable fear of the people in the best position to describe it. 124 years after 49 men arrived by riverboat, 58 years after Tom Merton pointed at the ground and destroyed his own career, 56 years after a federal judge declared the whole thing unconstitutional, men are on their hands and knees in the same soil working for nothing, watched by men on horseback. The strap is gone.
The Tucker telephone is gone—dismantled by Merton’s own hands in 1967 and never rebuilt. The armed trustees are gone, banned by federal court order in 1970. Those were real victories won by real people at real cost. Reuben Johnson, a lifer who pointed at the ground knowing what it might cost him.
Tom Merton, who lost his entire career for bringing the cameras. Lawrence Holt and the seven other named petitioners who sued the state that held them. Jack Holt Jr. and Philip Kaplan, who argued it.
J. Smith Henley, who broke a doctrine of judicial non-interference that had stood for the entire history of the republic. But the land is still there. The state still owns it.
The crop still comes in every year. The fundamental proposition the state of Arkansas accepted in 1902—that the correct thing to do with a person convicted of a crime is to put him in a field and take the value of his labor—has never actually been abandoned. It has been regulated. It has been litigated.
It has been, in its most violent expressions, forbidden. It has never been rejected. At Angola and Parchman, the land was the wall. At Cummins, the land was something different and considerably stranger: the land was the evidence.
It held what the institution could not account for—roughly 200 people buried in ground the state owned, whose names its own 66 years of recordkeeping could not reliably produce. Merton thought he had found a crime scene. What he had actually found, and what got him fired for showing it to the world, was a filing system. A murder is a discrete act committed by a specific person at a specific time, for which someone can in principle be held responsible.
Two hundred unmarked graves is not an act; it is a policy executed patiently across six decades by hundreds of ordinary employees doing their ordinary jobs, none of whom did anything that would have looked on any individual Tuesday like an atrocity. A man died. Nobody came for the body. Somebody dug a hole in the pasture.
Somebody wrote something in a ledger, or didn’t. Repeat, until the ground behind the levee holds more people than anyone can name. That is what institutional harm actually looks like most of the time. Most of those graves have never been identified.
The men in them were prisoners of the state of Arkansas. They died in its custody. Nobody came to claim them, and they were put into the same soil they had spent their sentences working. They were overwhelmingly Black men sent to a former cotton plantation by a legal system built after Reconstruction to supply exactly that labor.
The state that buried them has never been able to say who most of them were. They are still there. Nobody dug them up after 1968, because once the murder theory collapsed, there was no legal reason to inscribe and no political appetite for it. There is no memorial on that ground, no marker, no list of names, because no list of names exists to inscribe.
The fields are still farmed, still profitable, still worked by hand, with roughly 200 unidentified people in the pasture behind the levee and a crop coming in over them every single year since.