Danny Lyon The Line, Ferguson Unit, Texas Department of Corrections. USA. 1968.
Funny how they keep changing the name of the Texas Department of Corrections. What exactly the state of Texas thought they wer
(...) e “correcting” back in 1968 is an open question. The current American uprising is calling for the abolition of prisons, something I proposed when this picture first appeared on the cover of Conversations With the Dead. “The Line” is a squad of Black teenagers being used to move dirt on a thousand-acre prison farm. This was easier than, say, using a tractor. Ferguson was a prison farm for “youthful offenders” meaning the inmates were teenagers. They were kept in Ferguson until they were old enough to be transferred to the large prison farms, like Ellis and Ramsey, where, if they were doing a life sentence, they could move dirt for another twenty years. Sadly, the Texas prison system, which held about 12,000 inmates when I photographed it in 1968, had over 150,000 by 2018.
– Danny Lyon © Danny Lyon | Magnum Photos
