Crushing Rock

[W. Gray]

Someone mentioned on another thread that convicts should be pounding rock with sledge hammers rather than watching television.

Watching movies as a kid, I thought that a convict's hard labor at breaking rocks by hand was merely harsh punishment for breaking the law. There did not seem to be any other reason for the guards to be standing around with rifles watching the prisoners crack rocks with a sledge hammer. Even Spartacus worked on a rock pile for the Romans.

In real life all over the U.S., convicts with sledge hammers were a substitution for heavy duty machinery that had not yet been invented or were a substitution for expensive machinery that was not reliable on a large scale. Even county prisoners were put to work with a sledge hammer. The convicts manually crushed rocks into gravel or into manageable chunks for primitive rock crushers owned by the prisons. The gravel was sold by the prisons for use as a road paving material and the income went into the state treasury.

The manual rock crushing was a paid job at cents per day similar to working in the prison laundry or carpentry shop.