The Sally Port |
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Among the hundreds of communities served by the Southern Railway System is a walled settlement of some 2,700 male inhabitants located within the city limits of Atlanta, Ga.
It is a nearly self-sufficient community: Much of the food consumed by those within its walls is grown by some of its own members at a farm 10 miles away; and from five industries located within its walls and worked by its members, the community contributes greatly to its own financial support.
Noting that the raw materials for these industries arrive over Southern trackage and that the finished products leave the same way, discontented members , of the community have themselves attempted now and then to use our railway as a means of flight.
But armed men have prevailed upon these few to pause and stay yet a little time longer .
The community is the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, located several hundred yards from our main line at Roseland station on some 420 acres of land which the city of Atlanta offered to the government as a site in 1899. With the government's acceptance, work was begun and by 1902 a private contractor had erected the first of the prison's red-brick buildings.
To these buildings the Southern then brought 50 federal prisoners from Columbus, Ohio, where they had been confined in that state's penitentiary for lack of federal facilities. Until ab6ut 1908, these first 50 prisoners and others who followed were occupied with completing the very walls that enclosed them, using stone brought to the building site over a Southern spur which is today one of our two service tracks to the penitentiary.
The Sally Port |
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One track serves the prison's powerhouse. The other track serves the prison's 396,000-square-foot industrial division. On it there are a receiving dock for raw materials located outside the walls and a loading dock for finished products located within.
Southern's principal shipment inbound to the prison's industry is baled cotton about 150 carloads per year. From this, the prison's textile mill annually produces about six million pounds of cotton duck.
This is used in the manufacture of bulk mail bags and parcel baskets for the Post Office Department. Many of these are made in the canvas specialty shop at the penitentiary. Annual production is about two million bulk mail bags and 50,000 parcel baskets.
This air view of the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, Ga., taken a few years ago: shows Southern's two service tracks sweeping out from our main line in the rear to the prison's powerhouse (right) and the receiving dock (left). One leg of the left spur continues on around to enter the prison grounds proper through the sally port jutting from the wall. |
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The bulk raw cotton delivered by Southern is also converted into other fabrics from which clothing is made for inmates at Atlanta and other penal institutions and for patients at veterans' hospitals. Last year, the penitentiary's clothing shop turned out 178,355 pieces.
Baled cotton linters "that mixture of cotton fuzz and fiber which is the residue of the ginning process -move by the carload to the prison to be used as batting in the two carloads of innerspring mattresses which the prison produces each day. The mattresses go to the armed services and to veterans' hospitals.
Inmates at the Atlanta penitentiary do their own switching with the "trackmobile" shown here easing two Southern box cars up to the prison's receiving dock for unloading. Baled cotton and cotton linters are the principal commodities brought in by Southern. |
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The fifth industry located within the walls of the Atlanta penitentiary is a print shop, which manufactures about 400,000 calendar pads a year for the use of federal agencies. Inbound, the paper which goes into these calendar pads averages about four carloads a year.
The industries division of the Atlanta penitentiary had a "profit" of $2,187,000 in 1960. Accounting in large measure for this profit, of course, is the fact that the industries operate tax-free. Then, too, industrial help at the prison comes relatively cheaply. An inmate who has become a skilled mill hand gets paid a monthly wage of about $40.
On a typical work day, the mattress shop at the Atlanta penitentiary will turn out two carloads of innersprings - such as those which are shown here being loaded into Southern box cars for shipment to such "customers" as the various armed services and veterans' hospitals. |
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Faced with such figures as these, the average businessman is apt to bridle some at the vision of federal competition. But there are these considerations: - Ninety - eight per cent of Atlanta's inmates are eventually released. Under the prison's industrial program, these men return to society able to work at a trade which will sustain them physically and in self-respect. As the Bureau of Prisons states, "Any refusal to recognize the social obligation to prepare men for useful life in the free community would be a refusal to recognize the stark realities of the prison's true place in society :'