Richard, Gregory Louis

Description

The following dissertation discusses the United States Federal Court judicial reform of prison farms in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. More specifically, it examines the judicial and legislative history of the historic reform that includes the role of the individual judges that presided over the years of legislation necessary to bring Constitutional reforms to the state prison systems of the South. The judges and states in this study include J. Henley Smith of Arkansas, William C. Keady of Mississippi, and E. Gordon West of Louisiana. The research outlines an important aspect of the court system and the struggle between states and the federal government to create a constitutional prison system. Some of these constitutional defects related to substandard living conditions, prison officials not providing for the safety of inmates, the prevention of prisoner complaints reaching the courts, and the segregation of African American inmates from whites within the prison structure. A number of primary resources provided the bulk of the research, including the use of judicial archives, the individual judges' papers, court documents such as motions and prisoner petitions, and biographies of the individual judges. The judges' court opinions, as well as archival information relating to their lives before they reached the bench as well as their work from the federal courts, contributed to this study. These sources helped construct the most exhaustive and complete judicial and legislative history of the reform of three state prison farm systems in the United State South after the segregation era. In numerous ways, the...

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