My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future.

But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show.

And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it.

And maybe you're not interested in internet culture and the future of life on planet Earth.

And why John Carpenter movies are so good.

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But if you like what you're hearing and I know that you do, you can listen to all of what future on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Truth is stranger than fiction and reality TV stars know this better than anyone. But what you may not know about them or even believe is actually criminal behavior.

I'm Kayla Miller-Kees and on my new podcast True Crime Reality, I will be joined by reality TV stars as they dive deep into the details of the crime they have a direct connection to.

Listen to true crime reality on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to It Could Happen Here. Today I'm your host, Garrison Davis. And this is part two of our three part series on the history of the old Atlanta prison farm made in collaboration with the Atlanta Community Press Collective.

Last episode I talked about how one of the initial motivations for running a city prison farm was to save money on the project of incarceration or perhaps even start generating money.

This remained the case throughout its existence, though exactly how well it performed at that was often questioned.

Use of prison or slave labor for government projects was not a new concept in Atlanta though around the time of its incorporation in the mid 19th century.

The city of Atlanta's population was around one fifth enslaved persons.

City Hall itself, along with many other iconic buildings and roads, was built using convict police labor from the Chattahoochi brickworks, notorious for its brutal conditions and was owned by a former Atlanta mayor.

The city prison farm produced various crops, livestock and dairy, but it also provided workers for other city projects. In 1946, Superintendent H. H. Gibson bragged that he was cutting the city prison food budget in half, as well as quote, furnishing the city 11,961 man days of work on city streets by prisoners, unquote, within a sixth month period.

In 1939, they began saving further money on incarceration by getting the women prisoners to make the new uniforms, adding that quote, the city can buy better materials because the labor is free, unquote.

They attempted to incentivize overtime work by offering, quote, extra credit for each hour of overtime worked for reduced sentences.

The prisoners were forced to build some of their own cages as well. In 1944, one of the older prison buildings was designated for use as a hospital for people with venereal diseases.

That meant that prisoners would need a new building and they had to build it themselves, quote, most of the work was done with prison labor with the city providing the materials, unquote.

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