A chain gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work, such as mining or timber collecting, as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include building roads, digging ditches or chipping stone. This system existed primarily in the southern parts of the United States, and by 1955 had been phased out nationwide, with Georgia the last state to abandon the practice. Chain gangs were reintroduced by a few states during the "get tough on crime" 1990s, with Alabama being the first state to revive them in 1995. The experiment ended after about one year in all states except Arizona, where in Maricopa County inmates can still volunteer for a chain gang to earn credit toward a high school diploma or avoid disciplinary lockdowns for rule infractions.
Read more about Chain Gang: Synonyms and Disambiguation, History, Reintroduction, In Popular Media
Famous quotes containing the words chain gang, chain and/or gang:
“You know, he wanted to shoot the Royal Family, abolish marriage, and put everybody who’d been to public school in a chain gang. Yeah, he was a idealist, your dad was.”
—David Mercer, British screenwriter, and Karel Reisz. Mrs. Dell (Irene Handl)
“Man ... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)