A Clemson University arena that Horry County is modeling uses inmate labor. Will Horry County do the same?

As Horry County leaders have begun discussing plans over the past year for a rural civic arena — a large event facility for everything from farm shows to public meetings — they’ve looked to existing facilities as a model.

In particular, county leaders have studied Clemson University’s T. Ed Garrison Arena in Pendleton, ultimately basing conceptual plans and cost analyses off of the facility. At a meeting two weeks ago, Christopher Heintze, Clemson’s director of the arena, gave a presentation to county leaders about how the university operates its facility, underscoring the degree to which the Clemson arena is serving as a model for Horry County.

But during his presentation, Heintze made a surprising admission: The only way the arena remains financially viable for the university is because it uses unpaid inmate labor three to four days a week to set up and tear down events.

“We utilize inmate labor to help with turning over our stalls, that’s the biggest labor-intensive thing we do,” Heintze told a gathering of county officials, Horry Electric representatives, and others. “There’s no way we could turn this facility over without that.”

According to South Carolina Department of Corrections spokesperson Chrysti Shain, the crew of six to eight inmates working at the Garrison Arena are currently incarcerated at the Livesay Correctional Institution in Spartanburg, and, prior to the pandemic, worked three to four days per week from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Inmates with five years or less remaining on their sentence are eligible to work on a work crew like those at the Garrison Arena, Shain said, and “very much desire to be on an outside labor crew rather than work inside the institution.”

Heintze said before the pandemic, the arena hosted events on 40 to 45 weekends a year, using inmate labor three to four days a week in between events.

None of the inmates are paid for their labor, Shain said, though the DOC has halted labor crew work due to the pandemic. Heintze explained that the inmates work along a full-time staff of four people and a part-time staff of four people that help with events on the weekends.

Those facts raise an important question: As Horry County lays the groundwork for its own civic arena, will it, too, use inmate labor?

Some county officials said it was too soon to know how such a facility would operate, given that a special committee only recently began studying a potential site for the arena. But one, County Councilman Johnny Vaught, who serves on that committee, said some form of cheap, or free, labor would be needed.

“It has to be done that way,” Vaught said Friday, explaining that the county would only need a workforce at the arena to set up and tear down events, and it wouldn’t make financial sense to employ a full-time staff. “Why would you put people on staff when you only need them for those peak times? It doesn’t make sense.”

Vaught, however, noted that the county would face roadblocks to potentially using inmate labor, namely the inmates available to work within driving distance. Many of those incarcerated at the J. Reuben Long Detention Center in Conway, for example, are pre-trial and have not been convicted of a crime, meaning it’s illegal for the county to use them as laborers. If inmate labor is not feasible, Vaught said, the county might look to a model similar to its highway litter patrols: A crew of temporary workers who are paid per day worked.

“What we did was we took one county employee and put them in charge of temps who work for us on a day-by-day basis,” Vaught said, explaining the highway litter patrol model. “It’s a lot cheaper.”

Hernandez Stroud, an attorney working with the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, draws a connection between slavery and modern forms of inmate labor. Among the troubling aspects of the practice, he said, is the fact that labor protections like the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act don’t apply to inmates working.

“It’s slavery by a different name,” Stroud said. “You have this disquieting lack of protections for prison laborers that protect their safety.”

Whether or not Horry County could implement the practice is not clear, and a decision is likely several years away.

For one, Shain said the department “does not have the capacity to provide a work crew” to Horry County, and the county has not made a request for inmate labor to date. She added that the department does not have a prison that could supply a work crew to Horry County.

County Council member Al Allen, who chairs the committee studying sites for the civic arena, echoed Vaught’s concern that the county couldn’t use inmate labor because there aren’t enough post-conviction incarcerated people nearby. Allen also added that plans for the arena are in such early stages that leaders haven’t yet had conversations about staffing and workforce at the arena.

“(With the) current situation at our jail, we don’t have that many inmates for that kind of work,” Allen said, adding: “We don’t fully know what size or type of center we’re going to be building yet. It’s still in the early, early preliminary stages, those are questions that will have to be answered as we get further down the road with it.”

Horry County spokesperson Kelly Moore said plans for the civic arena were in such early stages that she couldn’t comment on its future staffing or workforce. She added that Heintze’s presentation did not indicate the county would copy Clemson’s model.

“The presentation from Clemson was not meant to indicate that we would be undertaking an identical operation, only that the committee found it prudent to get relevant information from similar facilities in the region,” Moore said in a statement. “This facility remains in the most preliminary phases and the committee will continue to meet and further discuss potential opportunities.”

Messages seeking comment by The Sun News were sent to Heintze and a Clemson spokesperson. The spokesperson, Jonathan Veit, referred questions to the Department of Corrections.

Horry County’s civic arena, a planned multimillion dollar project that would see a large indoor event space built somewhere along Highway 22, is meant to serve as both a community center and revenue generator for the county. The campus of the civic arena would include an RV camp site, horse trails, a shooting range and parking with the event space able to host everything from farm shows to large corporate meetings. Through a state tax program, Horry Electric Cooperative pays Horry County $400,000 each year, which leaders have said they’ll use to pay for the arena. An attorney with Horry Electric said because the cooperative’s involvement in the planned arena is purely financial, it has no comment on any potential operation decisions.

To date, the cooperative has given the county around $1.6 million with another $400,000 expected this year, Moore said. County leaders are also hoping to put revenue from a payments-in-lieu-of-taxes solar farm deal towards the civic arena, around $550,000 per year.

Though it’s unclear if Horry County could use inmate labor in the future, the practice has deep roots in South Carolina, and at Clemson University. In South Carolina, hundreds of inmates participate in various work programs, some are paid and others are not.

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, a literature professor at Clemson, has spent part of the past 13 years researching the history of inmate labor at the university, finding that inmates built much of the campus beginning in 1889. Between 1889 and the university’s open in 1893, she found, inmates from South Carolina prisons built roads and dormitories, as well as academic and administrative buildings on campus. To date, Thomas has identified nearly 700 inmates from every county in South Carolina who worked on Clemson’s campus, some of them teenage boys. While she continues to work to identify those people, Thomas is clear about the impact their labor had on Clemson.

“What we do know is that their labor was the primary labor that was used to build the college and the trustees say pretty clearly that if it weren’t for these laborers they couldn’t have done the work in a cost effective way,” she said.

Inmate labor became a practice in the United States in the late 19th century, after the Reconstruction period. Using a loophole provided by the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that said “involuntary servitude” was a suitable punishment for a crime, lawmakers then passed a series of laws criminalizing various behaviors, including loitering and being out after dark, causing more people to be arrested and convicted of felonies.

“A lot of people, former slaves, were arrested and labeled as criminals and sentenced to unpaid labor for wealthy plantation owners,” said Stroud, of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

As Thomas continues her work, she said she’s hoping to trace the histories and stories of those who labored on Clemson’s campus, and raise awareness that the university continues the practice today at the Garrison Arena. Her book on the subject is due to be published in two weeks.

“I think it’s interesting that they returned to it, it’s not something I’ve heard anyone speak about publicly. I don’t think that it’s known,” Thomas said. “We try to empower people, we want to provide information to people so they can make decisions.”

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Editor’s note: This story was updated to clarify a statement by South Carolina Department of Corrections spokesperson Chrysti Shain.

This story was originally published October 20, 2020 at 2:50 PM.