T. Don Hutto

Parents and family Hutto's parents were Winnie Elvenia Cusler Hutto and Terrell Sanford Hutto, a farmer who died when Hutto was nine years old. and Sam Houston State University (1967) but did not earn a master's degree. The W. F. Ramsey Unit, as it was known then, consisted of five former plantations that used a convict leasing system on working plantations. In 1967 Hutto and his family lived in a plantation home on the prison farm.

While working at Ramsey Unit, Hutto met Bruce Jackson, an ethnographer turned photographer, who was collecting photos as reference material for his research on the songs of African Americans inmates in prisons in Texas. The two became friends, which gave Jackson access to prisons in both Texas and Arkansas.

Arkansas Department of Corrections Governor of Arkansas Dale Bumpers appointed Hutto as Director of the Arkansas Department of Correction in 1971.

Soon after Winthrop Rockefeller was elected as Arkansas State Governor on January 10, 1967, he received a shocking 67-page report by the Arkansas State Police, that "uncovered systematic corruption and brutality at Tucker farm, where inmates and prison officials alike engaged in torture, beatings and bribery." for "white and black adult inmates".

As part of reform of the Arkansas prison system, Governor Rockefeller created a new Department of Corrections and hired the first professional penologist, Tom Murton, as prison superintendent in 1967. On January 29, 1968, Murton invited the media to witness the unearthing of three decayed skeletal remains in a remote part of the 16,000-acre grounds of the Cummins prison farm. They believed the skeletons were those of prisoners murdered at Cummins, although this was never proven.

According to a March 22, 2018 article in the Arkansas Times, during his short tenure of less than one year, Murton's aggressive approach to uncovering Arkansas' prison scandal with its decades-long systemic corruption, embarrassed Rockefeller and "infuriated conservative politicians".

As well, in 1969 prisoners, Robert Finney, et al., started a litigation process naming Terrell Don Hutto, et al. The series of cases lasted almost a decade and resulting in the Supreme Court landmark case Hutto v. Finney 437 U.S. 678 . It was the first successful lawsuit filed by an inmate against a correctional institution. The case also clarified prison system's unacceptable punitive measures.

Against this backdrop, Hutto was hired by Governor Dale Bumpers in 1971 as the head of the Arkansas Department of Correction, In 2010, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University featured Jackson's Cummins Unit photo collection.

After Bumpers was elected to the United States Senate and David Pryor was elected governor in 1974, Hutto resigned and moved to Virginia in 1976 to become deputy director of the Virginia Department of Corrections.

American Correctional Association Hutto was president-elect of the American Correctional Association (ACA) from 1984 to 1990. The ACA, which serves as a both the "national regulatory body for prisons" and as a trade association for the American correctional industry, under Hutto's tenure, began to support prison privatization. At the time Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, and Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville. As a result of the initial meeting, CCA were awarded an RFB with INS, which was the "first contract ever to design, build, finance and operate a secure correctional facility." This marked the beginning of the private prison industry.

Hutto died on October 22, 2021, at the age of 86.

Awards In 1987 Hutto received the American Correctional Association's E.R. Cass Correctional Achievement Award, the ACA's highest professional honor.