Some prison administrations felt that having inmates occupy
the same space to work a treadmill or pick oakum was too much
mingling. When they wanted to keep them properly isolated,
inmates had to do work alone in their cells. Officials had also
noticed something they found very interesting: Inmates hated a
pointless task more than a meaningful one. This presented them
with an obvious solution: the crank.
The crank was literally
a crank that stuck out of a small wooden box that was usually
set on a table or pedestal in the inmate’s cell. Despite its
innocuous description, it was a truly soul-crushing monstrosity
designed to exhaust inmates mentally and physically. Inside the
box was a drum or paddle that turned nothing but sand and rocks.
The axle on which the crank turned had a screw, which warders
could tighten or loosen depending on how much punishment they
wanted to mete out. The screw would make the crank easier or
harder to turn.
Warders who came in to
adjust the screw earned themselves the nickname “screws” for the
suffering it caused.
A prisoner left in
isolation with the crank usually did not need to worry about a
beating if they just ignored the machine. Instead, they would
worry about starvation. Each crank had a counter on the box that
logged the number of turns. An inmate had to reach a certain
number of turns before being allowed to do basic things like eat
and sleep. Most were expected to make at least 10,000 rotations
a day.