The difference in prisoner sentences
What's the difference between, say, 30 years hard labor and 30 years imprisonment or are they both basically the same thing?
shareMy guess is that in the era, 30 years hard labor would mean being sent to a prison or a part of a prison where you were given heavy outdoor labor to perform, vs. going to a prison where you only had to do a basic prison job, if any.
I think the trope of actually breaking rocks on the chain gang was real at some point, like literally having to spend the day smashing big rocks into little rocks with a sledgehammer. Then there are those scenes in other, older, movies like Cool Hand Luke where they go out an do road work. Some states had a "prison farm" (like Angola Farm, Louisiana) where inmates more or less did a bunch of farm work by hand.