bucket brigade & chain gang

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

I'm sure I've seen "bucket brigade" used to refer to a line of people handing
stuff along where the stuff was not buckets of water or anything else. I first
learned the term in its literal sense, but the semantic extension seemed
obvious.

"Chain gang" is not dialectal US, but standard, and AFAIK is understood
everywhere in the same way. It refers to a crew of convicts working outside the
prison, generally on some kind of public works project like a road, under guard
and chained together to prevent escape. They have historically been used mostly
in Southern states, or such is my impression. I don't know how much they are
still used. The term was in New England newspapers last year when a
Massachusetts sheriff used convict labor in approximately this way, evoking many
protests.

A search of the On-Line Archive of the Boston _Globe_ (
http://www.globe.com/globe/search/ ) produced 36 hits in 1999, many relating to
this controversy. I append the opening paragraphs of four of them, ordered
chronologically:


   SHACKLED BUT FREE
   FOR BRISTOL INMATES, CHAIN GANG A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

   Published on 06/17/1999. Article 23 of 33 found.
   SOURCE: By Ric Kahn, Globe Staff

   NEW BEDFORD -- For Lawrence Woodsum, 26, degradation
   was not being an inaugural member of the state's first chain gang
   yesterday, shackled ankle-to-ankle to four other inmates holding
   paintbrushes like a bunch of tethered pre-schoolers.

   Real humiliation, Woodsum said, was found on the road to prison
   itself: smoking crack, stealing vegetables, and sleeping on the street.


   NOT WELCOME SIGN IS OUT FOR SHERIFF'S CHAIN GANGS

   Published on 06/19/1999. Article 22 of 33 found.
   SOURCE: By Ric Kahn, Globe Staff

   The state's first chain gangs are all dressed up in silver shackles and
   new red jumpsuits -- but do they have a place to go?

   Yesterday, the Fall River Housing Authority served Bristol County
   Sheriff Thomas Hodgson and his black-booted chain gangs with a
   no-trespass order, kicking him and his 10 men off an abandoned
   ball field they had planned to transform into a field of dreams.


   CHAIN GANG IS RELIC OF AMERICAN APARTHEID

   Published on 06/21/1999. Article 18 of 33 found.
   Your June 17 Metro headline, ``Shackled but free: For Bristol
   inmates, chain gang a breath of fresh air,'' reeks of Antebellum
   nostalgia. Just for the record: A person wearing shackles in public is
   not free, nor does anyone working in them really believe that.
   Otherwise people in offices, maybe even a few at the Globe, would
   be wearing them.


   TWO MORE TOWNS REJECT CHAIN GANGS

   Published on 06/23/1999. Article 17 of 33 found.
   SOURCE: (AP)

   The showdown over chain gangs in southeastern Massachusetts
   intensified as two more towns joined a growing list of communities
   saying no to the program. Despite votes by selectmen in Dartmouth
   and Freetown to reject community cleanup work by shackled
   inmates, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson vowed yesterday
   to press on. The gangs began work last week in New Bedford
   when two groups of five men, chained together at the ankle and
   watched by armed guards, painted a fence at a drug treatment
   center.


-- Mark A. Mandel