How They Ruined Our Prisons
Judge Justice is wrong. The governor is wrong. The Legislature is wrong. And the reformers are wrong. The answer to the Texas prison crisis is to run the jails the same way we did twenty years ago.
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Inmates who showed vigor at work, whose disciplinary records were clean, and who demonstrated an ability to hold their own—or prevail—over their peers became candidates for the supervisory level of the convict world: building tenders. Like squad leaders in an Army barracks, they wore three hats. They were janitorial overseers, institutional snitches and stand-in sergeants with disciplinary powers. They were the ward chairmen and sometimes the cops on the beat of their indoor neighborhoods. They were convicts who had risen from being one of “these thieves” or “those old thangs”—the usual guard terms for inmates—to that of men who could drink coffee, eat sandwiches, even play poker and wheedle favors from their keepers. Only one other class of convicts rivaled the buildings tenders: the class of bookkeepers, barbers, cooks, and yardmen assigned to system offices and bigwigs. But building tenders were arguably in a stronger position because their privileges and powers lasted around the clock. Some of them dictated television program selections, and some decided who could go to gym; sometimes they decided who could go to sick call. Each of them organized a clique of helpers and stooges, called runners and strikers, whose unofficial purpose was to protect the building tender from his enemies and to make sure that his enemies could not be protected from him. The cells of building tenders were never locked, and building tenders could take cafeteria meals at the hours of their choosing. A few of them kept parakeets or gerbils or boyfriends or weapons in their cells, from which some of them operated protection, loan shark, or male prostitution rackets. To find more opportunity than the building tenders had, a man had to make parole and start a new life in the free world.
Our Gangs
If the golden age in Texas penology has already been reached—and I think it has—it came during the sixties, as a result of expansion of the system’s industrial and educational programs. For the first time industries were inaugurated not merely to satisfy the prison system’s internal needs but to earn revenue as well. In new plant operations, convicts began producing highway signs, recapping tires, rebuilding vehicles, manufacturing furniture, and making computer and microfilm records for other state agencies. For the first time, too, free-world diplomas and tradesmen’s certificates were awarded to convicts, and long-termers began earning graduate degrees. This industrial program put the Texas prison system in a league with the Auburn-prison states, and its educational program was unmatched anywhere.
Because most prisons in the South operated with inmate supervision and on an agricultural basis, they were more cost-efficient than those elsewhere. But penologists took a dim view of them because their rural settings, their agricultural work programs, and their supervisory and racial practices seemed archaic. Texas stood out as an exception; its prisons were the showcases of the Southern prison model. Building tenders or their analogues, inmate guards, were a legacy of the beyond-the-walls leasing era and were used in most Southern prisons. But in some states they had inordinate powers. Inmates in Arkansas and Louisiana, for example, were given firearms to use while supervising work in the fields, and some of them were even assigned to duty in guard towers. Texas outlawed whipping in 1941, but in other Southern states—Arkansas is again the most notorious example—it continued, in full legality, well into the sixties. Early in that decade, Texas closed its last all-black prison unit. Convicts in Texas, as in the North, were segregated by cell-block or dormitory, while in neighboring Southern states black convicts continued to live out their prison lives in dilapidated units; new facilities were reserved for whites. Texas alone embodied the fiscal virtues of the Southern prisons without succumbing to their vices. It was controversial because of its success.
But some academics, some reformers, and even some penal administrators—the chief of Oklahoma’s prison system notably among them—shared a complaint about Texas prisons. They said that the Texas system was inhumanely restrictive, that its prisons were houses of discipline, not houses of hope. “The Texas Department of Corrections is probably the best example of slavery remaining in the country,” Arnold Pontesso, the former Oklahoma prisons director said on the eve of the Ruiz trial. Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer and head of the national prison project of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that what he saw in the state’s prisons reminded him of “the old autocratic lockstep penitentiary” of the early Auburn days. The president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, another prison watch committee, said that the orderliness of Texas prisons was based on “the quiet and respectfulness of men who are completely cowed.” What the critics suspected—indeed, what some of them said they knew—was that the object of the Texas system was to break the resentment, rebelliousness, and even the spontaneity of convicts by any means necessary. Its administrators had seemingly pledged themselves to three chilling watchwords—intimidation, control, and autocracy—and when modern-day rehabilitation programs were mentioned, they practically reached for their shotguns.
What the critics charged was true. Intimidation was the object of the system’s disciplinary procedures. Convicts who were late in returning to work from an appointment inside the prison were ordered, like tardy schoolchildren, to “stand on the wall” in the hallways of their units, sometimes with their noses or toes—or both—touching the wall. Laggards and disrespectful or deceitful inmates were subjected to humiliations similar to those used in Marine boot camp. Instead if being ordered to peel potatoes or do push-ups, they were put to work shelling peanuts during leisure hours or made to perch—sometimes overnight—atop wooden soft-drink cases stacked on end. More serious violations were punished more severely. Until the instrument was outlawed, assaultive and menacing prisoners were held to the floor and whipped about the buttocks with “the bat,” a leather strap attached to a wooden handle.
But those punishments, though not always legal, were publicly performed. Nobody denied that they existed, and nobody tried to keep the public and the prison system officials from knowing that they were frequently imposed. Throughout the system’s history, however, despite the efforts of reformers within and without, guards indulged in simple, straightforward, punitive assault. Sociologist James W. Marquart, who wrote his doctoral dissertation about his observations as a guard in 1981 and 1983—and who generally defends the use of force by guards—reported that at the tough Eastham Unit, disrespectful, foulmouthed convicts were sometimes given a “tune-up,” or ear-boxing. Prisoners who assaulted their fellows or threatened offices were sometimes taken to storerooms or officers where guards gave them an “ass-whipping,” in which flashlights and nightsticks replaced the outlawed bat. Convicts who used weapons to attack their peers or who assaulted officers were subdued, then often kicked and beaten with such severity that they required medical attention. When incidents like those were exposed, prison directors sometimes reprimanded, demoted, or fired the guards or wardens responsible—and sometimes they took no action at all. Apologists said that abuse was inevitable in any system of authority, and guards muttered under their breath that it was impossible to maintain discipline among convicts without resort to swift, corporal action.
The excesses of the guards, however, paled in comparison with those of the building tenders, who used violence not only to comply with requests from guards but also for motives all their own. During the Ruiz trial, a former building tender provided the following account of a sexual assault by two other building tenders, Butch Ainsworth and Charlie Robertson.
They wrapped a wet blanket around him first; plugged an extension cord into a socket. The ends of the extension cord were insulated, and they stuck this energized electric cord to the wet blanket. This wasn’t getting the results that they wanted, so they unwrapped [the] inmate . . . made him stand up on the commode in Ainsworth’s cell and then placed the electric wires to his body and into the water. This caused [the] inmate . . . to scream from extreme pain, to begin to tremble, even to cry, and to submit to the homosexual act.
Sociologist Marquart says that during his time in the Eastham Unit several building tenders openly kept chains, clubs, and shanks in their cells and lockers. In at least one unit, Ramsey I in Brazoria County, similar weapons were confiscated from building tenders by a junior officer, only to be returned to them by his superiors the following day. The evidence from a variety of sources indicates that intimidation, ranging from humiliating punishments to dietary restrictions to simple assault, was always in use in Texas prisons. Some guards and administrators protested the frequency of its use or its application in individual cases, but nobody believed that the prisons could be managed without it.
The Texas prison system not only punished its unruly convicts by summary physical means but, as its critics pointed out, it also restricted the behavior of all inmates at almost every turn. Convicts were forbidden to draw, hang, or tape pictures on the walls of their dorms and cells and to possess any item of commerce—even harmless items, like cowboy boots—not sold in prison commissaries. They were ordered to address their keepers as “boss” or “sir” or by titles of rank and to make up their bunks each morning before work. They were not allowed to grow moustaches or beards or to let their hair hang below the ear, and the grooming code for guards and civilian employees included the same restrictions. Prison chiefs, like military commandants, believed that some rules were necessary merely for discipline’s sake.
Thousands of restrictions were enforced for what were termed security reasons. Incoming mail was censored, and racist and gun-related publications were banned; convicts could watch Grand Dragons on television newscasts but not communicate with them by mail or in person. The number of visitors was limited, and the names of prospective visitors were cleared through law enforcement agencies. Convicts could visit with their mothers but not with their real or suspected underworld buddies. Prisoners were allowed to make telephone calls for emergency reasons, but only when the tolls were reversed and only in the warden’s or the chaplain’s office; because prisoners were denied access to pay phones, they could not, as did the federal prisoner who once called me, charge their conversations to fake or purloined credit card numbers. There were even restrictions on medications. Judge Justice was displeased to learn that asthmatic inmates were not allowed to keep inhalers in their cells or lockers. Yeast was weighed and registered like radioactive material, and guards kept a close eye on the bread-baking process because any convict who could pinch an ounce or two of yeast or dough could use it to make “chock,” or jailhouse hooch. Few prisoners were allowed to go home on furloughs; administrators said that many who did came back with drugs secreted in balloons in their bowels. When going to their jobs or the cafeteria, convicts had to walk a line, literally—lines were painted on the hallway floors—in single file; guards said that it was easier to keep an eye on them that way. Texas wardens and guards believed that it was fair to make the convict majority suffer for the likely transgressions of the minority because the totality was certifiably errant. The problem was not so much that of knowing which convicts to trust, guards said, as that of remembering that none were to be trusted unless the prison system could benefit.
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