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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Another characteristic of the Texas system was the autonomy of its prison director and wardens. Legislators happily stayed out of prison affairs so long as costs were low and scandals rare. County sheriffs and district grand juries did not look behind the walls of a system that sent them few criminal complaints to investigate, even though they knew that crimes were committed in prison. The state’s prison board, composed of gubernatorial appointees who served on a part-time, unsalaried basis, was without penal expertise and usually rubber-stamped proposals from the system’s director, the autocrat of the prison world. Though newsmen and politicians from time to time created an uproar over prison conditions, reform efforts at the state level were always too short-lived, too ill-informed, and too impotent at the Legislature to effect fundamental changes. Nothing disturbed the hegemony of the system director and his wardens, even if they sometimes had to discard old punishments and procedures.
The system director, appointed by the prison board, named the wardens at each unit. The paragon of prison directors was Dr. George Beto, a former Lutheran educator and prison board member, hired in 1962. Beto, now a professor at the Criminal Justice Center at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, is a large, lumbering man with twinkling eyes and a pastor’s pulpit voice. Even during his forties, when he took over the prison system, he had a grandfatherly air. His administrative style was equally paternal.
Beto’s predecessor, O. B. Ellis, had begun centralizing authority in the director’s office at the expense of the wardens, and Beto continued the process. Not content to read reports from his wardens, he made weekly visits to the units, stalking their hallways and fields, making inspections, observing and chatting. Touring was his chief administrative tactic, and it won him the nickname “Walking George.” “I got around quite a bit,” Beto says, “because that gave both the employees and the convicts the idea that I might know what was going on.”
In those days convicts from all fifteen prisons were sent to the Walls Unit in Huntsville for release. Most mornings Beto walked across the street from his office to the Walls, where he randomly interviewed outgoing prisoners. He also established a practice allowing convicts to send sealed, uncensored letters to him. The reports he got from prisoners were often petty, baseless, and exaggerated, he says, but like his walking visits, they put wardens and guards on notice that they were under scrutiny. Occasionally Beto ordered wardens to be transferred from one unit to another, sometimes with the sole object of dislodging entrenched regimes, and several times he reprimanded, demoted, and fired wardens and guards for incompetence. His paternal presence and his firsthand knowledge of prison details won him the trust of legislators, who, to help him keep an eye on life in distant units, provided Walking George with an airplane and a pilot.
George Beto and his wardens believed that rehabilitation could happen, but they didn’t believe it could be wrought. They believed that men could be prepared for gainful, lawful lives, but they didn’t believe that criminals could be remotivated by the prison experience. What they observed was that age, not social programming, sapped the propensity for crime; about two thirds of the young men released from prison returned after committing new crimes, but mature men, 35 and older, didn’t come back so often. Rehabilitative programs in the Texas system matched the view of its leading personnel. Texas prisons taught convicts the habit of hard work and provided them with educational and technical skills that could ease a man’s transition to an honest vocation. Prisoners were encouraged to attend church and sessions of the convict chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, but group therapy wasn’t available behind bars, and psychological counseling was rare. The TDC rehabilitation program, its critics said, was a nineteenth-century program, behind its times. It placed the responsibility for rehabilitation not on the shoulders of the director or the system or the state but on those of the convict.
Beto made no secret of his doubts about rehabilitation, and he even scandalized critics by saying that sterilization of sex offenders would be an effective means of rehabilitating them. His comments and the slow pace at which the TDC put psychologists on the payroll heated up the rehabilitation controversy, which in Texas, as everywhere, was anything but new.
During most of the present century the prevailing theory of rehabilitation, called the treatment model, has been that criminal behavior, like alcoholism, is most effectively corrected when regarded as a disease. Beginning in the Progressive era, and especially during the fifties and sixties, social scientists and reformers experimented with a whole new gamut of “cures”—psychotherapy, drug therapy, milieu therapy, even plastic surgery—as means to rehabilitation. Elected officials found relief in the effort. By promising rehabilitation, they could vow to reduce penal expenditures and at the same time ease the worries of constituents who had family members behind bars. But in the end, what researchers found was what Beto and the old-line wardens had known—that men turn away from crime with age.
In 1974 New York sociologist Robert Martinson and a team of research assistants found that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” One of the exceptions Martinson found was too radical for acceptance. In a twenty-year Danish experiment, sex criminals were offered release from prison if they would submit to castration. More than 50 per cent of those who refused the offer returned to prison after committing new crimes, but only 12 per cent of the sterilized group came back. It was that experiment that Dr. Beto had alluded to when he’d mentioned sterilization of sex offenders. He spoke not from the barbarism his detractors suspected but from an informed penologist’s point of view.
Martinson’s findings were checked by other researchers, and throughout the seventies new reports were added to the balance, with generally compatible results. What researchers of the decade found was that men released from prison in Europe and North America usually returned after committing new offenses, regardless of the programs available for rehabilitation. Today most penologists and prison administrators shy away from touting rehabilitation. “Prison is not the place where you’re going to improve a man’s character,” says current Texas prisons director Ray Procunier, a veteran of the once-innovative California system.
The Reformers
Dr. Beto resigned as prisons director in August 1972. His timing was felicitous. Beto’s handpicked successor, pink-faced W. J. Estelle, a second-generation California prisons manager, would have a much tougher time for reasons largely beyond his control. The nation was still living in an era of what appeared to be limitless prosperity. Pronouncements about a War on Poverty and a Great Society had convinced us that we could guarantee a secure and uplifting living standard to all our countrymen, and prisoners were in many ways seen as a displaced sector of the poor. The experiences of the civil rights movement, of the Vietnam debacle, and of the Watergate scandal had by the mid-seventies also disposed many Americans to trust not public officials but their accusers. In that era, when Eldridge Cleaver, the Soledad Brothers, and Attica convicts were nearly heroes, prison administrators did not fare well in the courts. Altogether, the penal systems of forty states and territories came under federal review during the decade, with results similar to those in Texas.
The seventies were also a time of sky-rocketing crime rates, when prison populations doubled everywhere. The decade’s new convicts were not only more numerous but they were more trouble too. They lived by the tempo of prime-time television, where violence was so common as to appear normal, and as a group, they were more violent than their predecessors, both on the streets, where the murder rate doubled, and behind bars. They were the products of a less regimented society. By 1970 two fixtures of adolescent discipline, the schoolteacher’s paddle and the drill sergeant’s push-up orders, were illegal. Convicts expected the same prohibition to apply in prison. On the streets most cons had learned to turn to their advantage the Warren court rights for suspects and defendants, and they expected the same kind of constitutional leverage in prison. The new generation was less prepared for institutional life than any in memory. The constitutional question they and their lawyers began to raise in the courts boiled down to this: how much can prisons punish, confine, and deprive?
For years the courts had stayed out of penal affairs. The attitude of most judges was expressed in an 1871 Virginia court finding that “the prisoner has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights [and] is, for the time being, the slave of the state.” But the prevailing view was exposed to an obvious incongruity: the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and it is difficult to see whom that prohibition was supposed to protect if not convicts. Our Founding Fathers apparently meant to grant even felons the right to humane punishment and, perhaps, other rights as well.
The change in judicial posture began with a mere one hundred words from the Supreme Court. In its decision in Cooper v. Pate, a 1964 case brought by an Illinois double murderer, the court reversed an appellate finding that the plaintiff had no constitutional grounds on which to sue his keepers for the right to receive literature from the Black Muslim sect. The decision in Cooper v. Pate ended the long-standing presumption that convicts had no rights and opened the door to an epoch in which suits against penal administrators would successively minimize the consequences of a felony conviction.
After Cooper v. Pate, prison administrators began to take conciliatory and preemptive steps. Beto even invited a Houston Muslim minister to hold services in Texas prisons. But the Texas system, like most others, was peppered with suits anyway. The most important of them was Novak v. Beto, a 1968 suit that challenged solitary confinement on Eighth Amendment grounds as cruel and unusual punishment.
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