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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The suit was heard in 1969 in the court of federal district judge Woodrow Seals of Houston, who upheld the state in an opinion chock-full of praise for Dr. Beto and the Texas prisons. Novak reached the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1971, and that court’s majority found that solitary confinement served a legitimate purpose as “a deterrent and a punitive force.” But in a broad and lengthy dissent, one justice called for “regular meals, light and bedding in solitary cells.” Anticipating that the dissent would attract additional support in the Supreme Court, Beto ordered some changes. In the solitary confinement wings of his prisons each cell had two doors: a traditional barred door and a solid steel door that shut out light and sound. Beto ordered the solid doors left open, which allowed the prisoners to talk to each other, and also replaced the bread-and-water diet with vegetarian fare. His precaution was legally unnecessary. In October 1972, when the Supreme Court reviewed the Novak record, it voted not to give the case a new hearing. In effect, the practice of solitary confinement, including the bread-and-water diet, had been upheld.
The Texas system had won the Novak case, but only on the face of the matter. It had lost in two important ways. First, in anticipation of judicial scorn, Beto had mollified the system’s tough disciplinary code. Second, the system had acquired a formidable new adversary, William Bennett Turner, a San Francisco attorney who had joined in arguing the case. Turner, a handsome, dark-haired man then in his early thirties, was a Texas native who had been raised in the Midwest and educated at Harvard. He was, by most estimates, the nation’s leading expert on penal law, and he was an open partisan of convicts. He was opposed to prison punishments, solitary confinement included, and he believed that when they couldn’t be attacked in the courts as cruel and unusual they could be attacked on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits deprivations of liberty without due process of law. By winning decisions that increased the paperwork and procedural steps needed to punish prisoners, Turner believed he could make such punishments a rare resort. His strategy, essentially one of erecting bureaucratic obstacles to punishment, threatened the future of Texas prison discipline and drew the attention of a judge not yet involved in prison affairs, William Wayne Justice. Two years later, when Judge Justice decided to appoint an attorney to represent the Ruiz petitioners, William Bennett Turner was the man he sought.
The System Crumbles
The Ruiz case didn’t go to trial until October 1978, and the interval served the plaintiffs well. During the six years between the suit’s filing and the first day of trial testimony, federal courts paved the way to victory with rulings on behalf of prisoners, and Texas prisons became crowded—nearly 1000 of the 26,000 inmates were sleeping on the floors of their units—creating yet another issue for litigation. For more than two years before the trial opened, expert witnesses for the plaintiffs, as well as attorneys for the Justice Department and Turner’s firm, had walked the hallways of the Texas prison system, inspecting it from top to bottom, interviewing convicts and taking depositions from prison officials, building a case. The trial, held in Houston, provided a forum for a dozen complaints that the original petitioners hadn’t mentioned, like crowding, plumbing, and work rules, as well as the disciplinary grievances that were the heart of the case.
So exhaustive was the trial that not until December 1980, fifteen months after it ended, did Judge Justice summarize his findings of fact in a memorandum opinion that was 118 pages long. The memorandum opinion was a warning. It didn’t order changes but instead indicated the areas in which Judge Justice planned to order changes in a later decree. To alleviate overcrowding, for example, Justice indicated that he would ban double-celling. He also said that he wanted the system’s eight hundred building tenders stripped of all authority and replaced by about four thousand salaried guards. He wanted medical care radically upgraded, and he wanted an end to summary discipline.
Judge Justice was also critical of solitary confinement, even in its mollified form. The diet in solitary was nutritionally inadequate, he pointed out, causing prisoners to lose weight. “It is apparent that, by this diet,” the judge’s opinion said, “TDC attempts to starve its most troublesome inmates into abject submission.” Because prisoners there sometimes suffered hunger pangs, Justice found that solitary confinement constituted corporal punishment. Citing the federal prison system, which had abandoned the punishment years before, the judge also found that solitary confinement was penologically unnecessary. What he didn’t point out was that year in, year out, with fewer prisoners than the Texas system and a lower proportion of violent offenders, the federal system had led the nation in the number and rate of inmate murders.
The four months between the judge’s memorandum opinion and his decree spelling out the changes and ordering them were the most critical in the whole Ruiz affair. The opinion warned the state’s attorneys that they had to settle several issues out of court or be prepared to appeal. Spokesmen and attorneys for the state were divided about what to do. Ed Idar, a middle-aged assistant attorney general who had been in charge of the case since its inception, thought that appeal should be the chief line of defense. He also argued that if settlement talks were begun, the state should not settle any issues until all of them could be settled in a single pact. He was especially insistent in regard to medical issues. Mark White, then attorney general, and several TDC attorneys disagreed with Idar, and their views prevailed. Negotiations with the plaintiffs’ attorneys began. The strategy the state pursued was to seek agreements in anticipation of the judge’s decree and, with luck, at terms more merciful to the state than those the judge was expected to impose. Or at least that’s what White and his cothinkers say today.
The record tells a different story, at least where several issues are concerned—most important among them, solitary confinement. Despite his distaste for the practice, Judge Justice in his memorandum opinion conceded that the controlling precedent regarding solitary confinement was Novak v. Beto. Since that case had upheld a stiffer solitary regimen than was formally in practice during the Ruiz suit, solitary confinement should not have been an issue for settlement. Had the judge ordered that it be further weakened, the likelihood is that his order would have been struck down on appeal. Despite that, when the settlement talks began, William Bennett Turner demanded that the state make concessions. He wanted three full meals a day provided to convicts in solitary, and he wanted the absolute maximum time spent in solitary reduced to fifteen days for any single disciplinary offense, including murder and assaults on guards. He also wanted the procedures for confining men to solitary greatly expanded and documented at every step. In a word, he wanted an end to summary, quasi-corporal punishment in Texas prisons. Rather than waiting for the judge to rule and preparing to appeal any changes he might order in solitary confinement, attorney general White conceded the issue, he says, with the approval of prison director W. J. Estelle. The state gave up the ground it had won from Turner ten years earlier in Novak v. Beto, and it showed its willingness to settle issues in the case without winning anything in return. The era of swift, certain retribution inside Texas prisons ended, and with the solitary confinement pact, the state began, piece by piece, to surrender its leverage in the case.
Their Gangs
One afternoon late last September, inmate Calvin J. Williams jumped from his bunk in a panic. He was on fire. Someone had thrown a flammable liquid onto him. A makeshift bomb was in the cell with him too. Despite his pain, Williams picked up his mattress and flung it onto the bomb, preventing its detonation. As he flailed at the flames on his body, someone stuck him with a knife. When guards arrived seconds later, they found two convicts standing outside Williams’ cell, each of them holding a shank at the ready.
The incident involving Williams and the two shank wielders, James Michael Briddle and Warren Eugene Bridge, occurred at the Ellis I Unit, near Huntsville, one of seven prisons that the TDC had set aside for its most hardened offenders. The incident presents a nearly complete picture of the loss of control at those seven tough-guy units—the most vital prisons in the system—in the days since the Ruiz case undermined prison discipline.
The men suspected of assaulting Calvin Williams were not building tenders; the building tender system had been dismantled by order of Judge Justice. But human beings in any setting establish pecking orders. Convicts are different only in that violence plays an inordinately large role in theirs. The building tenders have been replaced, in the eyes of judges and officials, by uniformed guards, but they’ve been replaced in the prisoners’ eyes by the leaders of convict gangs. The new bullies on the cellblock are appointees of the Texas Syndicate, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mandingo Warriors, and any of a dozen other gangs that are organized, usually along racial lines, behind prison walls.
The gangs are such deadly organizations that the Bandidos motorcycle club, a terror on the outside, is regarded in the prisons as a band of hippies bent on peacefully passing prison time. Convicts in gangs kill and maim to collect extortion, to win or preserve hegemony in the prison drug traffic, and even to satisfy requirements for gang membership. They also kill and maim for purely racial reasons. Calvin Williams is black. His two suspected assailants are white, and one of them bears the tattoos that mark members of the white-supremacist Aryan Brotherhood.
Last year there were 404 armed inmate-on-inmate assaults in the Texas prison system, a record for mayhem. Gang members were involved in most of the attacks. Some of their victims weren’t as lucky as Calvin Williams: 25 convicts were killed by their peers in Texas prisons last year. In the days before the removal of the building tenders, inmate-on-inmate killings averaged fewer than three a year. If the building tenders were a gang, as the Ruiz plaintiffs alleged, they were a gang that stopped short of murder and even prevented murder. During their reign the murder rate in Texas prisons was lower than in most cities. It was safer to walk the hallways of prisons in Texas, where murderers abounded, than to walk the open streets of Houston. That’s not true anymore. Our gang, the building tenders, has been replaced by new gangs, their gangs; convicts are moving up on the prison social scale, while we and our values are moving down. Their gangs are racist and murderous; our gangs weren’t.
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