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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Gang activity inside a prison is most effective when it is tied to gang activity on the outside. Some of the inmate gangs that have come to dominate the tougher Texas prisons in the Ruiz era, notably the Hispanic Texas Syndicate, have also come to have daily, extensive business dealings in the free world. The dope trade links outside members to those inside, often through the cooperation of a guard. Because of the massive hirings necessary in the wake of Ruiz, the prison system employed men whose backgrounds it did not know or could not thoroughly check. One result is that guards have been turned, or recruited, to aid the dope trade. During 1984 most Texas wardens caught and fired two or three guards each for involvement in the dope trade. The firings didn’t stop the problem either. Wardens at some units estimate that as much as 20 per cent of the guard force may be involved. Wardens have always found pinches of marijuana inside prisons; today they’re finding pills, heroin, and, increasingly, cocaine. And drugs aren’t all that passes through the smuggling trade. The flammable liquid, probably butane or lighter fluid, that was used to set Calvin Williams on fire was a contraband item, and last fall guards at the Darrington Unit in Brazoria County came upon a pistol with ammunition that had been smuggled into the prison. According to the grapevine, it was to be used in the assassination of a chief guard.
Building tenders were appointed by the wardens and ultimately were subject to their control. The two men accused of torching Williams are not. They can be tried under the state’s attempted murder and felony assault statutes, but the prospect is unlikely to impress them, for a variety of reasons. Indictments are difficult to win in prison cases because witnesses, especially credible witnesses, are hard to find, and convicts are afraid to testify against each other. Last December a convict at the Eastham Unit was stabbed to death in a thirty-by-forty-foot recreation room where 35 other prisoners were watching television. All of them denied seeing any live violence. Briddle and Bridge are liable to punishment by prison authorities—a prospect that ten years ago would have made them miserable—but today’s disciplinary courts are toothless. The maximum penalty that can be imposed for any offense is fifteen days in solitary confinement plus revocation of the guilty convict’s good time. But Bridge and Briddle, like Williams, are on death row for 1980 murders. For all practical purposes, Bridge, Briddle, and Williams are free to commit new crimes.
So are other convicts, thousands of them. Some 8300 of the system’s 38,000 inmates, or about 22 per cent of the total, are under sentence for aggravated or armed offenses and, by the terms of a 1977 law, are ineligible for good-time credit toward parole. Thousands more are serving sentences so short that good time can make little difference in their parole or discharge dates. Others can’t control their behavior or just don’t give a damn whether they leave prison early or not. Solitary confinement, the last of the even remotely corporal punishments left on the books, is not an effective deterrent today. In fact, the evidence is that many convicts now seek placement in solitary confinement. In the Ramsey I Unit there are convicts who have spent 40 fifteen-day terms in solitary. To prolong their stays, convicts in solitary commit disciplinary offenses every fifteen days, usually by throwing urine, feces, or refuse onto their keepers. They want to remain in solitary because there they are celled alone and are exempt from work. Solitary confinement has come to mean privacy and ease.
In most of the seven tougher units there are not enough solitary confinement cells to meet demand. Wardens in some prisons have begun graduating chronic disciplinary offenders into a similar but milder category called punitive segregation. In seg, as it is called, convicts are still exempt from work but are entitled to prison privileges like having radios, watching television, participating in athletics, and going to the commissary. Today many prisoners who commit disciplinary violations are simply ambitious. They want to win a berth on a segregation wing.
The bomb that was found in Calvin Williams’ cell had been fashioned from two asthmatic inhalers. Before the Ruiz agreements, such inhalers had been forbidden in prisons, not because they could be used as weapons but because they could be abused as intoxicants. Compared with other prison weapons, though, the inhaler bomb was a luxury; a fluorescent light bulb, a crushed soft-drink can, a 55-gallon drum, and a pork-chop bone were among the weapons used by inmates last year. Weapons searches and metal detectors, both tried in Texas prisons last year, are desperate, largely futile attempts to grapple with the problem. Nothing short of a full return to Quaker conditions of imprisonment is likely to halt current prison violence. In a system where convicts work outside their cells, shank-making materials are everywhere to be found. Weapons are unnecessary in any case. One inmate was strangled last year. Not lack of access to weapons but fear of disciplinary action was what kept Texas convicts from slaughtering each other in the past. Now that fear is gone. It is so far gone that last year more than a thousand assaults on guards were recorded. Before Ruiz, assaults on guards were at a double-digit level.
The breakdown of discipline in the state’s rougher prisons affects not only convicts and guards but taxpayers as well. Ten years ago Texas could keep a man behind bars for about $1600 a year, construction and education costs excluded. Today the comparable figure it $8186. One of the reasons prisons cost more to operate is that convicts aren’t as productive as before. In Dr. Beto’s era, convict cotton pickers, like their free-world competitors, harvested between five hundred and one thousand pounds of cotton per man per day. Last year convicts opened the season by harvesting less than thirty pounds per day. For the first time in history, TDC administrators hired private contractors to harvest the cotton crop. Now, abandonment of the agricultural program is frequently advocated inside the system and at the Legislature.
During the Texas system’s calmer days, there was a silver lining to imprisonment: the educational program. Convicts went to school, if for no other reason than because school attendance exempted them from a morning’s work on the line. When refusals to report to the line began to go unpunished, school attendance dropped. The Windham School District, all of whose pupils are convicts, had an average daily attendance of 6500 in 1982-83. Its attendance dropped by more than 1000 during 1984-85, with no decrease in convict population. Beto’s chief rule for wardens was “Either you run the convicts, or they’ll run the prison.” Today attorneys and judges think that they are running the prison system. But what they’re doing is turning it over to the convicts.
Down to Detergent
The phrase wardens most often used in talking to me about their troubles was “loss of control.” According to them, discipline has been weakened so much by the Ruiz affair that our prisons are on the brink of disaster. Journalists are used to cries that the sky is falling, and as a group, we’re rightly cynical about them. But my impression after looking over Texas prisons is that the wardens aren’t bluffing, that neither they nor the Legislature is in control. That was brought home to me one day while I was sitting in the office of David Moya, warden at the Clemens Unit, a prison for first-time and second-time convicts, just inland from the southern tip of Galveston Island.
Moya, 35, is a former Hereford High School football player and military officer who wears cowboy boots and Western-cut clothes. He has bright brown eyes, a broad face with prominent cheekbones, and light, curly brown hair. His face is like a scoreboard; you can look at it and read his mood. On this particular afternoon, his face says that he thinks his job is thoroughly absurd.
Moya says that he’s got a special problem at Clemens today. A pair of attorneys—women—are inside the prison, interviewing convicts. They work for William Bennett Turner’s firm. The Ruiz case isn’t over—issues like living space and recreation programs for convicts are still being negotiated—and the job of the two lawyers is to determine what problems exist at Clemens. They have registered a complaint with Moya. A few days earlier, when two dozen convicts on one wing refused to turn out for line work, Moya ordered their diet restricted to sandwiches until they changed their minds. The sandwiches, Moya says, are prepared from a special menu drawn up by a dietitian to ensure adequate nutrition, but the lawyers say that food can no longer be used as a punishment. Moya has called the system’s central office in Huntsville for instructions. He is waiting for a return call when I walk in.
When the telephone rings, Moya picks up the receiver and says, “Yes. Yes. Boy, they’re really going to love this! I, I really hate to tell them, but if you say, yes.” His forehead wrinkles again, in deep, thick furrows. He cradles the receiver, then dials a three-digit number. Without identifying himself to the party on the other end of the line, Moya says, “Will you find those lady lawyers and tell them to stop by my office on their way out?”
Promptly there is a knocking at Moya’s door, and two women come briskly in. One of them, Elizabeth Laporte, is about thirty, with short blond hair, a thin face, and thin lips tightly closed. Gail Saliterman, also dressed in a business suit, is a little older, a little taller, and a little heftier. Her black hair is longer but disheveled, as if she is harried. There’s something brusque and unfriendly about both of them.
Moya sits down. “Well, you girls win again, I guess,” he says to the blonde, trying to be good-natured. She winces when he says “girls.” Then she glances at her dark-haired companion, who has pulled a legal notepad out of a big leather bag; she is writing something on the pad. “I mean, you’ve won about the sandwiches,” Moya says, as if he’s expecting the two lawyers to clap or cheer. They stare at him, saying nothing. He looks toward me, his brow wrinkled again, his thick lips pursed with nervousness, his eyebrows arched so sharply that they almost touch at the bridge of his nose. He looks away. “They called me from headquarters in Huntsville and said that you’re right. I can’t feed them sandwiches anymore,” he says to the blonde, still probing for a sign of acceptance.
“Well, now that we’ve got that straightened out,” snaps the dark-headed woman, “why don’t you do something about the white uniforms? A lot of them aren’t white—they’re dingy. I asked several of the men, and they said that they’re always that way. You should put more detergent in the laundry.”
Moya looks over at me with a pleading expression. A warden has a tough job, I’m sure he wants to tell me. Not only does he have to keep tabs on a thousand convicts and a staff of two hundred employees but he’s got a city to run too. There is a sewer plant at every prison unit; there’s a water system—Moya had a water shortage to contend with during one month last summer—there are boiler rooms and kitchens; most of them have industrial shops, gyms, farm sheds, fields, dairies, and the rest. And now there’s not enough detergent in the laundry. Worse, the days of discipline won’t be coming back to Texas prisons, but the lawyers will.
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