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.
In the file room of the fifth floor of the federal courthouse in downtown Houston, there’s a sheet of paper that has eclipsed the Texas constitution, the laws of our Legislature, and traditions that have guided us since the days of the Republic. It’s an ordinary piece of paper, a white sheet of onionskin, legal size. Words formed of block letters are written across its face, in ballpoint ink so pale that it appears to be gray. The handwriting is steady and careful; the writer apparently used a slip of pasteboard to guide his hand, because the bottoms of his letters all stop at precisely the same point, as if on an invisible line. The first words written on the page are those of a pauper’s oath, “Motion To Proceed In Forma Pauperis.” They were not intended to be but they have become words of irony. In the past five years, that sheet of paper and thousands of others indexed to it—the text and proceedings of the Ruiz v. Estelle case—have cost Texas taxpayers more than $150 million, including $4 million in legal fees alone. During the next ten years the suit could cost the state nearly $1 billion more.
The man whose signature appears beneath the writing is David R. Ruiz, a diminutive, intense convict with only seven years of formal education. In June 1972, when he penned his suit against employees of the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), the nation’s largest prison system, he was only 29. In the years since then, Ruiz has become a symbol of courage and tenacity, a figure mentioned almost daily in our press. In some quarters he’s a folk hero, the little man who beat a big, oppressive system, a David who brought a Goliath low. David Ruiz is the kind of man whom the Austin American-Statesman, without any cynicism, could quote describing himself as “a person whose only aims, hopes and desires are to improve, always to improve, and to contribute to humanity.” He is the standard-bearer of the Texas movement for penal reform.
But David Ruiz is no hero. He’s hardly deserving of admiration at all. In 1972 he already had a long prison record, for robberies he later admitted he had committed. After four stretches in reform school, Ruiz first went to prison in 1960 on an armed robbery charge. Released in 1968, he returned before the close of the year with three concurrent sentences, for another ill-fated stickup and two counts of robbery by assault. In June 1972 he was also wanted for murder on a warrant out of Ohio, where he had spent a part of the brief seven months between his prison terms. David Resendez Ruiz had not, as the wardens would say, been sent to prison for singing too loud in church.
He’d been less that a choirboy while wearing the white uniform of a Texas convict, too. During the trial of his lawsuit, he admitted that he had stabbed “approximately three or four” of his fellow inmates. He had escaped once and had several times been found with weapons. He had been put in solitary confinement some fifteen times for assaultiveness and had been denied parole for the same reason. David Ruiz didn’t show much respect for the law or for the rights of others. His explanation for one of the stabbings was “He had his hand in his pocket. I didn’t know what he had in his pocket, so I had a knife myself, and I used it.” Yet during his career as a convict, he’d filed a dozen suits alleging that the Texas Department of Corrections had engaged in unlawful practices and violated his rights. David Ruiz hasn’t shown much regard for the truth either. He is now back in prison, this time for aggravated perjury. Some of the charges he made in his petition weren’t credible, even by the farthest stretch of the imagination. For example, he asserted that the cells in which he had been confined—in various unairconditioned Texas prisons—were cold in May, August, and September. The question his suit raised was, Does a man like this, a hardened criminal, deserve the rights the rest of us have?
But Ruiz wasn’t the first or only convict to sue the Texas prison system, and in April 1974, after federal district judge William Wayne Justice set the Ruiz case on his docket, the judge married it to the suits of seven other prisoners. The most important allegations in their petitions concerned punishments administered to disciplinary violators in prison, an issue that federal judges had come to regard during the sixties as invoking constitutional protection. Using the prisoners’ petitions as a basis, Judge Justice engineered a proceeding—it isn’t over yet—in which issues not mentioned by the petitioners, like living space, recreation programs, and even prison landfill operations, also came under his review. As if the expert lawyers he appointed to represent the plaintiffs were not enough, the judge also brought in the United States Department of Justice as an adversary to the State of Texas. The trial of Ruiz v. Estelle, the most thorough in penal history, lasted eight months and heard 349 witnesses, most of them convicts. The result was a lengthy opinion from Judge Justice, followed by reams of court-approved settlement agreements, all aimed at reforming the prison system.
If you have ever visited a prison, it is easy to comprehend the desire for reform. Prisons are ugly, frightening places, and there is something fundamental in human nature that recoils from the idea of men and women locked up. I have toured all 27 Texas prison units. I talked to wardens, guards, shop and field supervisors, educators, and doctors. I looked at solitary confinement wings, cellblocks where transvestites were segregated, packing plants, canneries, and industrial shops. I sat in on disciplinary hearings, I listened at the doors of classrooms, I ate in prison cafeterias. What I learned was that prisons are inherently disheartening. They are places where men turn beets and other pigmented vegetables into eye shadow, lipstick, and rouge and where the nine-inch brass rods that support toilet floats are prized as instruments of mayhem. They are places where men dissolve antihistamines in coffee to get high and where soft whole fruits are valued as aids to masturbation, places where guards wear surgical gloves while serving food to convicts who are likely to throw feces back at them.
Physically, prisons resemble nothing so much as storm sewer tunnels or the undersides of freeway bridges, dim and full of noise. Hundreds of men in humbling cotton uniforms, unstarched and devoid of markings of rank, shuffle down hallways with the deepest resignation in their faces. Like prison reformers, I found myself thinking, “These men have become our victims” and “Nobody should be treated like that.” The very thought that men must spend their lives in a building where they can walk only when others open doors for them is repellent.
Prisons are barbaric places, but then, society doesn’t always have kind or polite or reliable solutions to problems. Sometimes we have to accept measures, like surgery and prisons, that we don’t like to contemplate, because as yet nothing better has come along to replace them. The Texas prisons, in the days before Ruiz, were not uplifting places—they aren’t that today and won’t ever be—but they served their purpose. They were finely turned to assure that discomfort and force served the interests of the guards and the order-keepers, not of the kept. It was a more efficient but no less ugly system because things were that way. Texas prisons were places where, in defiance of law, prisoners were punished by assault, by kicks and blows from guards and their convict allies, the building tenders. Men were thrown into darkened cells and kept incommunicado and wasting away on a diet of bread and water, as one old-time warden told me, “until their hearts got right.” Prisons were outposts in a world the rest of us didn’t want to enter, whose population we wanted to subdue. They thrived so long as discipline was harsh and summary. “The old system,” a veteran warden told me, “ran on fear.” Then he paused, as if in nostalgia for a boyhood sweetheart. “But you know what?” he continued. “It worked. We kept order that way.”
However ugly, the system did most of the things we can realistically expect a prison system to do. It did them well, and it did them cheaply. Before the trial of Ruiz v. Estelle, prisons in Texas were the safest, most productive, and most economical in the nation. Today, they are the most dangerous, yet their cost has more than quadrupled. Growing indiscipline has set new records and created new categories of cost. For example, last year so many convicts turned cafeteria spoons into shanks, or jailhouse knives, that the prisons had to abandon the metal dinnerware that had been in use for years and spend more than $30,000 to purchase disposable plastic utensils. At the system’s Coffield Unit alone, near Dallas, convicts who couldn’t be controlled by the new, Ruiz-era disciplinary code last year broke six thousand window panes, and convicts across the state vandalized so many ceramic commodes that they had to be replaced with sturdier stainless steel models at a cost of more that $500,000. In prisons, where guards do not carry arms, metal detectors were installed in hallways to keep convicts from carrying concealed shanks. By April of this year, ten inmates had been killed by their fellows, and the cost of keeping a man in prison had risen to more than $30 a day. The reformed Texas system is more difficult to control, more costly, and more dangerous to its occupants than ever before. To understand how the federal judiciary and state leadership destabilized the prison system, and why it will be years before our prisons can be returned to a sensible footing, it is necessary to understand something about the history and purpose of prisons.
Two Tiers of Justice
Prisons’ as we know them, are relatively new institutions. Before the American Revolution, jails existed in Europe and the British colonies, but their purpose was to hold accused men only until the conclusion of their trials. Upon conviction, felons were ordinarily sentenced to punishment by the cheap and swift means ancient society had provided: hanging, flogging, or exile. The first American prison was created in 1790 in Philadelphia at the urging of Quakers, who for humanitarian reasons advocated long-term solitary confinement as an alternative to capital and corporal punishment. Felons in the half-dozen prisons that the Quakers inspired were quartered alone in large, thick-walled cells that they never left. They took their meals there, and they bathed there. They were encouraged to spend their time in reading, self-improvement, crafts, and meditation, and they were prohibited from speaking to anyone but wardens, guards, and ministers. The Quakers hoped that in the quiet, wholesome solitude, felons would have a change of heart, rehabilitate themselves, and turn penitent. The word “penitentiary” is a reflection of that faded hope.
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