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Rush to Justice
An East Texas cop, a drug addict, a convict, a novelist—and now a policy wonk? Absolutely, says Kim Wozencraft, whose rallying cry is prison reform.
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In fact, Wozencraft learned from the Texas Department of Public Safety that someone—presumably one of the several dozen defendants facing long prison sentences—had hired a hit man to kill her. “That just about sent me over the edge,” she says. “I was just waiting to die. Every day I was thinking, ‘When are they going to come get me?’” Holed up in a trailer on the outskirts of town during the trials, Wozencraft and her partner finally had their worst fears come true: One night, under the cover of darkness, the barrel of a shotgun poked through an open window and tapped her on the forehead while she lay asleep on a couch. She grabbed the gun barrel as the unseen assailant blasted her partner’s leg and arm, almost killing him.
Soon after the shooting, Wozencraft quit the police department, got free and clear of her drug addiction, and moved to San Antonio, where she joined the Air Force. “I was going to study Russian at the Defense Language Institute and learn how to translate Russian broadcasts.” She smiles and sighs. “But the day I got out of basic training, there was a little news blip on the radio about the FBI looking into our undercover investigations back in Tyler, and I knew right then that this was it, that I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Word had spread that Wozencraft and her partner had been pressured by their superiors to plant evidence on certain defendants and that while undercover they had used illegal drugs. “I had gotten on the stand in several trials, and of course the defense attorney always asked if I smoked marijuana with his client or did cocaine with his client, and I would say no. Initially I stayed with the story when the FBI agents came to talk to me. I kept up the blue wall of silence—that we never used drugs, that we never set anyone up. But eventually I decided to tell the truth, to deal with it, and then maybe start over. I certainly had hopes of probation, but I understood that most likely I would go to jail. I knew that if I went to trial, I could have lied and the jury would probably have believed me, because they chose to—no one wanted to believe that the local police in a town of eighty thousand are corrupted by drugs. But I’m glad that I made the decision to come clean. I would do it again.”
In 1981, after her admission to prosecutors, Wozencraft was convicted of perjury and civil rights violations and sentenced to eighteen months at the federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky. (Her partner was sentenced to three years. The Tyler chief of police went to trial, testified that he knew nothing about the illegal activities, and was promptly acquitted.) “I was terrified,” Wozencraft says. “The prison had a capacity of eight hundred and there were thirteen hundred of us. They had started to double-bunk. The noise level at this place was just astonishing. Initially I told the other inmates that I was in for cocaine—here I was pretending I hadn’t been a cop, working undercover again. But eventually I was honest about what I had been on the outside, and to my surprise, everyone was great about it. They were interested in it. They said, ‘My brother-in-law was a cop, my cousin was a cop, I used to date a cop.’ It’s a cliché, but it became clear that the line between criminals and cops is thin. They function in the same world.”
Wozencraft describes the three-hundred-acre prison as a small town where the inmates did all the labor. Wearing her fatigue pants, T-shirt, and steel-toed boots, she spent her days riding around the warden’s vegetable garden on a 1940 Ford tractor; she spent her nights in her cell reading, writing in her journal, and sharing stories with the other inmates. Oddly enough, she says her time in prison was good for her. “It was one of the best things ever to happen to me. I had grown up thinking, naively, that this is America, the land of the free. Being in prison was the first time in my life that I truly understood the value of intellectual freedom.”
After her release in 1983, Wozencraft spent time in a halfway house in Dallas and then moved to New York, where she fleshed out her prison journals in hopes of becoming a writer. She enrolled at Columbia University, earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and writing in 1986, and was accepted into the school’s master of fine arts program. “I wrote a six-hundred-page thesis, a novel,” she says. “Robert Towers, the director of the program at the time, suggested that I get rid of the first three hundred pages, which I did. I rewrote the second half, which became Rush, submitted it to an agent, and within a few weeks got a $30,000 advance, which was an astonishing figure for me. I thought, ‘You mean I can now stay home and write?’” Rush quickly became a best-seller and earned Wozencraft critical praise from around the country. The New York Daily News called it “a great book [that] . . . can be read as both an immorality tale and a classic of street lit.” The Houston Chronicle said the novel was “intensely written, [with] . . . the wallop of a shotgun blast.”
In 1991 a movie version of Rush hit theaters, with a screenplay by Pete Dexter, a soundtrack by Eric Clapton, and terrific performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Patric, and Gregg Allman as a drug-dealing nightclub operator. “I was pregnant when I saw the movie in a theater for the first time,” Wozencraft says. “I was scared that I would go into labor just from the visual impact of the stuff, but I loved the flavor of it. The film captured the total sense of menace of the East Texas drug world.” Two years later she published her second novel, Notes From the Country Club, a gritty look at life in the psychiatric ward of the Fort Worth Federal Corrections Institute. At its heart, the book is about domestic violence and the difficulty many women—even someone like the protagonist, who is a well-educated public relations executive—have in leaving abusive mates.
In 1994 the founder of Prison Life invited Wozencraft and her husband to contribute their editorial skills and much of their personal savings to help keep the foundering magazine in print. “When I got out of prison, my first impulse was to get as far away from that world as possible,” Wozencraft concedes. “But I’ve gradually come back to it. Prison Life is not about letting all the criminals free—it’s about making justice more just. People who do horrible crimes need to be locked up, but there’s a myth that prisons are filled with violent people. Even in the state joints, the level of violent offenders hovers around fifteen or twenty percent. Much of crime is not violent in nature. These people could do community service, clean up the parks, make restitution to their victims, do something other than be stuck in a cage.
“If it was up to me,” she continues, “I would change the way we regulate drugs—legalize marijuana like alcohol and tobacco, and keep hard drugs under the supervision of a doctor, as is done in England—which would cut the prison population by half and would help people instead of hurting them. I’m also really opposed to the privatization of prisons. It’s slavery. We’ve locked up more than a million people in this country, and we’re doing it so corporations can make money, so politicians can get votes—it has nothing to do with justice and helping people straighten out their lives.”
Wozencraft glances down at the copies of her two novels and the most recent issue of Prison Life next to my plate—accomplishments born directly of her experiences with the criminal justice system. “I mean, I messed up, and I went to prison, and I’ve tried to come back out and contribute to society. Many prisoners don’t get that chance. I believe in justice. But I believe in restorative justice.”
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