Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Great Texas Prison Mess
During the gargantuan buildup of the Texas Prison System, everyone wanted in on the action—even Andy Collins, the boss himself. Here’s how greed, fear, and VitaPro produced the state’s costliest scandal.
“IT WAS THE STUPIDEST THING THE STATE of Texas has ever done,” Andy Collins said about his crowning achievement, his oversight of the greatest expansion of prison beds in the history of the free world. “The public was absolutely hoodwinked into thinking that the only way the crime problem could ever be solved was prosecution and incarceration. We should’ve been interceding at an earlier age, dealing with these kids before they ever became crooks. But instead, we’re just taking juveniles and feeding them directly into the system. I mean, look who was behind it all. Prosecutors, cops, politicians—all of them with a self-serving agenda.
“And the media,” Collins declared as he leaned over the patio table at his suburban home just north of Houston, delivering the accusation with a martyr’s relish. “The goddam media did as much as anyone to build all those prisons because they fanned the flames of public hysteria. The issue of crime has become entertainment. Turn on the TV. Cops. Rescue 911. That kind of crap.”
As recently as last December, Collins had been the most powerful bureaucrat in Texas, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). Now it was March, and with news of scandal breaking all around him, his brief second career as a prison consultant was in shambles. By all rights he should have been a basket case. But here he was, wearing the standard yuppie regalia of khakis, loafers, and tortoiseshell glasses, puffing appreciatively on a long cigar, and sipping at a single-malt Scotch while his dachshund yapped away in the back yard and two of his daughters appeared on the patio to hit up their dad for movie money. The tableau was eerily serene; the 45-year-old Midland native with the well-padded cheeks and preadolescent grin was one hell of a lot tougher than he looked. He was placing calls to headhunters about job opportunities that had little to do with the way he had spent the past 23 years of his life, and former subordinates in Huntsville were now trashing him in the papers. And yet Andy Collins had not lost an ounce of his old charm and could still downshift from scholarly correctional minutiae to Bubba banter with the ease of a bona fide political master.
“And now,” he said, his laughter both sour and triumphant, “now we’re worried about the aftertaste of VitaPro! People were willing to feed these sumbitches dog food! And now they’re worried about an inmate’s aftertaste.”
But VitaPro, the soybean-based powder that Texas prisons have been using as a meat substitute, had nothing on the bitter aftertaste of irony that so bedevils Collins nowadays. He stood center stage as the state carried out a frantic buildup that transformed a once-provincial agency centered in rural East Texas into a mighty bureaucracy with outposts in 72 towns—the biggest prison system concocted by any free society in history. From 1990 to 1995, the TDCJ’s annual operating budget ballooned from $700 million to $2.2 billion. All of a sudden, the gloomy prison business was the hottest thing going, and money grabbers poured in from all over North America to get in on the action. Private-prison operators reaped more profits in Texas than anywhere else in the nation. Construction firms and subcontractors raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. Vendors great and small, proffering a myriad of esoteric wares—state-of-the-art mousetraps, law journals for prison libraries, grease trap-cleaning systems, taut-wire intrusion-detector fences, and, yes, VitaPro—paid handsome fees to self-styled “corrections consultants” or to lobbyists who would dispense campaign contributions wherever influence could be peddled. Even cities got in on the act by competing for the new state jails that might bring jobs and economic salvation; among the winners were Bonham, Dalhart, Raymondville, and Henderson—towns so removed from major crime centers that the goal of keeping inmates near their communities was negated. The Texas prison expansion became a feeding frenzy, and the unenviable task of overseeing it fell to Andy Collins. Eventually it began to dawn on him that there had to be a better way to make a living—and that way, of course, was all around him.
The story of how Andy Collins set himself up to make money as a consultant for VitaPro and other businesses to which he had doled out lucrative contracts began to unravel in early January, just four days after Collins officially left the TDCJ to become a consultant. Law enforcement officials had arrested a man named Patrick Graham for allegedly accepting money in exchange for trying to use his influence to spring a TDCJ inmate. In Graham’s wallet was a business card identifying him as a broker for VitaPro, a company that had been awarded a $33.7 million contract by Collins six months earlier. But Graham had a more ominous link to the former TDCJ director: He was Collins’ brand-new business partner. In the ensuing weeks, reporters found other contracts Collins had tendered without the approval of the appointed board that oversees the TDCJ. What has emerged is the tawdriest government spectacle since the Sharpstown scandal 25 years ago. Governor George W. Bush has enlisted the services of the Texas Rangers and the FBI to investigate what he has described as “sweetheart contracts”—implying that Collins may have benefited illegally from such deals. Though Collins has not yet been formally accused of breaking any laws, that may say more about the wording of the laws than the integrity of the ex-director.
But in the rush to judge Andy Collins, the media and the politicians have failed to judge his accomplices in the great prison scandal: themselves. So eager were they to sate the public’s bloodlust for locking up criminals and throwing away the key that they helped create a climate of hysteria in which corruption could flourish. The dust from the prison expansion has now settled, and we are left with a sorry mess indeed. The state prison system, which before the buildup was so overcrowded that it had to turn inmates loose after only a few months behind bars, now has 146,000 prison beds but only 129,000 inmates. Eight new prisons have been built but remain closed, for the simple reason that we have no use for them. For that matter, the agency has a warehouse full of VitaPro that it cannot sell and a state-of-the-art meat-packing facility in Amarillo that sat dormant for half a year. To fill empty classrooms, it has “pre-release” classes for inmates who are on their way in as well as on their way out and substance-abuse courses for inmates who have already taken such courses. The TDCJ steadfastly maintains that the empty prisons will be full within a year, but its past record of predicting its future needs has been poor and, anyway, the TDCJ’s argument misses the larger problem: While our public schools have gone to seed and state programs for the elderly have dwindled to near-nothingness, the prison system has accumulated a wasteful embarrassment of riches. Is this what Texans wanted?
Exploiting the cloud cover of “urgency,” prisons were built poorly and at an exorbitant cost. Some 12,000 “emergency beds” were thrown together in 180 days at the height of the hysteria in late 1994. Those particular prison units have a life expectancy of about twenty years, as opposed to the fifty-to-seventy-year life expectancy of the standard TDCJ prison; they are nothing more than minimum-security warehouses, and yet they carry the price tag of maximum-security prisons. Construction of the $10.3 million Ama-rillo meat-packing plant was also deemed for some strange reason an “emergency” back in 1994, a decision that cost the taxpayers probably an extra $1 million even though the facility was built partly using free inmate labor and even though it still lacks essential (and expensive) items like grease traps and bar screens. The TDCJ, according to its own internal figures, also spent $3.3 million more than was necessary to build facilities containing thousands of beds for substance-abuse treatment, which state officials had decided was an urgent need—only to be told later that many of these beds weren’t needed after all. (The TDCJ is now spending even more money reconfiguring those beds into something it can actually use.) And let us not forget the six Mode II (county-run) private prisons that TDCJ awarded to high bidders in early 1994, an expenses-be-damned approach then justified by the belief that the treatment programs offered by the private companies were urgently needed. Two of those prisons sit vacant today, and the prison system may ultimately convert all six into standard facilities—which of course will cost more money to accomplish. Beneath this statewide fiasco lurks not merely Collins, but an entire culture of loose money and looser ethics—a culture, in other words, whose most enthusiastic participants exhibited a moral compass not unlike that of the state’s sleaziest inmates.
THE EAST TEXAS TOWN OF HUNTSVILLE is not much different today than it was when James Anthum “Andy” Collins, a dough-faced college kid of nineteen, transferred from the University of Mississippi to Sam Houston State University in the fall of 1970. Huntsville remains the company town of the Texas prison system, which provides more than twice as many jobs (5,219) to Walker County as Sam Houston State, the next biggest employer and itself a participant in the field of criminology. Thanks to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the town of 27,142 (not including the 7,450 inmates housed in Huntsville) is recession-proof and demographically blessed by East Texas standards, its restaurants and bars packed nightly with accountants, lawyers, and other well-educated administrative officials on the TDCJ payroll. It’s hard to find a person in Huntsville who doesn’t have at least an indirect affiliation with the prison system, as local attorneys are reminded whenever they ferret through a jury pool. Walker County farmers, hardware store retailers, and gas station operators owe their livelihoods to the TDCJ—all for the small price of seeing busloads of men in white rumble through their streets and enduring the harsh lights of the Walls, Wynne, and Holliday units that pierce the blanket of evening.
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