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.
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Isolated from the media and the Legislature, the prison system carries on its activities with regal insularity, satisfied with the arrangement that in this airtight community, everything gets around but nothing gets out. The agency’s most renowned autocrats of the past—prison board chairman-for-life H. H. Coffield, haughty director-dictator George Beto, and his discredited successor, W. J. Estelle—are immortalized by prison units that bear their names. The new executive director, Wayne Scott, resides, as his predecessors did, in the two-story colonial brick affair built for reformist prison boss O. B. Ellis in 1949—a mansion not quite as grand as the governor’s and situated directly across the street from the Walls Unit, but a mansion nonetheless. Inmates tend Scott’s gardens, wash his car, and serve him food, just as they did for Ellis.
The prison system has its own culture and its own esoteric language. To watch the Texas Board of Criminal Justice (the prison oversight board consisting of nine unpaid citizens appointed in staggered six-year terms by the governor) attempt to even make sense of the prison system, much less to regulate it, is an embarrassing spectacle. Over the years board members have variously been indifferent, bewildered, or ethically challenged—or all of the above, in the case of the present board. Embattled though the TDCJ may be, the board remains utterly at its mercy. “We’ve had to wait for the media to tell us the things that we’re supposed to know,” complains new member John David Franz.
Yet the formidable power of the prison system has always been of the austere kind. The assorted middle managers of the TDCJ toil in a poorly lit converted warehouse. The prisons themselves are, with a few recently built exceptions, singularly wretched in appearance. The wardens greet guests in dumpy offices carpeted with institutional fabric the colors of which do not exist in nature. Even today, a prison visitor must identify himself by dropping his driver’s license into a tin can that the tower guard lowers by means of a rope. For Texans who like to see their state’s prisons bleak and antiquated, the TDCJ does not disappoint.
Dismal trappings notwithstanding, the prison system in the Andy Collins era became the biggest agency in the state. As the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Collins oversaw not only the prisons but also the parole division and state jail system. At the time he took over the job in April 1994, the TDCJ had 65 prison units. By the time Collins resigned twenty months later, the state boasted 108 prisons. The system housed 72,000 inmates in 1994; by 1996 that number would almost double.
His improbable ascent from summer intern to executive director makes sense only in retrospect. He went to work for the prison system in 1972, while still a student at Sam Houston State, spending a summer vacation as a prison guard in pursuit of his criminal justice degree. His first day on the job at Ellis I was made memorable when an inmate was dragged out of the shoe shop sporting a slashed throat. “I was so goddamned naive,” Collins says. “The day I showed up to prison, I didn’t know anyone in my family who’d had a divorce, much less been to jail.”
He was, as one colleague remembered him, “more glib than the average correctional officer,” a pudgy and fun-loving frat boy who could intimidate a can of Budweiser but not much else. He advanced through the ranks without making much of an impression, first as an unimposing prison guard and eventually as the warden of Beto I Unit, where even his friends say he was a failure. But he possessed both an acute internal weather vane and a gift for excellent timing. Collins’ rise coincided with the landmark Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit, which cited injustices ranging from overcrowding to brutality against inmates and which compelled the ruffians who had been running the show (using thug inmates known as building tenders to keep order) to flee the prison system in droves. “Andy wasn’t from the same school as the old badass wardens like Billy McMillan and Beartracks McAdams and Wildcat Anderson,” says one former associate from Collins’ days at Beto I. “He was post-Ruiz through and through.”
Collins’ knack for good timing was never more apparent than in 1985, when as a beleaguered warden he gave notice and took a job with the Texas Youth Commission. It happened that the new prison board chairman, Al Hughes, insisted that the governor provide him an executive assistant in Austin. “I needed someone who had been in the trenches,” Hughes recalls. “The prison system is quasi-military in a lot of ways—there’s always nine million excuses for everything. I needed someone who had the institutional knowledge whom I could call at one in the morning and ask, ‘What the hell does ad-seg mean, anyway?’ Or ‘How many inmates per shower head does Ruiz require?’”
Hughes hired Collins, who thus became acquainted with the more rarefied side of the system, a world peopled by legislators and lobbyists rather than prison gangs. “Oh, man, I thought it was great,” Collins says today. Colleagues remember how well the 36-year-old ex-warden took to schmoozing in the Capitol and over pitchers of beer at the Texas Chili Parlor. Collins became a bureaucratic star, using well his gift for gab and his ability to spew out esoteric data he had just recently learned.
The event that placed Collins firmly on the fast track was the prison board’s decision at the end of 1986 to install TDCJ financial whiz Jim Lynaugh as director. Lynaugh in turn made Collins his deputy. The new director had worked under state comptroller Bob Bullock for nine years; “He understood money and was an absolute master at the political process,” Collins says. But Lynaugh delegated to Collins enormous authority over the prison operations. “Jim didn’t talk the lingo of corrections,” Collins says of his former boss. “We’d get to talking about putting an air fan in a flytrap at the Retrieve Unit, and his eyes would glaze over.” In 1990—to the chagrin of many wardens who remembered Andy Collins as one of their least competent peers—he was made the director of the TDCJ’s institutional division, the overseer of all prison operations.
As Collins’ star rose, Lynaugh’s began to fall. The board members appointed by new governor Ann Richards in 1991 were more interested in drug treatment than maximum-security confinement, and they regarded Lynaugh as cagey and arrogant. When in 1992 the news leaked that the TDCJ’s internal affairs division had been investigating a Richards-appointed board member, it became clear that Lynaugh’s days were numbered. But Collins remained the Artful Dodger. As he told a friend, “I got one of Ann’s people to let me see her, and I got on her drug-treatment bandwagon real quick.”
Lynaugh’s departure in September 1993 left a clear path to the top job for Collins. His claim today that “I didn’t want the job initially” draws laughter even from his supporters. From the start, Collins campaigned vigorously for the job, soliciting letters of recommendation from politicians all over Texas and Washington, D.C. His candidacy was boosted when Lynaugh told Bullock, who had been elected lieutenant governor, that Collins was the best man for the job, and Bullock in turn announced that Collins was his man. On April 10, 1994, the board made it official—but only after six and a half hours of deliberation, during which they resorted to the desperate measure of asking interim director Jim Riley to reconsider taking the job. One board member said during the closed-door meeting, “I just don’t believe that Andy Collins, as good as he is logistically, has the character to be executive director.”
The board member’s warning would prove grimly prescient, but Collins began his tenure with a determination to win over his doubters. It worked. “He succeeded beyond our wildest expectations,” recalls one opposition board member. The new director was everything Lynaugh wasn’t: open-minded, inclusive, seemingly eager to solicit the opinions of the board. He alone had the institutional knowledge and political savvy to cope with events that would engulf the state’s criminal justice landscape. “The day I walked into that job,” Collins says, “there were decisions that had to be made that day. And it would’ve taken anybody else two months minimum to get up to speed. There’s no other job in the country that would’ve prepared a person for this one.”
Among his many duties loomed a paramount mission: build more prisons—now. For earlier directors, prison building had not been a central focus because there wasn’t any money available. As a result of the Ruiz lawsuit’s decision that Texas prisons were overcrowded, parole officials started letting out as many as 79 percent of the state’s eligible inmates by the early nineties. When the public wouldn’t stand for this, the unspoken policy became to let the TDCJ inmates spend the bulk of their sentences in county jails because there was no room at the prisons. But the counties foiled this strategy by filing suit against the state in 1990. With Texas judges, juries, and politicians determined to send even the most nonviolent of criminals to prison, Texans dug deep and approved two state bond issues for prison construction totaling $2 billion.
Collins had to produce beds, tens of thousands of them all at once, and such a task was like nothing any previous director had experienced. Every new prison unit brought with it new travel demands, new contract squabbles, new personnel headaches, new inmate conflicts, and new litigation. Turf wars cropped up everywhere—between the new privately run prisons and the old prison bureaucracy, between bickering board members, between Senate Criminal Justice Committee chairman John Whitmire and Huntsville-based House Corrections Committee chairman Allen Hightower—and Collins was caught in the middle. Appeasement was more Collins’ specialty, but there were just too many people to accommodate. Legislators wanted prisons built in their districts and, preferably, named after them; new vendors wanted their slice of the pie. And these requests came on top of the usual ones, such as state officials wanting to hunt quail and deer on prison property and influential Texans wanting some favored inmate to be transferred to a facility closer to home.
Collins’ tendency to accommodate important people rankled his underlings. He ramrodded the hirings of less-qualified individuals who happened to be recommended by influential legislators and let board members circumvent the TDCJ’s construction staff. The director’s tenure would eventually be marked by numerous floutings of established procedures, by himself and by board members whose meddling he did nothing to discourage, all of which profoundly demoralized TDCJ staffers.
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