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By Claire Cardona AUSTIN — To maintain consistent and comprehensive information on offender recidivism rates, the author of a bill suggesting changes to Texas Department of Criminal Justice operations addressed the importance of data collection. Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, said his bill would address the most glaring need in the department and the Windham School District, the Correctional Managed Health Care Committee and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which the department works in conjunction with.
“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” Price said, referring to a lack of data flow between the different agencies.
But Ana Yanez-Correa, executive director of advocacy group Texas Criminal Justice Coalition disagreed.
“They do not have all the technical assistance they need to have comprehensive data management,” she said. “That takes money and we’re far away in our mind from having a comprehensive database system that can be shared.”
The bill would also extend the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s existence until 2021, which Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations at Texas District and County Attorneys Association joked is the most important thing the bill does (“We can’t let all those people go free.”) The routine Sunset Advisory Commission report recommendations that the bill addresses examined the impact of policy changes to the criminal justice system enacted six years ago and found the need for a risk and needs assessment and a case management system.
Price’s bill addresses the concerns and would require the department to create a comprehensive treatment plan for all offenders that looks into recidivism factors such as substance abuse, family dysfunction, anti-social personality and criminal behavior. It would also urge the department agencies to establish a clear re-entry plan that is well-coordinated so groups that monitor re-entry success in communities don’t duplicate programs.
The bill was left pending. Its companion has passed through the Senate with some amendments that would allow other medical schools aside from University of Texas Medical Branch and Texas Tech, which provide the medical care to inmates, to sit on a committee for the inmate medical program.
Discussion On Bill To Improve Criminal Justice System Focuses On Data Collection<
April 3
2 Inmates, Including 1 Facing Death Penalty, Escape Texas Jail
2 inmates with long criminal histories - including 1 awaiting trial for capital murder - escaped an East Texas jail, dumped their black-and-white scrubs and were fleeing a manhunt Tuesday, authorities said.
Brian Allen Tucker of Sulphur Springs and John Marlin King of Cumby slipped past a fence around a recreation yard at the Hopkins County Jail around 8 a.m. Tuesday, officials with the Hopkins County Sheriff's Office said.
The 2 men dumped their jail uniforms on rail tracks near the jail, Deputy Alvin Jordan said. They had white T-shirts and boxer shorts on underneath, and Sheriff Butch Adams said it was possible they had clothes stashed on the outside.
"Certainly, we're going to do our best to get them back," Adams told reporters. "We have a lot of help here from other counties and jurisdictions."
Dispatcher Beth Renfro said a maintenance person noticed a problem with the fence around a recreation yard used by female inmates at the jail in Sulphur Springs, about 75 miles northeast of Dallas. Jordan said the men either slipped through a gap in the fence or they scaled it.
Hours later, deputies and other law enforcement were searching the woods and area east and northeast of the jail.
Tucker was being held on $1 million bond in the 2011 death of Bobby Riley of Mahoney. Riley was found strangled in his home and some music instruments and firearms had been stolen. Jury selection in his murder trial was set to begin June 3.
Tucker was previously convicted of burglary and driving while intoxicated, and has been arrested several times for violating parole.
King was being held on several charges, including evading arrest, burglary and possession of a controlled substance. He's been convicted previously of burglary and possession of a controlled substance. According to court documents, he pleaded guilty last month to the possession charge as a habitual offender and received a sentence of 40 years in prison.
Local schools were locked down as a precaution, though classes were continuing as normal, an official for the Sulphur Springs schools said.
Kris Mitchell, who lives across a field from where officers were focusing their search, said she was telling her family to lock their doors and stay vigilant.
"This land is all ponds, tree lines and brush," Mitchell said. "You could hide pretty easily, I think."
(Source: Associated Press)
MARCH 05, 2013
'The Case For Independent Oversight Of Texas' Prison System'
The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition issued a press release today in support of three bills establishing independent oversight and accountability for TDCJ's facilities and treatment of prisoners.
They recommend that the Legislature:
(1) Support H.B. 877 by Representative Alma Allen, which will develop an independent body tasked with comprehensive oversight of all TDCJ correctional facilities; that committee will conduct regular facility inspections and compile comprehensive reports outlining the results of those inspections, as well as providing any recommendations concerning policy changes or other strategies that could improve the conditions or operations of Texas’ correctional facilities.
(2) Support H.B. 968 by Representative Sylvester Turner, which calls for TDCJ to annually compile a comprehensive report clarifying the number of grievances filed and appealed at each unit, information about the ultimate resolution of such grievances, needed resources at the unit level and across units that will enable facilities to effectively mitigate problems, and any identified patterns of commonly recurring problems.
(3) Support H.B. 1543 by Representative Alma Allen, which allows the current Independent Ombudsman for the Texas Juvenile Justice Department to visit with youth who have been sent to adult secure facilities.
See their new, related report, "The Case for Independent Oversight of Texas’ Prison System: Pursuing Accountability, Efficiency, and Transparency" (pdf).
MORE: From the Texas Tribune.
POSTED BY GRITSFORBREAKFAST
Former Guards Accused Of Smuggling Cell Phones Into Texas Prison
By Debra Goldschmidt and Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
(CNN) -- How were inmates inside a Texas prison allegedly able to make cell phone calls, plot crimes and acquire drugs?
With the help of 17 former corrections officers who once worked at the prison, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed this week.
Now the former officers and 12 others have been arrested and charged with racketeering after a four-year investigation authorities dubbed Operation Prison Cell.
The former guards are accused of involvement in a smuggling scheme that undermined the justice system, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson told reporters Wednesday.
"Prison is a place where inmates are supposed to do their time," he said, "not where they do their crime."
Using the cell phones guards smuggled in, prison inmates orchestrated and facilitated killings, home invasions and drug trafficking, said Angela Dodge, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office.
The indictment released Wednesday accuses 13 former corrections officers of smuggling cell phones into the McConnell Unit Prison in Beeville, Texas, about 200 miles southwest of Houston.
Read the Indictment (pdf)
"The employees supplied the phones, knowing the inmates would use the phones to conduct illegal activities," the indictment says.
A four-year investigation into the "culture of corruption" at the prison began after authorities caught gang members trying to transport stolen cars that were destined for Mexican cartel members across the border, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas said Wednesday.
Prison inmates using illegal cell phones were behind the thwarted attempt to move the stolen cars into Mexico, prosecutors said.
Nationwide, the smuggling of contraband cell phones into prisons is a growing problem, the U.S. General Accountability Office said in a 2011 report, noting that the number of smuggled phones seized had quadrupled in a three-year period.
In 2007 an inmate at a Maryland detention center ordered the murder of a witness to his crimes using a contraband phone, the report said.
And in 2008, a death row inmate in a Texas state prison used a cell phone to threaten a state senator and his family.
This month's indictment doesn't detail how much money guards at the McConnell Unit Prison allegedly received in exchange for the cell phones.
But in 2009, one top Texas investigator told CNN that a smuggled cell phone could fetch as much as $2,000.
In the McConnell Unit Prison, authorities said Wednesday that rampant corruption had festered since 2005.
Thirteen of the former guards arrested are charged with racketeering, and four face drug charges, Dodge said.
In total, authorities have arrested 29 people in connection with the alleged scheme. Three others are still at large, Dodge said.
Now, authorities said, some of the former correction officers who once guarded the Texas prison are behind bars themselves.
CNN's Dave Alsup and Carol Cratty contributed to this report.
Former guards accused of smuggling cell phones into Texas prison
Death at Dawson: Why Is Texas’ Worst State Jail Still Open?
By Emily DePrang
Wendy King never saw a doctor.
“Everybody in my family has some kind of uterine problem,” King told me. “My mom and three sisters have all had hysterectomies.” So when King started bleeding continuously while serving a one-year sentence at Dawson State Jail for a parole violation, she asked to see a doctor.
“I bled for nine months,” she says. “I’m sorry, I know this is gross, but I’d step in those metal showers and you could hear blood clots fall out as big as my hand.”
King says that at Dawson, prisoners must first fill out a form asking for medical care and wait five to eight days for it to be processed. “Then they schedule you for a doctor if they think you actually need to see a doctor,” she said. Getting an appointment can take another week.
The physicians’ assistants who saw King didn’t think she needed to see a doctor. They also didn’t give her an exam. “They gave me antibiotics,” she says, “They said it was something going around, a venereal disease.” With a week’s worth of antibiotics and a menstrual pad, King was sent her back to her cell.
King’s experience at the troubled Dawson State Jail, a privately run, 2,200-bed lockup for nonviolent offenders, isn’t unusual. Several inmates at the facility have complained of poor conditions and lack of access to medical care that, in a few cases, led to deaths. Dawson has come to exemplify the once unutterable, now bipartisan, cause of closing some Texas prisons.
Yesterday, two advocacy groups, The Sentencing Project and Grassroots Leadership, released a report summarizing the case for closing Dawson—primarily that it could save the state $24 million a year. That’s not counting how much the state could make by selling the property on which Dawson sits, a riverside plot in downtown Dallas that the city has been clamoring to develop for years.
Nearly every stakeholder wants Dawson closed, except, of course, for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which operates the jail; its contract is up for renewal in August. State lawmakers, including Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chair of the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice, want Dawson closed because Texas’ inmate population continues to drop and the state can save money by consolidating prisons. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the union that represents prison guards, wants Dawson closed because chronic understaffing makes the facility an extremely stressful and dangerous workplace. Human-rights groups want Dawson closed because of documented, systemic failures in its health care services and the horrifying deaths of several inmates, allegedly due to medical negligence.
Compared to the seven inmates who have died at Dawson since 2004, Wendy King was lucky.
Back in her cell, she continued to bleed. “I lost so much blood, it’s amazing I could walk,” she says. Finally another inmate told a guard about King’s condition, and the guard escorted her down to the clinic personally. The physician’s assistants still didn’t allow King to see a doctor, nor, she says, did they give her an exam or run any tests. But they did give her two shots of Depo Provera within the space of a few weeks. Depo Provera is a powerful birth control hormone intended to be given only once every three months. The shots slowed King’s bleeding, and she lived with it for the next seven months, until her release in September 2011.
King never saw a doctor at Dawson. Once she was released, she sought help and her condition turned out to be non-lethal: endometriosis and a retroverted uterus. Endometriosis happens when the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, and can cause heavy bleeding and scar tissue, sometimes enough to tilt, or retrovert, the uterus. Though the condition required surgery and rehab, it could have been worse. King’s sister died in October 2011, a month after King was released, of an aggressive uterine cancer.
Unfortunately, King’s is among the least disturbing stories of medical horror at Dawson. In 2012, the Dallas news station CBS 11 ran a four-part exposé highlighting alleged medical negligence at the jail and detailing three cases:
• In 2008, a 30-year-old woman named Ashleigh Parks died of pneumonia six weeks before her release date. Her family says she was denied medication until it was too late, a claim supported by letters from other inmates who knew Parks.
An autopsy revealed that she died from diabetes complications.
CBS 11 obtained internal documents from CCA showing that the chief of security reported that Dawson staff “didn’t follow proper procedures in that they did not call a medical professional” the night of Weatherby’s death and recommended termination of shift supervisors. But a week later, Senior Warden Raymond Byrd determined, “The actions by employees were consistent with TDCJ policy and procedure. No training needs have been identified at this time.”
• Parks and Weatherby aren’t alive to tell their stories, but Autumn Miller is. Miller didn’t know she was a few weeks pregnant when she arrived at Dawson in January 2012 to serve a year for violating her probation. But by May, she knew something was wrong. She’d been missing periods and felt sick. A mother of three, Miller recognized pregnancy. Miller is still at Dawson, but her mother, Jean Burr, told Miller’s story to CBS 11 after seeing its coverage of Weatherby’s death. Burr says that in May, Autumn Miller requested a pap smear and pregnancy test but never got them. Three weeks later, she started bleeding and cramping, feeling pressure and pain. The staff brought her to the medical unit on a stretcher, and Burr says a doctor was on a video screen—Dawson is one of many facilities that use telemedicine to save money—but that an assistant told the doctor he wasn’t needed and turned off the screen. A guard suggested, “You probably need to go poo,” gave Miller a menstrual pad and locked her in a holding cell. “The pressure was so bad that she went to the toilet,” Burr told CBS 11. Then, “the baby came out and went into the toilet and started screaming.” The baby girl, named Gracie, was just 26 weeks along. She died four days later. Miller had a tubal ligation and was allowed to stay in the hospital until Gracie passed away in her arms. Half an hour later, Miller was shipped back to Dawson, where they placed her in solitary confinement for two days, because, they said, she was on “suicide watch.”
• Shebaa Green, 50, suffered from diarrhea and difficulty breathing for three days before she was allowed to go to the medical unit at Dawson last August, according to records obtained by CBS 11. She lay there unexamined for three hours before anyone arrived to look at her. Seven hours later, a doctor called an ambulance as Green struggled for breath. She died the next day of complications due to pneumonia.
CBS 11 reported that 15 women talked to the station about mistreatment they witnessed or experienced at Dawson; two said they had extremely high fevers and were left in segregation for days or weeks without ever seeing a doctor. Another, Lorraine Brown, said that, like Weatherby, she was diabetic and never received her insulin at set times. She also said she watched a woman have a stroke, become paralyzed, and be left for other inmates to bathe and care for.
Other former inmates echo these stories on Topix.com, in an online forum about Dawson State Jail conditions, though the details of their stories haven’t been confirmed.
But the case against Dawson’s medical care isn’t just anecdotal. A January 2012 audit of Dawson health services by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found multiple systemic failures: noncompliance more than half the time in areas of preventative, gynecological, dental, HIV and elder care. They even failed the basics: conducting inspections, having enough first aid kits, providing medically appropriate diets to sick prisoners, and keeping adequate records.
CCA has issued statements in response to the CBS 11 reports, saying that its “dedicated, professional corrections staff is firmly committed to the health and safety of the inmates entrusted to our care.” They point out that CCA is not the health care provider—the state contracts with the University of Texas Medical Branch for care—but in each case of alleged mistreatment, the problem was not bad treatment but a denial of access to treatment. CCA staff at Dawson, the ones whom Senior Warden Byrd said had no training needs, are the gatekeepers. CCA says it can’t comment on the Weatherby case because of the ongoing lawsuit, and “As for the other allegations, there are no complaints on record from those inmates about their access to quality health care.”
Perhaps the most amazing part is that Dawson’s closure still isn’t a sure thing. Despite financial, practical and moral reasons for closing Dawson, the state may renew CCA’s contract for the facility in August. The simple reason is that CCA, the largest private prison company in the world, is a powerful lobbyist.
Sen. Whitmire has been trying to close Dawson since 2008. In December, Robert Wilonsky of the Dallas Morning News asked Whitmire about the chances of successfully closing Dawson this time.
Whitmire laughed, paused for a long time, and then said, “Better than 50-50.”
Tags: Ashleigh Parks, Autumn Miller, CCA, Dawson State Jail, John Whitmire, Pamela Weatherby, Shebaa Green, TDCJ
Emily DePrang freelanced for The Texas Observer for ten years before joining the staff as a reporter. A former nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review, her work has appeared in Black Book, FHM, and several publications that have since gone out of print. She has a bachelor's in English from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She is happy to be home.
Death at Dawson: Why Is Texas’ Worst State Jail Still Open?
Houston Crime
Prisoners Collecting Millions In Unemployment While Behind Bars
CYPRESS – Unemployment benefits are supposed to be life lines to out-of-work Texans.
But the KHOU 11 News I-Team uncovered millions of dollars in unemployment payments are flowing into jails and prisons across Texas.
All of it comes as the Texas Workforce Commission insists that fighting fraud is one of the agency’s top priorities.
But after we found more than 1,700 cases of inmates collecting unemployment, some want to know if anyone is really watching the system?
Inside her Cypress home, Bonnie Griffin’s former office now resembles a used furniture showroom.
“These are some pieces I put on Craigslist,” Griffin explained.
To her, the chest of drawers and dresser represent more than pieces of a bedroom set.
“I see it as money that will help me pay my bills,” said Griffin.
Two years ago, she lost her job working in the human resources department of a major oil and gas corporation.
Now, Griffin sells her belongings just to pay for the basics.
“It's tough,” she explained.“It's really good to have friends because I can call on them and say what are you having for dinner tonight? That's kind of how it is.”
As she continues her search for a job, Griffin’s weekly $440 unemployment check keeps her afloat.
“I’ll do whatever I can,” Griffin said. “I don’t want to be somebody on the streets.”
Griffin’s case shows the way the state’s unemployment system is supposed to work.
But the 11 News I-Team uncovered another side.
It’s an abuse of the same system that puts unemployment payments in the pockets of criminals while they’re in prison.
In fact, in the last four years, the Texas Workforce Commission identified 1,746 cases of inmates fraudulently collecting benefits.
TWC estimates the total cost of the fraud during that period has been nearly $3.4 million.
It’s something that outrages honest Texans.
“There's no excuse for that,” said Raymond Hall, a retired veteran. “That's money that a man has not worked for.”
Or woman in the case of Tamika Scales. She was serving time for mail fraud in a prison outside Fort Worth when prosecutors say she collected $5,000 in unemployment.
We showed the figures to Tom “Smitty” Smith with the watchdog group Public Citizen.
“Astounded,” said Smith. “This is an outrage.”
Smith believes common sense dictates that prisoners should be at the top of the list of people to watch for this kind of fraud.
“The people we already know are criminals who will commit fraud, who will lie and cheat and steal and are behind bars, ought to be the place where we are putting our greatest amount of scrutiny,” said Smith.
However, TWC admits that hasn’t happened.
The agency performs monthly comparisons of lists of unemployment recipients to lists of inmates.
But, TWC spokeswoman Lisa Givens says that those checks are limited to inmates serving time in state prisons.
That means if someone was locked up in city or county jails or even federal prison, odds are TWC had no access to that information.
But the 11 News I-Team discovered something else.
Although Tamika Scales pled guilty to theft of government property, her case is the only successful prosecution of an inmate collecting unemployment in the last four years, according to TWC.
Givens says that’s because it costs the state money.
“You are spending resources to prosecute,” explained Givens. “You know, we have to look at how much the amount is and weigh that on what makes sense on the agency to be able to prove.”
“Wouldn’t prosecuting people, even if it is expensive send a message to inmates, this is wrong, and we’re going to prosecute you?” asked the I-Team.
“Yeah, well we certainly want to be able to provide deterrent information,” replied Givens. “We did have a case where we did prosecute.”
“But you had one case out of 1,746 cases,” the I-Team pointed out.
“Right,” said Givens.“Like I said, we have to look at limited resources.”
Limited resources are something Griffin knows all about.
“I only put $350 on it, but it's worth a lot more than that,” she said looking at the furniture she was selling.
She says she’s sickened to see what’s happening to the money she so desperately needs.
“How could you take money away from people who need it?” asked Griffin. “If you need it, collect it. But if you don't need it, it's not yours.”
To combat the problem, TWC recently launched a $450,000 pilot project to better detect fraud. That project includes gaining access to incarceration data from city and county jails, as well as other states’ prison systems.
Prisoners collecting millions in unemployment while behind bars
January 16, 2013
Prohibition Doesn't Work:
It's a simple fact of economics and human behavior: Prohibition doesn't work.
Not with alcohol (1920's - 1930's), not with marijuana (present-day "War on Drugs") and not with guns (2013).
Prohibition always has the same 3 effects:
1) Fills the prisons with a whole new class of "criminals" who really aren't criminals.
2) Creates a huge expansion of a new federal agency that terrorizes the people (DEA).
3) Drives huge profits into the hands of criminal gangs who control the underground market.
Read more in my detailed analysis of the economics of prohibition:
Delusions of the radical left: Prohibition doesn't work for alcohol or marijuana, but it will somehow work for guns
By Maurice Chammah
Following his yearly routine, Gov. Rick Perry granted pardons to 14 people on Friday, bringing his career total to roughly 200. Each of the cases was recommended to him, as the law requires, by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. While the pardons are certainly welcome news for the recipients, others have criticized the tradition of holiday clemency announcements, arguing that it trivializes an important executive responsibility. "It makes the clemency function of the executive seem like a once-a-year event, while really it should be an ongoing function," said Scott Henson of the popular criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast. Henson has written that presidents and governors tend to pick "trivial, long-ago cases chosen more for their lack of political risk than the particular merits of the petitioners." Perry has never granted a pardon in a death penalty case. But, Henson noted, Perry has pardoned far more people than President Obama, who in four years has only granted clemency to 22 people. Perry’s pardon record has varied from year to year. In 2003, Perry granted clemency to 35 defendants in the famed Tulia case, in which dozens of black defendants were wrongly convicted based on false testimony by a white police officer. Last year, he granted eight pardons. Patricia Willingham Cox is the cousin of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 and whose family submitted an application for a posthumous pardon in October. Responding to today's pardons, she reiterated her hope that Willingham will be on Perry's list in the future. "I think that the list certainly is not complete," she said. "My heart goes out to those fourteen people who have been pardoned, because of their families. I know exactly what they're going through. I still have confidence that we will prevail and that Todd will get justice as these fourteen have gotten justice." Here's The Full List Of Pardons This Year From Perry's Office: Kyndel Wayne Bennett, 41, of Austin, was convicted of public intoxication in 1988 at the age of 17. He was sentenced to pay a $215 fine. Mary Lee Cloud, 50, of Houston, was convicted of carrying a weapon in 1989 at the age of 27. She was sentenced to four days in jail, and paid a $100 fine. Earl Andrew Cooksey, 59, of Kansas City, Kansas, was convicted of possession of marijuana in 1972 at the age of 18. He was sentenced to three years probation. In addition to a full pardon, he was granted restoration of his firearm rights. Joe Neil Fife, 56, of McKinney, was convicted of fleeing from the police in 1974 at the age of 17. He was sentenced to five days in jail. Ester M. Hewitt, 37, of Houston, was convicted of hindering apprehension in 1997 at the age of 22. She was sentenced to nine days in jail. James L. Jones Jr., 35, of El Paso, was convicted of unlawfully carrying a weapon in 2000 at the age of 23. He was sentenced to pay a $250 fine. Glenn Sabastian Lyon, 38, of Houston, was convicted of criminal mischief in 1995 at the age of 20. He was sentenced to two years probation, and paid $4891.32 restitution. Michael LaShay Pierson, 40, of Lancaster, was convicted of unlawfully carrying a weapon in 1993 at the age of 20. He was sentenced to pay a $100 fine. Kari Lynn (Cook) Price, 38, of Hillsboro, was convicted of debit card abuse in 1993 at the age of 19. She was sentenced to five years deferred adjudication probation, and given a $1,500 fine and paid $510 restitution. Suzi Kim (Brown) Prokell, 41, of Aledo, was convicted of credit card abuse in 1991 at the age of 19. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which was probated for six years, and given a $1,000 fine and paid $200 restitution. Raul Alejandro Ruiz, 38, of San Antonio, was convicted of unlawfully carrying a weapon in 1992 at the age of 18. He was sentenced to 22 days in jail, and paid a $400 fine. Matthew Tristan, 45, of Humble, was convicted of assault in 1985 at the age of 18. He was sentenced to 21 days in jail. David Martin Gonzales, 57, of Corpus Christi, was convicted of a violation of a protective order and assault in 2000 at the age of 45. For the violation of a protective order, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which was probated for five years. For the assault, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail and paid $6,304.00 restitution. Charles Henry Havens, 43, of Fate, was convicted of assault in 1987 at the age of 18 and theft in 1988 at the age of 19. For the assault, he was sentenced to three months of deferred adjudication probation and paid a $100 fine. For the theft, he was sentenced to six months of deferred adjudication probation and paid a $100 fine. Click HERE to search our database of Perry's previous pardons.
STATESMAN IN-DEPTH: PRISON HOMICIDES
By Mike Ward As statistics go, the news inside Texas prisons seems good: Violence is down, fewer weapons have been found, sexual assaults have dropped. Even the use of pepper spray is down from last year, and that usually means more calm inside the slammer. But one number is way up: Eleven convicts have been killed this year inside prisons, the most since 1997, when 10 prisoners were killed. Last year, just three such homicides were reported. Prison officials say the near quadrupling of the murder total appears to be an anomaly without a single cause — a deadly uptick that neighboring states say they haven’t seen, though they have seen increased violence overall, which Texas has not. So far, Texas officials say investigations have shown that the homicides appear to be random acts of spontaneous violence between cellmates with no apparent pattern — not caused by short staffing at some prisons, not caused by a more violent or contentious environment behind the bars, not due to gang rivalries or even the fact that more convicts are serving longer sentences. “Anytime we have more than zero, we are concerned,” said Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which operates the 111 state prisons. “A broad sweep of the indicators is that the system is operating safely and smoothly with fewer problems — and then this one number.” At the same time homicides are up, sexual assaults reports have dropped from 343 last to 265 through October, weapons-possession cases are down from 1,102 to 837, and serious offender assaults are down from 1,222 to 1,028. Even major uses of force — when prison officials have to knock heads to quell disturbances or get control of disruptive or violent convicts — are down from 7,302 to 5,845. Rick Thaler, division director who oversees the prisons, shakes his head when asked what has caused the spike in homicides. “There appears to be no patterns to this,” he said. “It’s very random.” In a prison system where most convicts share a cell with another felon, most of the homicides involved fights with cellmates or other convicts who lived in their dorm areas. Most were beaten with feet and hands during fights. Several died after hitting their heads on concrete floors.Only one was stabbed with a shank, a prison-made knife that once was the most prevalent murder weapon in Texas prisons. One woman died in a contract prison. The fighting cellmates had been together for a range of periods, from several years to several weeks. All had been screened to weed out old rivalries or conflicting gang affiliations. “Most all of them hadn’t had any previous issues with their cellmate, at least that they’d told us about,” Thaler said. Livingston said the deaths occurred at a variety of prisons, not just at ones that were understaffed. Prison reports show most of the homicides occurred in cases like this: An inmate serving life for kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault was killed in an altercation at the Robertson Unit near Abilene by his cellmate, who was serving 40 years for robbery. At the nearby Middleton Unit, the only prison where two homicides occurred, one convict died of injuries suffered in a dayroom fight and another died from injuries from a fight in a dormitory. Advocacy groups and inmate family organizations say something can — and should — be done about the rise in prison slayings. They question how someone could be killed so quickly that guards couldn’t intervene. “So they don’t know what’s causing all these deaths, and they can’t do anything to stop it? That’s an abominable excuse,” said Terrence Benavides, who has a son and two brothers serving time. “It’s their job to run a safe and secure system. And three times the number of murders tells me that something isn’t right.” Still, some correctional officers at prisons where some of the homicides have occurred say the deaths appear to be random. But they acknowledge that conditions inside Texas prisons are growing tougher — filled with more convicts serving longer sentences for violent crimes — and contend that supervision has degraded at many prisons because large numbers of officers are new hires with little experience. And that can mean more opportunity for fights and homicides. “Understaffing and lack of training are two big issues right now inside the agency, and both of those can adversely affect supervision,” said Brian Olsen, executive director of a correctional employees’ union that represents more than 6,000 prison guards. “There are also issues with complacency and working in a difficult environment, where the inmates are more violent than ever. Many of them have absolutely no value for human life.” For well over a year, Texas’ sprawling prison system has struggled with the effects of the shale-oil boom in Texas’ oil patch: Guards have been leaving in droves for better paying jobs in the oilfield, fueling a staffing shortage that has left the prisons with more than 2,800 vacancies. At the end of October, seven prisons— mostly in West and South Texas — had staffing levels under 70 percent, a threshold when staffing can become an operations issue, according to an internal report reviewed by the American-Statesman. The lowest staffing was at the Smith Unit in Lamesa, in West Texas, where 48 percent of the guard jobs were vacant. There, 2,234 convicts were being guarded by 217 guards, with 202 vacancies. Livingston and Thaler said the Smith Unit and other short-staffed prisons are secure. Livingston noted that just a few years ago, the agency was 4,000 correctional officers short and continued to operate safely — with more convicts locked up. Now, with 2,800 vacancies, he and other officials insist there is no security risk due to the staffing problems. “We learned some valuable lessons the last time we experienced even greater shortages that have allowed us to better allocate resources to maintain safe and secure institutions,” Livingston said, noting that the prison population has dropped since then. Despite their assurances, prison officials concede the upswing in homicides is troubling. Livingston and Thaler acknowledged that they directed additional investigations after the numbers began climbing, looking for a common thread. They didn’t find one. Gang ties? Simmering feuds? Mismatched cellmates? Prisons too short-staffed to properly supervise convicts? None. Despite this year’s increase in homicides, the current tally is still far from 1985, when 27 convicts were killed and hundreds more were injured in an outbreak of violence blamed on overcrowding. The prison system at the time was less than a third its current size. A classification system implemented since then pairs convicts who are housed together in one cell so they have similar backgrounds, are within nine years of each others’ age and within 40 pounds of the same weight. Past history and medical restrictions are also considered, although race and ethnic origin are not, officials said. Lance Lowry, president of a Huntsville union local for correctional officers, the largest in the state, suspects inadequate supervision plays a role. He is also a correctional sergeant, with 13 years of experience. “The supervision of the inmates is not what it once was,” he said. “Having a turnover rate as high as TDCJ (the prison agency) does among correctional officers means there’s more inexperience out there. And that plus short staffing and a tougher inmate population adds up. “It should be a red flag.”
PRISON DEATHS: 10 years in Texas Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice Expert reporting; Capitol reporter Mike Ward has covered state criminal justice and prison issues for the American-Statesman since 1989. Texas prison homicides at 10-year high
Jailers Worry About Dental Floss As A Weapon
JIM FITZGERALD, Associated Press WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — Dental floss may prevent toothaches, but it's given jailers plenty of headaches. When a group of New York prisoners sued last month to demand access to dental floss, officials said they had to consider "security issues." As it turns out, jail — and jailbreak — history is tightly tangled with the stringy decay fighter. In Texas, officials believe a prisoner used floss to cut his way out of his cell, then jumped a fellow inmate and knifed him to death. In Maryland, Illinois, West Virginia and Wisconsin, inmates collected enough floss to braid it into ropes and escape, or try to, over prison walls. A group of escaped prisoners on the run in Texas used floss to sew up their gunshot wounds. And a man in an Illinois jail used floss to stitch together the dummy he left in his bed when he took off. Experts say floss, or the plastic holder it sometimes comes in, has been used to strangle enemies, to escape, to saw through bars, to pick handcuffs, to make a hand grip on a shank and to hoist contraband from one level of cells to another. "These inmates can make a weapon out of a chewing gum wrapper," said Steven Kayser, whose company sells a floss product advertised as prison-safe. "Floss is right up there on the danger list." Officials at the Westchester County Jail in Valhalla were somewhat leery when 11 inmates, acting without a lawyer, filed a $500 million lawsuit demanding access to dental floss. Lead plaintiff Santiago Gomez said the jail was "violating inmates' federally protected civil rights by not allowing inmates access to dental floss, while acknowledging that it will result in cavities if you fail to floss your teeth." He said the inmates had been brushing three times a day, "tongue and gums included," but were still getting cavities, bleeding gums, enduring constant tooth drilling and mental anguish. Deputy Commissioner Justin Pruyne said the jail is not required to supply floss to inmates and said floss posed security concerns. But the jail has since brought in a supply of Kayser's "Floss Loops" — circles of rubbery floss with no hard plastic that are designed to break easily before they can be used as a weapon. It's not clear if that has satisfied the prisoners. The lawsuit has not been dropped. An episode of the science TV show "Mythbusters" a few years ago set up an experiment to challenge the floss-as-security-risk theory. The show used a floss-equipped robot to test whether floss — combined with toothpaste to make it more abrasive — could really saw through a bar on a jail cell. The feat was declared "plausible," given 300 days at eight hours a day — the kind of time that an inmate might have. Regulations of prison floss vary around the country. In northeastern Texas, officials believe Antonio Lara used dental floss and toothpaste to saw his way out of a cell at a county jail and kill a gang rival in 2000. "We do not carry traditional dental floss because of security concerns," said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Coffield Unit near Palestine, Texas. "Floss can be used to make ropes, weapons, cut through bars, even just reinforce the grip on a shank." Instead, inmates are allowed plastic holders with a small piece of floss stretched across, he said. In California, the state approves Floss Loops. Regular floss can be used as a garrote, said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. "But for that matter, you can pull thread from your socks or bed linens to choke someone. It's not just razor blades and toothbrush shanks in prison. We've seen underwear used as a weapon." New York's state prison system permits dental floss, but only the unwaxed variety. The waxed is "much stronger," said spokesman Peter Cutler. He said prison security officials have banned it after having "experience" with the waxed variety. He would not elaborate. The Westchester jail does ban toothpicks and water picks; inmates are allowed to have a 3-inch-long toothbrush, Pruyne said. Kayser said he also makes a "rubber-type" flexible toothbrush that's 4 ¼ inches long, but said anything longer could be fashioned into a weapon. It was waxed floss that was used in Wisconsin in 1997 by inmates Timothy Dummer and Guy Dunwald. They used ropes of braided floss to get over a wall at the Green Bay Correctional Institution. They were quickly recaptured and had five years added to their sentences. A television story about the episode said the prisoners had collected 18,975 feet — more than 3½ miles — of dental floss. In 1994, Robert Shepard used a floss rope braided as a telephone cord to scale an 18-foot wall at the South Central Regional Jail in West Virginia. He was on the lam for about five weeks. He was already being disciplined for scraping away the mortar between bricks in his cell. In 1991, three inmates bought hundreds of yards of dental floss from the store at the Hays County Jail in Illinois and turned it into a ladder of sorts. "It was ingenious," said U.S. Attorney Gerald Carruth when the men pleaded guilty to attempted escape. "They made the rope out of dental floss and used cardboard salt-and-pepper containers for stirrups on the ladder. ... That dental floss is strong." ___ Associated Press Writer Michael Graczyk in Houston and Associated Press researcher Susan James in New York contributed to this report Jailers worry about dental floss as a weapon
'An intervention' on water usage in Amarillo In July and August this year, there were only six days when water use was less than the city’s conservation goal, which changes from month to month, based on historic usage patterns.
Posted: October 14, 2012 Amarillo's largest commercial user of water is Tyson Fresh Meats, 500 N. Farm-to-Market Road 1912, which used more than 1.7 billion gallons of water for the year. Coming in second was the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Clements and Neal Units, at 395 million gallons, and the City of Amarillo in third with 275 million gallons used. Water customers gave Amarillo’s supply system another workout during this year’s high-use season after consuming a record 16 billion gallons during the 2011 drought. In July and August this year, there were only six days when water use was less than the city’s conservation goal, which changes from month to month, based on historic usage patterns. There were even 13 days that saw use of 20 million gallons or more over the goal per day, according to city records. The month of July also goes down as the highest ever monthly water consumption for the city with 2.39 billion gallons flowing out of faucets. The city also broke the record for one-day use with 92.1 million gallons consumed on July 31. The previous record was 88.7 million on June 4, 2011, during the height of the drought, which has weakened but still lingers. The U.S. Drought Monitor’s latest analysis shows most of the southern Texas Panhandle in moderate to severe drought and the northern half’s drought is rated extreme or exceptional. “We just hope people don’t forget the drought because there will be another one behind it,” said Carole Baker, executive director of the Texas Water Foundation, a nonprofit conservation advocacy group. But things have gotten a little better. The Amarillo office of the National Weather Service shows it had gotten almost 12 inches of precipitation by Friday afternoon compared to 4 inches the same time last year. The average is almost 18 by this date. The city has historically emphasized increasing its production capacity with a conservation program to go along with that. The Every Drop Counts program focuses on customers in single-family homes that used 55.5 percent of the city’s water in 2011 — largely on lawns. “It takes a long time to change thinking,” said Tim Loan, Amarillo’s assistant director of utilities. “If we could just get people to cut back a little. If they would think spring and fall are the times to have a nice lawn and in summer give the lawn enough to survive to fall.” The trend of unrestrained water use may be changing somewhat. “Both locally and statewide, people have done better,” said C.E. Williams, general manager of the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District and a longtime member of state water conservation group boards. “But I think we all take it for granted until it comes up short.” The city is beginning several initiatives that should go beyond telling people they need to cut back. It is taking bids for a company to make efficiency assessments of irrigation systems at homes with high water bills. “It’s kind of an intervention,” said Assistant City Manager Dean Frigo. “We’re modeling it after a program in Carrollton that seemed to work. We budgeted $25,000 for that.” Another effort will focus on commercial properties through changing the landscape ordinance. “You have to have 10 percent living cover, and that’s how you end up with those narrow strips of grass on the edge of a property that’re so hard to irrigate efficiently,” said City Manager Jarrett Atkinson. “To rope everyone in is going to be a big deal.” And even the education program is getting a makeover. Utilities Director Emmett Autrey has developed a new computerized presentation to show people how to slash their water bills. “The emphasis is to show the customer how much control they have over the size of their water bill,” he said. “We have to have a consistent presentation of the concept.” By far the user of the most water from the city system is Tyson Fresh Meats. It used 1.7 billion gallons in fiscal 2010-11 while turning cattle into beef, according to city records. But that should change when this year’s use is totaled. “The facility in Amarillo last year made adjustments to the pressure coming from the on-site water tower, which resulted in an average 10 percent decrease in gallons consumed each day,” said Worth Sparkman, a Tyson spokesman. “This is for nine months of 2012 compared to calendar 2011.” Some state conservation leaders are hopeful the tide may be turning for promoting conservation, especially since the state water plan calls for 34 percent of “new” water to actually be conserved or reused water. “One of the biggest education programs is by the North Texas Municipal Water District that has been spending millions on it over the last few years to make people aware what their water supply is,” said Baker. “The people who knew where their water was coming from were the ones who were conserving, and that was less than 20 percent of the people.” And education is one of several approaches being tested. “Our members have their own conservation programs. It may be a rebate for low-flow shower heads or education or the city of Houston repairing its infrastructure,” said Leroy Goodson, general manager of the Texas Water Conservation Association, which has members such as water interest groups and water districts. “From time to time it seems like an ever-losing battle. The awareness is out there, but we just have to keep plugging.” And another answer might be money. The city of Amarillo charges progressively more per 1,000 gallons as a customer’s consumption goes up, and more cities are adopting that model. “We’ve just spoiled everybody to death,” Baker said “We’ve gotten high-quality water to everyone cheaply. I think the price has got to go up eventually to get more people’s attention.” Source: City of Amarillo 'An intervention' on water usage in Amarillo
Historic Texas Prison Cemetery Filling Up Published: Aug. 4, 2012
HUNTSVILLE, Texas, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- A cemetery that has been the final resting place for many Texas criminals for 160 years is filling up and the state must find a new burial site, officials said. About 3,000 prisoners are buried on 22 acres bordering Sam Houston State University, the Houston Chronicle reported Saturday. Named Joe Hill Cemetery after a former prison captain who led a cleanup of the site in the 1960s, it's the final resting place of many deceased inmates of the state's prisons. The cemetery is a virtual checklist of some of the state's most infamous murders. Three of the first five men Texas electrocuted are interred there as are serial killer Kenneth McDuff and Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to 600 murders he didn't do. Lucas died in prison in 2001 and is in an unmarked grave. The land was donated to the state in the 1850s, but now it's filling up and much of the remaining land is subject to flooding. The state must find a new cemetery site within two years. James Jones, the warden who oversees Texas' only prison cemetery, believes land the Department of Corrections owns in Huntsville can be used. Historic Texas Prison Cemetery Filling Up
Summer heat revives debate over prisons lacking air conditioning
By Mike Ward Four scorching summers ago, convict Eugene Blackmon and dozens of other prisoners baked inside a South Texas prison, in temperatures that an expert later calculated at 134 degrees, Blackmon alleges in a lawsuit. Last summer, Larry Gene McCollum, 58, who suffered from hypertension and weighed 345 pounds, died from hyperthermia at a state lockup outside Dallas. When medical personnel at a hospital measured his body temperature, it was 109.4 degrees — more than 5 degrees higher than the life-threatening level. Perhaps as many as eight more convicts died from heat the same summer. As the Lone Star State is settling into the hottest part of its triple-digit summer, lawyers, advocates and family members of prisoners say the state's practice of housing felons without air conditioning should end. "Housing prisoners in high temperatures like this is brutal," said Scott Medlock, an Austin attorney who in late June filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Austin federal court over McCollum's death — the latest in an growing string of litigation on the issue. "The Constitution doesn't require an air-conditioned prison, but it does require safe and humane conditions," Medlock said. "The newer prisons can be like a hotbox or an oven because where the windows are small and sealed Plexiglas, the air circulation is very minimal." Prison officials say the issue is overblown, and they are taking all required precautions to ensure convicts in lockups that are not air-conditioned don't overheat. "We provide additional water and ice, we restrict outside work activity, we provide fans," Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said in listing steps designed to keep convicts and staff members cool. "Correctional officers and much of the unit staff work in the same conditions as the offenders." But inmates, advocates and family members counter that even with those steps, the superheated conditions inside many of Texas' 111 state prisons violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment — as well as violating state and national prison standards. About eight years ago, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered Mississippi prison officials to make changes after finding that state's prisons were sweatboxes — windows had been sealed shut, fans and cold water were unavailable and access to showers was not allowed. Many of the same complaints have been lodged for years in Texas. Add to that, advocates say, American Correctional Association standards that stipulate temperature and humidity inside prisons be kept at "acceptable levels." A state law mandates county jails be kept between 65 and 85 degrees, though it doesn't apply to state prisons. "Our dog pounds have better conditions in the summer than our prisons," said Houston resident Shantelle Carter, whose husband complains about sweltering conditions at the Connally Unit south of San Antonio. "No one wants to air- condition prisons, I know, but this state has a responsibility to provide humane conditions. What we have now is not humane." At Connally, which has been plagued by water outages for more than a month, where daily showers were restricted for days as temperatures crossed the century mark, prison officials two weeks ago ordered about 300 convicts transferred to other lockups — not because of the water problem, but because of a chronic staffing shortage, authorities said. Prison officials in nearby states say heat is an issue but not comparable to Texas, which experiences hotter, more humid days. Prisons in many states have better air-circulating equipment — even air conditioning — than Texas, advocates say. "My father did time in Arizona, and the prisons out there were never as hot as they are here," said Debbie Garza, a member of the Texas Inmate Families Association, which has complained for weeks about sweltering conditions inside Texas prisons. Her husband is serving time at the Coffield Unit near Palestine, Texas' largest prison — and one that draws complaints every summer. Officials note that 21 of the state's 111 lockups are air-conditioned — those classified as geriatric, medical or psychiatric lockups. Ninety are partially air-conditioned, in medical and education areas. "But most inmate housing areas are not," Clark said. Though summer brings heat complaints about many Texas prisons, some units drew praise Thursday on an advocacy group's Facebook page for providing ice water, fans, shower breaks and other heat-relief measures. Contact Mike Ward at 474-2791 Summer heat revives debate over prisons lacking air conditioning
Smiles and Tears mark Day for Dads Behind Bars
By Lomi Kriel and Michael Paulsen
Patricia Galvan scrimped over the past week for enough gas money to make the trek from Pasadena to downtown Houston, where her husband is in jail on a burglary charge.
The cash-strapped mother can't make the trip as often as she'd like, but Sunday, after all, was special.
"It's Father's Day," said Galvan, 30, pushing 3-year-old Annalee in a stroller and balancing Caylee, nearly nine months, on her hips. "We want to see him."
Like the hundreds of relatives who lined up Sunday outside Harris County Jail and Joe Kegans State Jail, near San Jacinto and Commerce streets, the mother did what she could to mark the occasion. Roughly 10,000 inmates are held in Harris County jails; across the country, about 731 of every 100,000 Americans are incarcerated. The overwhelming majority are men.
Thursday, Galvan mailed a Father's Day card, which she hoped arrived. They made Edgar Casas a tool box for when the construction worker is released. And she dressed his two daughters extra special, tying colorful ribbons in their hair.
But, the mother acknowledged, seeing his kids- particularly Caylee - often makes Casas sad. The toddler was just4 months old when Casas was arrested - duped, Galvan claims - into participating in a burglary. Now his court date keeps getting pushed back and the co-defendant is a no-show.
So, Galvan visits. Surprisingly, Caylee recognizes her father, placing her chubby hands on the grimy glass pane that separates them.
"She gets really excited," Galvan said. "But sometimes I don't bring her because he always leaves crying."
Around her, mothers, babies, and lipsticked girlfriends waited under the hot sun for the county jail's 20-minute visit. Next door, at the state jail, visitors were more fortunate: they had two hours inside a fenced-in shady courtyard.
Guards turned several women away for wearing revealing clothing. No cell phones or bags are allowed and only $20 in quarters for the vending machines selling candy and soda, which families purchased to lend an air of festivity.
Jacqueline Wallace and her daughter-in-law, Courtney, brought 11-month-old Journey to celebrate her first Father's Day.
Heavy Burden
During their visit, Journey gobbled candy, falling asleep on her father's lap. She's a "daddy's girl," Wallace said. But it's hard to see her child incarcerated, she added: "As a mother, you want to see your child doing well."
For now, they have their Sunday routine: church, then jail.
"We talk about the good times, the baby," she said. "Because at the end of the day, when we leave, he's got to deal with it all by himself."
Patricia Hanson and her husband also brought their 11-month-old grandson to wish his dad a happy Father's Day. But mostly, they brought him so he could say goodbye. This week, Hanson said, her son's parental rights will be terminated.
The retirees were in Belize when he called to say his girlfriend was pregnant. Hanson, 58, was overjoyed. A crack addict with a long rap sheet, her son promised he'd cleaned up his act.
But when Jonathan was born, doctors detected marijuana in his system. The Hansons had to take over custody or risk losing the baby. After months of paperwork, the couple are nearly set to leave her son and his girlfriend, in jail and rehabilitation, respectively, and move to Atlanta. There, they hope for a new chapter with little Jonathan.
Meanwhile, things hadn't turned out so well either for Galvan. The Father's Day visit fell apart when a jailer told her she had an outstanding warrant for a traffic ticket and, if she didn't leave, would be arrested.
As for Father's Day, she said, "I guess we'll just have to speak to him on the phone."
Reported By; Lomi Kriel
Smiles and Tears mark Day for Dads Behind Bars
TDCJ Mix-Up Leads Local Family To Believe Loved One Died Behind Bars
by Jeremy Desel
HOUSTON—A local family wants answers after a big mistake that made them believe their incarcerated brother was dead.
Daniel Webster Johnson was sentenced to prison six years ago for cocaine possession.
He’s been housed in a medical ward at the Estelle Unit ever since, because he’s blind.
Johnson’s family said when they spoke with him two weeks ago over the phone, he seemed fine. He did not sound like a person who was about to die from a cranial hemorrhage.
But then, Rosetta Johnson said she got a knock on her door. It was a policeman, saying that her brother had passed away and giving her a number to call.
"I don’t know what to do and I am trying to grasp what he is telling me," she remembered.
Rosetta Johnson said she received letters from the prison explaining how to claim his belongings and expressing condolences.
Finally, last Friday, she called the Conroe funeral home that reportedly had her brother’s body.
As it turns out, she was in for a big surprise.
"[They said] somebody else already claimed the body. What do you mean somebody else already claimed the body?" Rosetta Johnson recalled.
The body had been claimed by a family from the Dallas area – the family of Daniel Adam Johnson.
The TDCJ admitted their mistake and released a statement noting that both offenders have the same first and last names, but different middle names.
"While the mistake was inadvertent, it was a mistake that shouldn’t have happened. The agency has contacted both families and apologized for the error," TDCJ spokesperson Jason Clark said.
But what bothers Rosetta Johnson most is that she had to tell the TDCJ about the error, because no one from the prison ever called her.
She did speak with a chaplain, who told her to be happy her brother was still alive.
"He said just be glad that he is still alive. I am. I said, more than anything, I don’t want to bury my brother, but still, that is not no comfort for me," she said.
It’s also not much of a comfort for Daniel Webster Johnson’s other brothers and sisters living across the country, who’d made plans to come to Texas for the funeral.
Rosetta Johnson said she’s concerned that if a mix-up like this could happen in a matter of life and death, then it could happen at another time, like during the parole process.
The TDCJ said they’re investigating.
TDCJ Mix-Up Leads Local Family To Believe Loved One Died Behind Bars
Middleton Prison Death After Fight Investigated As Homicide
By Denise Blaz
A fight with another inmate resulted in the death of a 47-year-old Dallas man serving time at the Middleton Unit, a state prison official said Friday, the first such death there since at least 2005.
Mark Anthony Rauls was injured Sunday and died Tuesday morning after being taken off life support at an Abilene hospital.
Rauls' death is being investigated as a homicide by the Office of the Inspector General.
No homicides have been recorded at Middleton or Robertson Unit in the past seven years, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice records that go back only to 2005.
The fight between Rauls and Cody Lane Vernon, 22, of Gatesville, both inmates, happened about 5:30 p.m. Sunday, said Jason Clark, spokesman for the TDCJ. Rauls was injured when his head struck the concrete floor, Clark said.
He was taken to the unit's medical department, then transferred to Hendrick Medical Center, where doctors determined he had a head injury, Clark said. Shortly afterward, Rauls was put on life support in the intensive care unit.
He was taken off life support and died at 8:55 a.m. Tuesday.
Clark said Rauls was imprisoned Aug. 17, 1989, to serve a 30-year sentence from Dallas County for burglary of a building. Rauls was back behind bars as a parole violator Jan. 9, 1995, with an additional 25-year sentence from Dallas County for theft of property.
"Rauls was paroled several times," Clark said, "and most recently returned on May 21, 2012."
Vernon was imprisoned Dec. 8, 2008, to serve a five-year sentence imposed in Coryell County for burglary of a habitation, he said.
Middleton Prison Death After Fight Investigated As Homicide
Change on TDCJ Public Information Office:
May 12th
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MAY 01, 2012
Sale of Imperial Sugar, Central Unit Closure Denote End of an Era
Imperial Sugar is selling out to an international conglomerate the year after the Texas Legislature chose to close the Central Unit (formerly the Imperial unit) which was an early center of convict leasing that made Imperial a lucrative enterprise a century ago, with labor costs not much higher than a slave owner's. Grits finds it ironic that both institutions should dissolve so close to one another, as though their fates were somehow entwined.
In the book Texas Tough (pp. 205-206), historian Robert Perkinson said the Imperial unit's expansion and renaming as the Central Unit came in the face of calls for reform out of New York and "signaled that Texas's penal system would develop on its own terms, rooted in the Texas slavery belt and devoted, above all, to plantation production."
It was at the Imperial/Central unit that Texas Governor Pat Neff supposedly promised Leadbelly, the great murderer-minstrel (pictured), his pardon, famously delivered on the final day of his administration. Now the plantations are gone, the Central Unit has closed, and Imperial Sugar in all likelihood will no longer exist as a brand.
For southeast Texas, the sale of Imperial Sugar in some ways provides a capstone for a confluence of events that, taken together, amount to the end of an era.
Indeed, one hopes history may some day identify it as a signal point, a prelude to a new era.of deincarceration and even more prison closures.
Perhaps it's crazy to imagine, but stranger things have happened, many of them right there in Sugar Land.
POSTED BY GRITSFORBREAKFAST
LABELS: CENTRAL UNIT, FORT BEND COUNTY, HISTORY, TDCJ
Announcements
Public Awareness - Corrections Today (PACT)
A free conference presented by the
NO REGISTRATION NECESSARY
The Public Awareness - Corrections Today (PACT), a free public information conference presented by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), is scheduled for Saturday, March 24, 2012, from 8:30 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. The PACT Conference, coordinated by the TDCJ Ombudsman Program, will once again be held at the Sam Houston State University (SHSU) George J. Beto Criminal Justice Center in Huntsville. Based on participant reviews from past years, the conference will benefit a wide variety of people, including offenders' family members, the general public, community leaders, jail and prison ministries and criminal justice volunteers and advocates. There will be a 1 hour and 30 minute lunch break. The University Hotel café, CJava, which is located on the second level of the hotel near the Criminal Justice Center, will be open for lunch, or conference participants may go to other restaurants in the area.
The conference will open with a General Session introduction from Jackie Edwards, Division Director, Administrative Review and Risk Management Division, who will be followed by guest speakers Brad Livingston, Executive Director, TDCJ, Oliver Bell, Chairman, Texas Board of Criminal Justice, and Rissie Owens, Chair, Texas Board of Pardons and Parole. Bryan Collier, Deputy Executive Director, TDCJ, will then introduce the TDCJ division directors in attendance, who will be available throughout the day to talk to participants.
Following the General Session, there will be featured presentations throughout the day. TDCJ staff will be available to provide brochures, answer questions, and provide helpful information. There will also be an exhibit room dedicated to the GO KIDS initiative, and several organizations involved with the initiative will have resource tables with informational material available.
Please visit www.huntsvilletexas.com for additional information about Huntsville, such as lodging, restaurants within walking distance of Sam Houston State University and other points of interest. Please share this information with others that might be interested in learning more about TDCJ and its operations.
Make your PACT with TDCJ!
With Loved Ones Behind Bars, Valentine's Day Not All Hugs And Kisses
By Greg Kendall-Ball
The first valentine, according to some legends, came from a prisoner.
Valentinus — who would later be known as St. Valentine — was a Christian priest imprisoned for defying the pagan Roman Emperor Claudius II and marrying couples in secret.
Before his execution, he wrote a letter to his jailer's daughter.
How much of the story is true and how much is the modern embellishment of some greeting card executive is up for debate.
But about 17 centuries after St. Valentine's demise, his day is still popular among the imprisoned and their loved ones.
Tuesday afternoon, the parking lot of the Taylor County Jail was packed with cars, much fuller than a normal Tuesday, said several regular visitors.
Alexandria Aguero was there with her mother, Lizabeth Rodriguez, and her 6-month-old daughter, Gynnyssy.
They normally visit Wednesdays and Fridays, but Alexandria said Gynnyssy "wanted to put on her special Valentine's dress" and see her uncle, Valerio, who is serving time for drug possession.
Her pink dress — with large sewn-on hearts — stood out in stark contrast to the industrial white and black color scheme of the walls and visitation stalls.
"I wanted to bring her to say hello," Aguero said. "He's never gotten to hold her, because he was locked up before she was born. She really lights up whenever she sees him through the glass, and she babbles on the phone with him."
Lizabeth said she had sent her son a valentine, but wasn't sure he'd received it. It may not be an ancient Roman jail, but the rules for what can go into and out of an inmate's cell are pretty strict.
John Cummins, spokesman for the Taylor County Sheriff's Office, said cards sent to inmates would be confiscated if they contained "contraband" — anything that could be taken off the cards.
"Such as adhesive stickers, or the kind that have people or animals on them with the eyes that move," Cummins said.
Nichole Deboard's family learned that the hard way Tuesday. Her mother sent her brother, who is awaiting trial on felony drug charges, a card decorated with glitter — a no-no in the pokey because it can be removed.
For Valentine's Day, Deboard said she drove from Sweetwater with a friend — both decked out in bright red shirts featuring heart designs — to visit three different inmates, including her brother.
"I have a lot of friends who are locked up," Deboard said. So she and a friend made a day of it, grabbing lunch before stopping in to say hello to their friends.
She said she couldn't visit her boyfriend, however, because he's locked up in the state prison in Plainview, and Texas Department of Corrections only allows visitation on weekends.
For the incarcerated, sending cards to loved ones on the outside is fairly straightforward. Cummins said the jail commissary stocked Valentine's Day cards this year and had nearly sold out by Tuesday afternoon.
Delivery of flowers or chocolates or singing telegrams, however, required the cooperation of a family or friend, Cummins said, as inmates can only place collect calls from inside the jail.
And while Tuesday was celebrated as a holiday for lovers, the State of Texas forbids conjugal visits in any of its correctional institutions; however, based on their level of custody, some prisoners are allowed "contact visits" — a hug and a kiss at the beginning and end of a visit and the ability to hold hands while talking.
With loved ones behind bars, Valentine's Day not all hugs and kisses
Brown Case Highlights Reluctance To Parole Longtime Offenders
By Mike Ward
Eroy Brown, whose acquittal on murder charges involving the deaths of a prison warden and a farm manager in the 1980s shook the Lone Star corrections system to its roots, is coming up for parole again.
Brown is serving 90 years as a habitual criminal for robbing a Waco convenience store of $12 and some candy bars. The graying, almost 60-year-old is serving time in a South Carolina prison because a federal judge thought his safety could not be guaranteed in a Texas lockup. If he's granted parole, he would be sent to a pre-release program in California.
If he's denied parole, he would be released within five years without any supervision under controversial early release policies enacted in the 1970s to ease prison crowding in Texas.
"He got more publicity for (the acquittal) than Christ on the cross," said Houston attorney Bill Habern, who was Brown's lawyer on the murder charges. "The (prison) system still to this day doesn't believe he should have been acquitted. ... What is probably going to happen is called getting even."
Brown's case highlights a long-standing issue with Texas' parole system: a reluctance to parole longtime offenders with high-profile cases, even those who soon will be freed anyway, and those with serious and costly health problems.
Brown is earning liberal credits for good behavior on his sentence, which he would finish by 2017, according to current calculations. At that time, he would be released free and clear, with no supervision.
Brown is among just 4,208 of Texas' 156,000 convicts who are still accruing such credits under old laws, a number that dwindles each year as more are paroled or released.
Within the prison system, he is most noteworthy for what happened during a deadly struggle on April 4, 1981, alongside a drainage ditch called Turkey Creek in the farm fields at the Ellis Unit near Huntsville. When it was over, the farm manager, Billy Moore, lay dead from a gunshot from the warden's pistol and the warden, Wallace Pack, was drowned. Brown claimed self-defense, saying that Moore had been stealing tires from the prison and was afraid Brown was about to snitch on him.
The trial transcript, detailed in a 2011 book about the case, "The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Case That Shook the Texas Prison System," details the events of that day:
Moore drove Brown to the ditch and called for Pack to join them.
"You ain't going to be able to tell a (expletive) thing on me. You ain't going to tell (expletive) on me," Brown testified Moore told him.
Pack pulled the pistol from his car's trunk, and with Brown handcuffed by his left wrist, threatened to shoot the convict, with the revolver cocked at his temple.
"Shut your (expletive) up, boy. I will splatter your brains all over this street here," Brown testified the warden told him.
Spread-eagled astride Pack's car, Brown struggled to wrest the gun from Pack.
The gun went off five times. Brown was shot in the foot. Moore was fatally shot in the head. A third shot grazed Pack's hand. Pack and Brown continued to fight for the gun, rolling into the water-filled ditch. Pack pushed Brown's face into the muddy water, trying to drown him. Brown rolled on top of the warden in the water.
"I laid on him and laid on him," Brown testified. "I don't know how long I laid on him. He stopped moving."
Prison officials insisted the deaths were murder, and prisons were later named for both Moore and Pack.
Brown went to trial three times. Each time, he was acquitted, after testimony about Moore’s and Pack’s past conduct and convicts’ accounts of the shooting as well as how the prisons were run helped corraborate Brown’s story, Habern said. The forensic evidence the state cited also was disputed, he said.
The acquittal of a black convict in the deaths of two white prison officials never went over well in the hidebound world of Texas prisons, where prison farms were run like plantations and inmates often called their guard supervisors "boss."
By 1984, Texas had agreed to settle a separate federal civil rights case ensuring that Brown and about two dozen other convicts who had assisted in the investigation and other cases would never have to serve time in Texas prisons because it would be too dangerous for them.
That's why Brown has spent the past 26 years in federal prisons in California and South Carolina for the Waco robbery. His attorneys blamed the long sentence on publicity about the prison murders.
Since he was first eligible for parole in November 1994, Brown has been turned down seven times. Habern said Brown was approved for parole once, in 2000, but that vote was quickly rescinded before he could be released. "The system has a long memory," Habern said.
Brown has spent most of his adult life in prison. At 17, he was sent away for two years for a Waco burglary. He was soon back with a six-year sentence for a burglary in nearby Bell County. Paroled for that crime in 1976, he returned to prison just over a year later for a Fort Worth robbery that netted him a 12-year sentence.
In a report filed with federal prison officials in South Carolina, Habern said Brown "grew up under the worst possible circumstances" — his mother went to prison for murder; his father was absent during his childhood; he eventually got hooked on heroin and other drugs.
"Eroy has been a junkie almost since his childhood," the attorney said.
Habern said Brown would be better off on supervision after his release. Sister Teresa Groth said Tuesday that Brown has been accepted into the Partnership for Re-Entry Program, an initiative that caters mostly to "lifers" like Brown. Since it opened in 2002, the program, which is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has a 100 percent success rate for participants not going back to prison, Groth said.
"He'll be going into a program where he'll be supervised. He won't be coming back to Texas. He'll be in an area where he has relatives and some friends. What could be better than that?" Habern said.
"It seems like that would be much better than squeezing another three or four years out of him and then dumping him out on a street in South Carolina."
Michael Berryhill, a Texas Southern University journalism professor who wrote the book on Brown's case, said he is not hopeful.
"He should have been out years ago," Berryhill said, noting that "the two guys who he robbed the store with got off because they testified against him." Brown did not wield the weapon — a knife — during the robbery, records show.
Members of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to comment on Brown's case, not unusual for the only segment of Texas' criminal justice system that operates mostly in secret.
A three-member parole panel based in Huntsville is reviewing Brown's parole application and will decide the case, a spokesman said Tuesday.
By chance, one member of that panel, Parole Commissioner Tony Garcia, is a retired Texas prison warden and a second, Pamela Freeman, is a former corrections officer.
mward@statesman.com
Clarification: An earlier version of this story did not make clear that Texas prison inmate Eroy Brown was acquitted three times of the murders of two prison officials in 1981. Brown testified that he killed the officials in self-defense. The story should have also mentioned that his story was corraborated by other testimony about the officials' past conduct and convicts' accounts of the shooting as well as how the prisons were run. In addition, the forensic evidence the state cited also was disputed, according to Brown's attorney, Bill Habern.
Brown case highlights reluctance to parole longtime offenders
'The Prison Show' Helps Texas Inmates Find Escape
By Carrie Feibel
Every Friday at 9 p.m., thousands of prisoners across East Texas settle into their bunks, pull out their hand-held radios and tune in to The Prison Show, the only radio show in the country that caters to prisoners and the families they've left behind.
The Prison Show has been trying for decades to relieve the harshness of the Texas penal system, which leads the country in executions and has the largest prison population of any state. It's run by a group of Texans who have set out to change the public's perception of prisoners by emphasizing that inmates aren't animals; they're fathers, husbands, sons and daughters.
The show broadcasts from KPFT in Houston, a nonprofit Pacifica Network radio station based in an old house near the city's downtown. Its first hour offers news and talk about Texas prisons and courts, but it's perhaps more famous for its second hour, in which relatives of prisoners can call in live and deliver messages to their loved ones.
Most of the callers are women whose husbands, sons or boyfriends are locked up in Texas prisons for crimes ranging from auto theft to murder. They call in with everything from anniversary messages ("Hi Don, this is your wife and I wanted to call and tell you that at one minute past midnight it will be our anniversary date. Sixteen years and I would do it all over again. I meant it when I said 'I do,' and I still mean it today.") to love and encouragement ("Take care baby. I love you so much. I can't wait, I cannot, cannot, cannot wait 'til you come out 'cause it's gonna go down, you know what I'm saying? Te amo, take care, be good and stop getting in trouble ... 'cause, you can't be having that if you're trying to get out in 2012.")
'A Little Hope'
The Prison Show is run entirely by volunteers like Storey Jones, who helps screen calls. Jones is also married to an inmate and currently in law school.
"I am not soft on crime," Jones says. "But to [the prisoners], the show just shows that there [are] people out here supporting them, loving them; that they're not forgotten and that we do want them home. And they see that there are still connections and I think it gives them a little hope."
When The Prison Show began in 1980, inmates in Texas weren't allowed to use the phone. So for relatives who couldn't afford a prison visit, the show was a way to quickly get a message to a loved one. For many families, that's still true today.
One mother called in with this message for her son: "Always remember you are the love of my life and you are the best thing that's ever happened to me. And I am so proud of you and what you're doing. Please keep it up so you can do well out here because that's not a place for you to be."
'It's All About Love'
For someone randomly scanning the dial on a Friday night, hearing those messages can be startling.
Doug Peterson works for NASA in Houston. He has no personal connection to the prison world, but he's tuned in to The Prison Show for years.
"It was just so unique to me to kind of be immediately inside of these, what I think are, pretty personal conversations," he says. "You tend to think that convicts in a prison really don't have much of a love life and yet when the family members talk, it's all about love."
In fact, The Prison Show regularly conducts live, On-Air Weddings between free-world women and incarcerated men; the groom listens on the radio from prison while his bride marries a stand-in known as a legal proxy.
Show host David Babb, a former inmate himself, says the weddings reflect the show's overall mission of keeping prisoners connected to their wives, children and friends.
"So many people go to prison and those relationships end," Babb says. "The families will write to them for a while, they'll go visit them for a while and it becomes a burden, it just tends to fades away."
But the show gives prisoners a way to stay connected and the call-ins they get from children are proof of that. One daughter left this message for her incarcerated dad: "Well, school's going great. I don't have any classes with my friends but I'm seeing that as the bright side to make new friends ... And I'm just loving school right now. So I hope you can wish me luck when it comes to all the tests I have to take this year. OK, love you, Dad. See you soon, I hope."
Bringing Light To A 'Dark Place'
The Prison Show can be heard in 14 prisons across East Texas. One of those facilities is the Eastham Unit, which sits north of Houston, in the middle of vast fields where inmates raise cattle and grow cotton.
John Chris Hernandez is serving a life sentence at Eastham for a drug-related murder. He's tall and clean-shaven. The dark edges of prison tattoos peek above the neckline of his rough, white shirt.
Hernandez has three teenage daughters who come on The Prison Show almost every week.
"Every little bit counts, every little bit of communication," he says. "It keeps them going; it keeps me going. I'm not the only one doing time, they're doing time with me."
Hernandez says that because of the show, he's up to date on even the smallest details of their lives, like whether Alexus won her soccer game or Stacee got her learner's permit.
"This is a real dark, dark place," Hernandez says, "and when the show comes on, even when it's dark, it brings a light into the cell."
Somebody 'Believes In Them'
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice gets criticized a lot on The Prison Show for things like allegedly denying medical care or the lack of air conditioning. But department spokeswoman Michelle Lyons says the program is also quite helpful. She's asked the host to squelch prison rumors or tell families which prisons will be evacuated before a hurricane.
No one's ever studied The Prison Show or its effect on inmates who listen, but research indicates prisoners who stay in touch with relatives while in prison do a better job of rebuilding their lives when they get out.
Babb says even prisoners who don't have a family can get something out of the show.
"There's somebody that believes in them, and there's somebody that doesn't look at them like the beast that the media does," he says.
The KPFT radio signal reaches just one-sixth of all Texas prisoners, but Babb says his dream is to one day send that signal through the walls of all 111 Texas prisons. He also wants people in other states to start their own shows so they can help spread his message to the more than 2.2 million Americans currently behind bars.
JANUARY 05, 2012
'Texas prison burials are a gentle touch in a punitive system'
HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Kenneth Wayne Davis died at 54 as not so much a man but a number: Inmate No. 327320.
Mr. Davis was charged, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated for capital murder by the State of Texas after taking someone’s life on Nov. 19, 1977. But when he died in November 2011, Texas seemed his only friend. His family failed to claim his body, so the state paid for his burial.
On a cold morning in this East Texas town, a group of inmates bowed their heads as a prison chaplain led a prayer for Mr. Davis, his silver-handled black metal coffin resting on wooden planks above the grave the prisoners had dug for him.
Wearing sunglasses, work boots and dirt-smeared white uniforms, they might have resembled painters were they not so solemn, holding their caps and gloves in their folded hands.
They were Mr. Davis’s gravediggers but also his mourners. No one who knew Mr. Davis bothered to attend his funeral, so it was left up to Damon Gibson, serving 14 years for theft, and the rest of the prison crew to stand in silence over the grave of a man they had never met. Then Mr. Gibson and the others put their gloves on and lowered the coffin into the ground using long straps, providing him eternal rest in the one place in Texas where murderers and other convicts whose bodies are unclaimed can be interred, remembered and, if but for a few moments, honored.
On this day, Mr. Davis’s funeral was one of seven at the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, the largest prison graveyard in the country, 22 acres where thousands of inmates who were executed or died while incarcerated are buried. All of them went unclaimed by their relatives after they died, but the cemetery is not a ramshackle potter’s field. It is a quiet green oasis on a wide hill near the campus of Sam Houston State University, with rows of small crosses and headstones, at the center of which stand a decorative brick well and a white-painted altar bearing a cross. The last years of these inmates’ lives were spent under armed guard behind bars and barbed wire, but there is no fence along Bowers Boulevard here, and no one keeps watch.
Walking along the hill beneath the pine trees, stepping between the rows of hundreds of identical white crosses and tablet headstones, you think of Arlington National Cemetery. But if Arlington is for heroes, the Byrd cemetery is for villains.
The concrete cross marking the grave of Duane Howk lists his name, inmate number and date of death in June 2010 but says nothing of the offense for which he was serving a life sentence, aggravated sexual assault of a child. The serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff, executed in 1998 for strangling a 22-year-old pregnant mother of two with a rope, had gained notoriety for being the only inmate in United States history who was freed from death row and returned years later after killing again, but he lies beneath a nameless cross reading 999055.
The state’s prison agency, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, has been the steward of the cemetery since the first inmates were buried there in the mid-1800s, maintaining and operating it in recent decades as carefully and respectfully as any religious institution might.
An inmate crew from the nearby Walls Unit prison cleans the grounds, mows the grass and trims trees four days per week. The inmates dig the graves with a backhoe and shovels, serve as pallbearers and chisel the names on the headstones by hand using metal stencils and black paint. The cemetery was named for an assistant warden at the Walls Unit who helped clean and restore the graveyard in the 1960s, and even today, the warden or one of his deputies attends every burial.
“It’s important, because they’re people still,” said the warden, James Jones. “Of course they committed a crime and they have to do their time, and unfortunately they end up dying while they’re in prison, but they’re still human beings.”
In a state known for being tough on criminals, where officials recently eliminated last-meal requests on death row, the Byrd cemetery has been a little-known counterpoint to the mythology of the Texas penal system. One mile from the Walls Unit, which houses the state’s execution chamber, about 100 inmates are buried each year in ceremonies for which the state spends considerable time and money. Each burial costs Texas about $2,000. Often, as in Mr. Davis’s case, none of the deceased’s relatives attend, and the only people present are prison officials and the inmate workers.
Though all of those buried here were unclaimed by relatives, many family members fail to claim the bodies because they cannot afford burial expenses and want the prison agency to pay the costs instead. The same relatives who declined to claim the body will then travel to Huntsville to attend the state-paid services at the cemetery.
"I think everyone assumes if you’re in a prison cemetery you’re somehow the worst of the worst," said Franklin T. Wilson, an assistant professor of criminology at Indiana State University who is writing a book about the cemetery. “But it’s more of a reflection of your socioeconomic status. This is more of a case of if you’re buried there, you’re poor.”
Prison officials have verified 2,100 inmates who are buried at the cemetery, but they say there may be additional graves. Professor Wilson recently photographed every headstone and estimated that there were more than 3,000 graves.
In some ways, the cemetery and the funerals held there lack precision and formality. Coffins are transported from the altar at the center of the cemetery to the gravesite on a trailer hitched to the back of a green John Deere tractor.
Names and words are misspelled on a few headstones and markers. Relatives have brought portable stereos to play music during the funerals, blaring rap songs and AC/DC’s “Hell’s Bells.” Most days, after the inmate crew has returned to the prison, the cemetery is a deserted, lonesome place. Of the thousands of graves, only a handful have flowers on them.
“You’ve got guys here who died in prison and were buried out here, and they could have made a difference someplace, even if it was only in a small community somewhere,” said Jim Willett, director of the nearby Texas Prison Museum and a retired Walls Unit warden who attended nearly 200 graveside services. “These guys didn’t just mess up their lives. There’s their family and other families that got messed up because of some screwup that they did, and then they wind up like this.”
On the day of Mr. Davis’s interment, three burials had family members present, and four did not. Vandals had entered the cemetery and set a large brush pile on fire, filling the morning air with smoke. Neither Mr. Gibson nor the inmate workers knew any of the men they were burying. “It has made me a better person,” said Mr. Gibson, 38, a father of two from Houston. “It has made me reflect on the things I’ve done. I don’t want this to be me.”
Two of the seven inmates who were buried, including Mr. Davis, were serving life sentences for murder, and the others had been imprisoned for drunken driving, theft, assault, sexual assault of a child or burglary when they died. Mr. Davis spent nearly 34 of his 54 years behind bars. In the ground in Huntsville, he was finally free of his prison uniform. The funeral home that handles inmates’ burials put him in dark pants, a white shirt and a tie.
See Slide Show The Rites of a Prison Cemetery.
Texas Prisoner Burials Are a Gentle Touch in a Punitive System
January 4, 2012
Demolishing A Piece Of History
HUNTSVILLE — Brick by brick, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice rodeo arena is quickly becoming a memory.
The spot where so many prison rodeos were held has long been used as a storage area for old vehicles, but the crumbling structure has become a safety hazard in recent years, said Jason Clark, TDCJ spokesman.
The rodeo arena should be completely demolished by February, he said. The arena, located next to the Huntsville “Walls” Unit, served as the prison rodeo stage from 1951 to 1986.
Prison rodeos, which began in 1931, were held at a baseball field next to the prison until the new arena was built 20 years later.
“The arena was primarily used for the prison rodeo, which happened every weekend in October,” Clark said. “(Since 1986) it has been used as a staging and storage area for vehicles that are set to be refurbished by offenders at the Huntsville Unit. The area will continue to be used as a staging and storage area. There will also be some open space, which will serve as buffer space next to the unit.”
Clark said the demolition project has been in the works for quite some time. State budgetary constraints were not enough to stop demolition.
“The condition of the arena has deteriorated significantly in recent years and has become a safety hazard,” he said. “A public roadway also borders the arena and there was some concern that debris could fall and potentially cause problems. With these things in mind and the relatively low cost of the project, the decision was made to demolish the arena.”
Soon, photographs and memorabilia will be all that remain from the once massive structure, where visitors from all over the state and the nation watched prisoners in striped uniforms ride tough, prison-bred bulls.
Jim Willett with the Texas Prison Museum oversees an impressive collection of items salvaged from the Texas Prison Rodeo. It's these items, Willett said, that he hopes people will come to love.
“Personally, (the arena) might as well be on the ground in my opinion because it doesn't give a good reflection of what used to be there,” he said. “It looks awful. I'd rather look at pictures of it, when it was really in operation.”
In its heyday, the rodeo could bring in 20,000 people each weekend in October.
This influx of visitors meant big bucks for Huntsville retailers who served tourists, such as service stations, restaurants and hotels.
“Looking overall for the city – if you had an October where there were five Sundays and you had good weather for all of them, you could look at having over 100,000 people coming to Huntsville that year,” Willett said. “People come in here all the time asking if I think they'll ever bring it back. My standard answer is no. It was a big to-do. It brought a lot into the economy of this community. This town became well-known because of it.”
Willett said folks loved the fast pace of the rodeo, though prisoner safety is one of the concerns TDCJ cites as a reason for not bringing the rodeo back, along with concerns about the arena's stability.
“It was a very fast-moving rodeo. As soon as the chute opened, and as soon as a bull rider hit the ground — almost that soon, the chute opened again and here came another rider,” Willett said. “Even to this day, we get a lot of people in here who say, 'My parents used to bring me to this rodeo every year.' My parents live 90 miles north of here and they came to a rodeo every year.”
Demolishing a piece of history
Book looks at inmate who exposed system
By ALLAN TURNER In April 1981, convicted burglar and armed robber Eroy Brown drowned Ellis Unit Warden Wallace Pack and fatally shot Billy Moore, the unit's farm manager, launching a high-profile series of trials that illustrated the level of brutality then existing in the state's prison system. Represented by Houston legislator-lawyer Craig Washington, Brown successfully claimed self-defense, contending the men, fearful he would expose a prison theft racket, planned to kill him. Released, then returned to prison for a 1984 Waco robbery, Brown is serving a 90-year sentence as a habitual criminal. Houston journalist Michael Berryhill explores Brown's case in his new book, The Trials of Eroy Brown: The Murder Case That Shook the Texas Prison System. Brown next will be considered for parole in February; his mandatory release is set for Christmas Day 2017. Following are excerpts from an interview of Berryhill by Houston Chronicle reporter Allan Turner. Q: Why did you find the case of Brown intriguing? A: The story of Eroy Brown may seem to be a true crime story and, in a sense, it is. Really, it's a story of the tragedy of Texas prisons going back to the 1950s, the tragedy of how they were run with a plantation mentality with state officials denying what they were doing. Q: The killing of Pack and Moore came just four months after federal JudgeWilliam Justice released his landmark Ruiz decision, blasting the prison system for crowding, questionable medical practices and brutality. Describe what the Ellis Unit was like at the time of the killings. A: Ellis Unit was designed by George Beto, the earlier prisons director, and continued by Jim Estelle, as the toughest in the system. You had the toughest convicts, and the general philosophy was you needed the toughest warden. Wallace Pack was assigned to keep the lid on Ellis. The inmates in the prison were restless. There were work stoppages and strikes, and with Judge Justice's opinion, there was an air of expectancy that the brutality and terrible conditions would end. Q: Brown's problems began when Pack and Moore escorted him to the "bottoms." What did that mean? A: The "bottoms" was a generic term for a remote place on a prison farm where discipline could be given. It was a "tune-up" or "attitude adjustment." A trip to the bottoms meant you were going to be disciplined corporally. Q: What motive would Pack and Moore have for punishing Brown? A: Brown had said rather loudly to another inmate that he was angry because he hadn't gotten a furlough "after all I did for Billy Moore." Brown had helped Moore and another prison official steal tires and automotive equipment from the farm shop and they thought he was going to snitch about their theft. Ordinarily, it wouldn't matter what a convict threatened to do, but FBI and Justice Department officials were crawling all over Texas prisons. Inmate testimony had played a critical role in Judge Justice's ruling ... and inmates were being heard and believed. Pack had just been assigned to take on the toughest prison in the system. Here it was his third week on the job ... it was important to back up his farm manager. Q: Did Brown have a history of violence? A: No. The simple truth is Eroy was a heroin addict, an incompetent thief, an armed robber. He never hurt anybody. He was not violent in prison, although he once defended himself against an inmate. He was a model trusty. Eroy succeeded in prison much better than in the outside world. Q: Brown's first trial ended in a mistrial, then two later trials, one for each killing, ended in acquittals. Brown was released, but returned to prison in 1985 on a 90-year habitual sentence stemming from a Waco convenience store robbery. Since then, he has been denied parole seven times. In your book, you suggest the state is retaliating for the Pack and Moore killings. How so? A: Brown feels like he's being retaliated against, and his parole attorney feels that he's been retaliated against. In the convenience store robbery, the two other participants had all charges dropped in exchange for testifying against Brown. They had records as complicated as Brown's. It's a supposition, but I think it's reasonable that (at age 60), he ought to be pretty well "timed out" on crime, especially if he's given some help. Author revisits Texas prisons brutality case
House Corrections Chair Jerry Madden to not run again
By Mike Ward House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, a 10-term lawmaker known nationally as a prison reformer for his work in expanding Texas’ treatment and rehabilitation programs, confirmed this afternoon that he will not run for re-election. “I’m not retiring. I’m just not running again,” he said, noting his decision came “within the past few days” and was not influenced by the fact that two opponents have announced against him. “It’s been a great run. After 20 years, I look forward to doing something else with my knowledge of criminal justice.” With his decision, Madden becomes at least the fourth House committee chairman to not run for re-election, joining House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Chairman Jim Jackson, R-Carrolton; Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Chairman Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, and Elections Committee Chairman Larry Taylor, R-League City. Several in the Senate already have done so, as well, including Senate Finance Committee Steve Ogden, R-Bryan; Education Committee Chair Florence Shapiro, R-Plano; Jurisprudence Committee Chairman Chris Harris, R-Fort Worth, and Economic Development Committee Chairman Mike Jackson, R-La Porte. Madden, a conservative Republican from Richardson, was first elected to the House in 1993 and, in 2005, became chairman of the powerful committee that oversees Texas’ prison system. Two years later, in 2007, he teamed with state Sen. John Whitmire, a conservative Houston Democrat and veteran chairman of the Senate’s prisons committee, to successfully push through a shift in state policy that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier: Instead of building costly new prisons, the state funded expanded treatment the rehabilitation programs. The initiatives were expanded in 2009, after Texas’ prison population began dropping and recidivism rates improved. In 2010, Madden and Whitmire received national recognition for their work as Public Officials of the Year by Governing Magazine. Other states have since begun adopting Texas’ model programs. A engineering graduate of West Point who saw Army service in Vietnam and Germany, Madden moved to Richardson in 1971 and worked for Texas Instruments and Teledyne Geotech until he formed an insurance company in 2000. He sold that business and retired in 2008. Madden earlier had indicated he would run for reelection. “It’s a personal decision, all about finances and money,” he said. “I’m not one of the wealthiest people around … I need to get out and work.” Madden said he plans to work as a criminal justice consultant, much as he has been doing for the past two years — though in an unpaid role. “I’m on the road almost constantly now talking about criminal justice programs and issues, and I plan to continue to do that,” he said. House Corrections Chair Jerry Madden to not run again
OCTOBER 26, 2011
TDCJ, parole board publish self-evaluations for Sunset process If you care about criminal justice reform, now is the time for you to speak up and voice your concerns. TCJC is very excited to tell you about a unique opportunity to offer input and suggestions that will help improve Texas' criminal justice system. Presently, the Sunset Advisory Commission has begun its review of TDCJ and other criminal justice-related agencies, including the Board of Pardons and Paroles, the Windham School District, and the Correctional Managed Health Care Committee. Based on its evaluation, the Commission will make recommendations on how each agency can be improved or whether the agency should be abolished. You can take part in this opportunity for improvement by letting us know what should be done to improve Texas' criminal justice agencies. TCJC has created a comprehensive guide to the Sunset process to help individuals understand the process, how they can get involved, and what resources are available.
Please click the link below to download a PDF version of our guide to Sunset:
To download a 1-page flyer on how to participate in the Sunset process, please click below: Again, the Sunset process is in its beginning stages, and most agencies under review have already submitted Self-Evaluation Reports (SERs), which are available on the Sunset Advisory Commission's website. To view each agency's SER, visit the Sunset SER webpage Here!
To view individual agency SERs, please click on the links below: Note: The Correctional Managed Health Care Committee's SER is not yet published. An agency's Sunset review typically only occurs every 12 years, so we must seize upon this rare opportunity to improve the criminal justice system. Through the Sunset process, and with your help, we can achieve the necessary reforms that can make Texas' criminal justice system a model for others. They're right. The Sunset process is a unique opportunity to suggest improvements at the agency at a deeper-in-the-weeds level than is often possible. Check out those self-evaluations, as will I, and I'm sure Grits readers will be hearing more on these subjects sooner than later. POSTED BY GRITSFORBREAKFAST LABELS: PAROLE, SUNSET, TDCJ
Whitmire: Move prison HQ to Austin
By Mike Ward
The chairman of the state Senate committee that oversees Texas’ prison system, angry over what he perceives as fiscal missteps by top brass, called this morning for the agency’s headquarters to be consolidated in Austin.
“It’s time to do things differently,” said Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston. “Maybe when there were no prisons any place other than east and south Texas, Huntsville made sense for the headquarters. But they have offices there and in Austin now, and we should do away with duplication and move it all to Austin.”
Whitmire’s comments came after he blasted prison officials earlier this week for holding a briefing session for the agency’s 30 top officials at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Park, between Austin and Huntsville, just days after most of those officials were in Austin for a meeting of the prison system’s governing board.
And he criticized the agency’s expenditure of more than $1.2 million to maintain a vacant federal Veterans Administration hospital in Marlin, near Waco. Four years ago it was to have been turned into a prison hospital, but that project is on indefinite hold.
“This is an agency with 112 prisons across the state that’s just cut programs and laid off employees, and they’re continuing to do business just like they were before,” Whitmire said.
“That needs to change. And their headquarters needs to be in Austin, the seat of state government. Huntsville has outlived its usefulness for that.”
Similar proposals to consolidate the prison system’s headquarters in Austin have failed in the Legislature several times during the past two decades, mostly because of opposition from top prison officials who live in the Huntsville area.
Whitmire failed in an earlier move during the 1990s.
But Whitmire, whose Senate Criminal Justice Committee oversees prison operations, said he intends to push for moving the headquarters to Austin next legislative session, at a time when the agency is up for review by the Sunset Advisory Commission that periodically does a top-to-bottom review of agencies’ operations.
For their part, prison officials said the decision on the headquarters location is up to the Legislature.
“TDCJ maintains facilities and operations throughout the state of Texas including prison units, parole offices and halfway houses in dozens of Texas cities,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“Consistent with state law, we have located our key agency functions both in Huntsville and Austin, which has allowed us to effectively manage our system from both locations. We recognize that ultimately, the decision to consolidate TDCJ’s headquarters would be one made by the Texas Legislature.”
Whitmire: Move prison HQ to Austin
As prison closes, could others be next?
By Mike Ward
SUGAR LAND — As white-uniformed convicts hefted steel bunks and furniture out of the aged Central prison unit on Thursday, correctional officers spoke in hushed tones about how time ran out for the concrete landmark.
It was done in by suburbia that slowly surrounded it, a prison population that has stabilized after years of explosive growth and state budget cuts.
The officers worried that other prisons just up the road, near burgeoning housing additions and two new schools, could be next.
And while prison officials and legislative leaders say no such closures are under discussion, they acknowledge that the coastal plains southwest of Houston, where prison plantation farms once stretched as far as the eye could see, are quickly becoming a different place.
"There's no doubt there are better uses for that land as development occurs," said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston. "And there's also no doubt that if the (prison) population continues to drop, that we may have other opportunities to close other units that are more expensive or are in the wrong place."
The construction of a prison psychiatric hospital during the 1990s "in the middle of a cornfield" not far from the Central Unit "will be a decision I think we'll regret," Whitmire said.
The Central Unit, the first state prison in Texas history to close, is the second oldest in the state corrections system. It first opened in 1878 as a sugar-cane plantation where convicts were leased to companies, including Imperial Sugar, to work the fields.
Its closure has been debated for at least six years. This spring, it fell victim to the tightest state budget in nearly a decade.
The more than 1,000 convicts were moved out more than a week ago, officials said. On Aug. 31, it will officially cease to be a state prison, when the property once known as the Imperial State Farm will be transferred to the General Land Office for eventual sale or lease for development.
Nearby, a new high school and homes have popped up near the Jester I Unit.
A new intermediate school and strip-center have opened just across from the Jester III and IV prisons. Custom homes, some valued at about $1 million, back up to the Vance Unit. Prison cotton fields and livestock sheds now sit alongside for-sale signs along Texas 99 that bisects the former prison farms.
Officials note that Texas is perhaps the only state in the country now with hundreds of empty prison bunks and the possibility of having even more in the future, if trends hold.
Even so, House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, said that the future of nearby prisons is secure for now.
"There's been no discussion about others down there," he said. "Development has surrounded Central, and the community there wanted another use for that site.
This is driven partly by what the communities want there, but no one has said they want this for any other units down there."
Even so, Madden said other opportunities may emerge as other rural prisons become urban, in a shift that benefits community-based rehabilitation and treatment programs that have proven successful in reducing recidivism in Texas.
For Central, though, there will be no such future.
"This place is different than other units," said Senior Warden Herman Weston, as guards nearby used large brass keys to unlock empty cells for a final tour by reporters, clanging steel-barred doors open and closed. "This is the only one with a central tower like this."
For all its chipped-paint, musty corridors that smell of sweat and dirt, rusting warehouses and an adjacent tree-lined, red-brick housing area where the wardens and other "bosses" lived, the prison was once considered cutting edge.
Designed by prominent architects and opened in 1932, as the Great Depression began, the concrete cellblock was to become the central intake and rehabilitation lockup for all of Texas.
Texas bought the 5,200-acre plantation in 1908, as part of purchases of several others nearby where convicts worked fertile fields of sugar cane, cotton and other crops. The concrete edifice replaced wooden barracks at three work camps on the prison farm.
Built to house 600 convicts in the white tower, capped by a peculiar, tiny cupola that once served as a lookout for guards, the old cellblocks at one time in the early 1950s held more than 1,000 prisoners.
"They should have condemned this place a long, long time ago," Terral Griffin, 48, a convicted burglar, said as he helped clear out an empty cellblock Thursday. He was assigned to Central until a few weeks ago and lived for a time in the tower.
"It's one of the worst places I've been. \u2026 The roaches and ants, the heat in the summer, the stories about the ghosts. If I'd come here first, I'd never wanted to come back" to prison.
mward@statesman.com
As prison closes, could others be next?
Texas closing prison amid cutbacks
03 Aug 2011
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - For the first time in its history, Texas is shuttering a prison -- a creaky, 102-year-old lockup southwest of Houston once made famous in the folk song "Midnight Special."
Half the state away in Brownwood, a Texas Youth Commission lockup for teenage lawbreakers sits empty, one of three juvenile prisons closed effective Sunday as part of a state plan to focus mostly on community-based rehabilitation and treatment programs.
The empty cells were once unthinkable in a tough-on-crime state like Texas that once couldn't build prisons fast enough.
Texas joins a nationwide trend of shutting expensive state prisons, driven partly by red ink in state budgets, partly by a drop in convict numbers -- with the lowest crime rate since 1973 -- and partly by a policy shift from lock-'em-up justice to rehabilitation programs.
"From where Texas was just a few short years ago, this is huge," said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, a Richardson Republican and an architect of the changes. "There were those who said this day would never come."
Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the Central Unit in Sugar Land -- the state's second-oldest prison, opened in April 1909 -- will be vacant by the end of the month. The closure will send 71 correctional officers to new jobs in other lockups.
Just a few months ago, it housed more than 900 felons -- including a trusty whose nighttime escape to go shopping at a nearby Walmart Super Center made national headlines.
On Tuesday, Lyons said, just about 80 felons and 200 correctional officers remained on site, working to move the prison system's soap factory to the Roach Unit in distant Childress and a prison trucking hub to the nearby Ramsey Unit for now.
"Inmates have been relocated to other units. Most of the staff is transferring to other units," Lyons said. "After the end of the month, we plan to be out of there."
Then, the state's General Land Office will take over, handling an expected environmental assessment among other steps needed to put the 325-acre site on the market for development -- either through a sale or lease.
"The buildings are a liability," said Jim Suydam, a General Land Office spokesman, noting that the farmlands around the lockup are now suburbia.
"Nobody wants a prison."
After several unsuccessful proposals to close the unit in the past decade, lawmakers in May finally agreed to shutter it to save $25 million over two years.
Hal Croft, a deputy land commissioner who oversees such sales of state property, said it might be a year before a decision is made on how to market or reuse the site.
One problem, he said, is that the prison is accessible only over a private railroad crossing.
"If this requires that an above-grade crossing be constructed, that will be a significant amount of money," he said. "A decision will also have to be made whether the state will keep ownership of the property, and market development rights, or sell it. We're a long ways from that decision now."
Similar issues face the Texas Youth Commission, which as of Sunday has three empty lockups -- the first state-owned juvenile prisons to be closed.
The commission has closed three other lockups in the past three years, but those sites were owned by other arms of government.
In early June, the Youth Commission board voted to close Ron Jackson II in Brownwood, Al Price in Beaumont and the Crockett State School in Crockett -- sites that at one time held more than 500 teen offenders, in all.
Jim Hurley, the commission's spokesman, said more than 700 employees received layoff notices because of the closures and budget downsizing that the Legislature ordered.
The commission is to be merged into a new Texas Department of Juvenile Justice by early next year.
By legislative mandate, the Brownwood and Crockett sites can be transferred to county governments if they want them.
Future use of the 16-year-old Beaumont site, the newest of the Youth Commission's lockups, remains undetermined, although state officials are exploring using it to hold immigration detainees, among other things.
In this seemingly new era for corrections in Texas, some employees suggest that the Central Unit being the first to close is perhaps fitting.
After all, by legend, it was memorialized in the 1920s folk song "Midnight Special," made famous during the 1930s by Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, an American folk and blues singer.
Ledbetter served seven years for murder at Central during the 1920s.
In the book "Best Loved American Folk Songs," the Midnight Special is identified as a train from Houston that shines its light into a prison cell, a light that is seen as a light of salvation and change.
And that, said Levin and Madden, is just what the closing of the old prison signals.
Many inmates don't finish time
Ken Fibbe
After a sentencing, ask someone how long they think that person will actually serve in prison, and most people will generally say "about half."
According to the most recent 2010 Texas Department of Criminal Justice report, that estimate isn't too far off.
Of those released from Texas state prisons during the 2010 fiscal year, the report stated the average sentenced length was 19.2 years for all inmates. But, on average, 58 percent of that sentence, or just over 11 years, was actually served.
The percentage of actual time served hasn't varied much in recent years, and if anything, it has gone down a little.
In 2006, for instance, the average time served was 60 percent, according to a similar TDCJ report conducted that year.
State jail sentences range from six months to two years while prison is from two years to life — and includes the death penalty.
At the state jail level, inmates averaged a one-year sentence, a time that has little to no buffer room for getting out early.
The most common sentence was three to five years in prison, with more than 16,000 new entrants sentenced to that.
During the 2010 fiscal year in Texas, 247 people were sentenced to life, 85 to life without parole and seven received the death penalty.
According to the report, the average educational achievement level for state prison inmates was close to that of an eighth-grader, and just above a seventh-grader for those in the state jail system.
TDCJ spokesman Michelle Lyons said a lack of education is an overwhelmingly common factor in those that are locked up.
"If they don't feel they have job skills, then they feel they have to find other ways of making money, like stealing, selling drugs or getting involved in other criminal activities," Lyons said.
But lack of educational standards for inmates is what she said the state has been working hard to fight.
She said two Texas legislative sessions ago, laws were passed to allow more funding and support for in-prison educational, literacy and drug treatment programs.
"And it's been working," she said.
As of May 31, about 58 percent of the prison inmate population had either a verified high school diploma or GED diploma, the latter being the most common achievement of the two earned in prison.
That's a 2 percent increase compared to the previous year, and Lyons believes as more prisoners take advantage of educational programming while incarcerated, that number will continue to rise.
"So it may be true their education level is low going in, but we are very diligent in making sure we get as many inmates as possible their GED's while they are in prison," she said. "That makes their chances of success rise for when they get out."
By their sheer size alone, Texas and California are usually the top two states in terms of total prison populations, Lyons said.
Texas has about 140,000 prison inmates, with males making up 93 percent of that population.
There are about 12,000 people locked up in state jails.
Blacks represented the highest percentage of total prison inmates at about 36 percent, or 51,000. They are followed by Hispanics at 45,000 and whites at 42,000. Only 708 fell into the "Other Race" category for state prisons.
Comparing Texas incarceration statistics to other states can be extremely difficult, Lyons said, because of discrepancies in the way reports are kept or filed and because statutory laws vary greatly from state to state.
In Texas, for instance, you have to serve at least half your sentence for many serious felonies, including those that are considered to be "3G" offenses.
Named after the section of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, these offenses include murder, indecency with a child, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and certain severe drug offenses.
Of four categories — drug, violent, property and other — the most common type of crime committed at the prison level fell under the "violent" category.
At 12,000 convicts admitted during the 2010 fiscal year, these crimes included sexual assault, robbery and kidnapping.
About 950 were admitted for homicide.
Of those entering prison that year, drug violators got an average of 5.8 years and violent crime offenders got about 10 years.
About 9,000 were sent to prison for drug delivery, possession and other narcotics offenses, and 3,800 for DWIs.
There were 210 people from Wichita County who went to state prisons that year.
© 2011 Times Record News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Many inmates don't finish time
7-year sentence in prison smuggling case
By Mike Ward
A Richardson woman has been sentenced to seven years in state prison in a headline-grabbing smuggling case in which an air compressor loaded with 74 cell phones and other contraband were intercepted going into a Beaumont prison.
The seizure had become emblematic of Texas’ chronic prison contraband problem, especially with cell phones, that resulted in several crackdowns and a lockdown of the entire prison system in 2009 after a condemned killer on death row phoned a state senator on a smuggled phone.
Officials said Tuesday that Iris Barroso pleaded guilty the day before to a charge of introducing prohibited items into a correctional facility, and was given a seven-year term by state District Judge Layne Walker.
John Moriarty, inspector general for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said that in August 2008, an air compressor was delivered to the Stiles Unit via UPS. Based on a tip, prison investigators seized the compressor and found it loaded with contraband.
Inside, they found 74 cell phones, cigarette and smokeless tobacco, cigarette rolling papers, cigarette lighters, clear alcohol, cologne, six pairs of underwear, a toothbrush and weight scales that presumably were to be used to resell the tobacco inside the prison.
Authorities traced the compressor to a Harbor Freight Store in Richardson, and determined that it was shipped to the prison through a UPS office in Mesquite.
Investigators also determined that Barroso’s credit card was used to purchase the compressor, and that she had visited convict Juan Cardenas at the prison.
Cardenas is serving a life sentence for murder from Dallas County, prison officials said.
7-year sentence in prison smuggling case
March 14, 2011
Moving TDCJ headquarters off the table
By Tori Brock; Staff Reporter
HUNTSVILLE — State Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, sat down Monday with Jerry Madden, a Republican state representative from Richardson, to talk about Madden's House bill that proposes the headquarters of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice be moved out of Huntsville.
Madden placed the idea of moving headquarters to Austin in House bills 2844 and 3386. TDCJ maintains joint headquarters in both Huntsville and Austin which Madden, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, said is a waste of resources.
Kolkhorst and Madden discussed the idea Monday at a meeting hosted by senior staff for Speaker of the House Joe Straus. In a prepared statement, Kolkhorst said she received assurances from Madden that relocating TDCJ headquarters would be removed from any further bill drafts.
“After a frank and serious discussion with Chairman Madden, we both agreed that there are perhaps better ways to address the budget shortfall,” Kolkhorst said. “I will take Chairman Madden at his word when he told me that any draft moving forward will not attempt to relocate TDCJ from Huntsville.”
This news should bring a small sigh of relief to the TDCJ community in Huntsville, which has already seen the loss of nearly 260 jobs this month.
City Manager Bill Baine said he's relieved the idea is off the table for this legislative session.
“It's great,” he said. “We appreciate the TDCJ headquarters being in Huntsville. We're grateful to Lois Kolkhorst for handling this.”
Madden's bill came as a result of trying to address the state's estimated $27 billion budget shortfall. Other parts of his bill are still active, including revenue-building initiatives, such as charging inmates fees for their health care and cost reductions, such as alternatives to traditional incarceration such as halfway houses or residential facilities. Madden also wants to cut “perks” for TDCJ employees, such as subsidized housing for correctional officers on the grounds of prison units and mileage reimbursements for other employees for traveling to and from work.
Moving TDCJ headquarters off the table
TDCJ cuts 555 jobs, trims menu, drops Project RIO
Posted on 02/23/2011
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is cutting 400 administrative jobs and eliminating the Project RIO program meant to re-integrate offenders into society, costing another 155 positions.
It also is changing the menu to substitute powdered milk for carton milk, use sliced bread instead of hamburger or hot dog buns, cutting desserts from two to one weekly and serving only brunch and dinner on Saturdays and Sundays at state jail and transfer facilities.
The cuts are part of the agency’s plan to reduce this fiscal year’s expenditures by $40 million, or 1.3 percent, to help address the budget shortfall. Executive Director Brad Livingston warned that these cuts shouldn’t be considered the last.
Most of the savings are from reductions in capital expenditures and unexpended funds, according to the agency.
But $3.1 million comes from the 400 agency positions, and $1.5 million comes from eliminating Project RIO (Re-Integration of Offeners) and associated positions.
The House and Senate starting-point budgets zeroed out Project RIO, according to TDCJ. It’s funded with general revenue through an inter-agency contract with Texas Workforce Commission and is meant to give offenders the knowledge and skills they need for jobs and help them with documentation including getting a state ID, certification of education and military records and completing a Work in Texas applications.
Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, told my colleague Nolan Hicks about his concerns over the cuts: “What people have to understand is that criminal justice is a system; it’s not just about locking people up, it’s about what you do while you have them. Some of these proposed cuts and savings will lead to increased spending later because it will increase the recidivism rate… and often times there will be another victim involved.”
Mike Gross, vice president of the Texas State Employees Union, said, “This move by the agency will have a big impact on public safety in Texas.” Among other points, he said the elimination of Project RIO “just means we’ll be seeing more offenders end back up in prison.”
“We’re putting the public at risk with these kinds of cuts,” said Gross. “This is why we need the legislature to find new sources of revenue, use the Rainy Day Fund, and maximize all federal funds. This is just the tip of the iceberg for what our state will be facing in a few months.”
TDCJ cuts 555 jobs, trims menu, drops Project RIO
State looking at release of foreign or sick inmates
Some lawmakers say they not ruling out cost-cutting move even in tough-on-crime Texas.
Faced with making deep cuts to schools and human services programs, closing at least two prisons and slashing rehabilitation programs, legislative leaders are beginning to talk about what is usually unthinkable in tough-on-crime Texas: releasing more convicts to save money.
Not violent offenders, mind you, but nonviolent foreign citizens who are eligible for parole and old, infirm convicts, some of whom have been diagnosed as dying.
"We don't have the resources to continue business as usual in Texas," said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston , whose committee oversees prison operations.
"Everything is on the table for discussion this year. Everything."
While some of his Senate and House colleagues echo those sentiments, others are not so sure.
Police, prosecutors and crime victims groups are urging caution in paroling any more convicts so that Texas does not face a tragic déjà vu of the late 1980s, when wholesale paroling of hundreds of convicts to ease prison crowding triggered a crime wave in Houston and other cities.
"If they want to get rid of the dopers, OK. The drunks, hot check artists, the thieves, OK," said William "Rusty" Hubbarth , an Austin lawyer who is a vice president for Justice for All, a Houston-based crime victims group.
"But they should keep all the sex offenders and the 3G (violent) offenders right where they are. They don't need to go anywhere."
House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, R-Richardson , echoes that sentiment: "Whatever we decide to do should not compromise public safety in any way. No one's in favor of that."
Criminal justice advocates predict the issue will test whether Republicans' resolve to cut the budget will outweigh a tough-on-crime mentality that has helped many lawmakers get elected.
"What this state is finally realizing is that we've got too many people locked up who may not need to be in prisons," said Sheryl Lynn Washington, a crime victim advocate from Houston and self-proclaimed tea party activist who was at the Capitol on Tuesday urging more treatment and rehabilitation programs and less imprisonment.
"Use prison only for the worst, most violent offenders, not everyone who violates any little law."
If there is one group that a growing number of lawmakers seem to agree should be gone from Texas, it's the prisoners who are foreign nationals — a group that now numbers almost 12,000, most of them from Mexico. That tally does not include those inmates on death row or serving life without parole.
About 3,000 were behind state bars as of December for nonviolent or drug offenses, according to statistics from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
All were listed as parole-eligible. All are targeted for deportation as soon as they are released. The majority of the inmates in question were in the country illegally before their arrest, lawmakers said recently.
By some calculations, sending them all home could save more than $54 million a year — enough to restore some of the deep cuts planned in prison, human services, public education and many other state programs.
"Fifty million could go a lot of other places in the current budget environment," said Whitmire, who has long advocated paroling and deporting nonviolent foreign citizens to free up prison bunks for Texas offenders and to save money — so far without success.
"The big fear has been that the Mexican nationals would come back into Texas, but we could make it a condition of their parole that if they came back, they would go back to prison.
"My guess is we'd never see these people again. Prisons are no party in Texas. Why would anyone want to come back and risk going back in the joint for a longer sentence?"
Parole officials who approve early releases caution that most of the nonviolent offenders who might be targeted for parole have been reviewed — and turned down because they are not considered ready for release.
Their fear, one that police and prosecutors voice as well: Federal officials might deport them, only to have them come back to Texas and commit new crimes. Or, federal officials might not even be able to take that many people at once for deportation.
Officials with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said they could not comment because they were unfamiliar with the proposal.
Convicts who are too old and infirm to commit new crimes, or who are diagnosed as dying, are also being discussed.
A legislative study two years ago urged that additional medical paroles be considered, noting that about 30 of the 90 convicts recommended to be reviewed for early release during one period died in prison anyway.
Parole officials urge caution about what Rissie Owens , chairwoman of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, has called "miraculous recovery" — cases in which dying convicts have been paroled in the past, only to recover and commit new crimes.
The same arguments are made for not paroling more of the growing numbers of "geriatric" convicts, over age 55, who are driving up medical costs by the year. The number of inmates 55 or older has increased from 5,500 in 2000 to 9,000 in 2006, according to a 2007 report, and that number could be as high as 11,000 now.
Several hundred inmates who are considered terminal or completely incapacitated are among those being looked at for release, lawmakers said. The cost savings from these medical releases have not been determined.
Whitmire suggested that the state might parole a trial group of 500 foreign national or infirm inmates and see how they do. But he noted that Texas parole and prison officials have been unwilling to embrace the idea in the past.
"There may be interest this session in passing a law directing them to get the old or disabled or foreign citizens out of our prisons, if they don't pose a threat," Whitmire said.
And while some lawmakers remain adamant that upping the parole rate to save money is a bad idea, even with strong safeguards to ensure public safety, others such as Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen , said nonviolent foreign nationals should be sent home.
"They're costing us a huge amount of money," he said. "Let's get rid of them."
mward@statesman.com
State looking at release of foreign or sick inmates
Lawmakers might scrap or revamp state jail system
By Mike Ward
When Texas' network of state jails was established by lawmakers in 1993, the goals were simple: Nonviolent drug offenders, thieves and first-time offenders would be housed in separate lockups with treatment and rehabilitation programs to cut their risk of returning to a life of crime.
Now some legislative leaders are considering a plan that might do away with the Lone Star idea that once attracted national headlines.
"I think there very well may be interest in changing the current state jail system," House Corrections Committee Chairman Jim McReynolds, D-Lufkin , said Tuesday. "The recidivism rates for state jail inmates are higher than for our regular prisons. We need to consider modifying the original model. They may have outlived their usefulness."
At the same time, two architects of the state jail system, which holds more than 12,000 of Texas' 155,000 convicts — those sentenced for fourth-degree felonies, the most minor type — warn that doing away with the special breed of prisons would be a big mistake.
"Tell (McReynolds) it ain't gonna happen," said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who authored the state jail law. "We created this system to take all the low-level drug offenders and property criminals out of state prisons so we'd have enough room to keep the violent offenders behind bars longer. The system has worked well.
"It would be a disaster to do away with state jails."
Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, who served as a liaison for prosecutors and law enforcement groups when Texas' criminal laws were rewritten to create the state jail system, agreed.
"Instead of considering doing away with it, the state should be considering renewing its commitment to the state jail system."
At a committee hearing last week in Houston, discussion of perhaps modifying or doing away with state jails surfaced in public testimony — a move that surprised many state corrections officials.
McReynolds said Harris County prosecutors, judges and others tentatively supported the idea, underscoring questions about the system that he has heard for some time from other officials and lawmakers.
McReynolds said he asked members of his committee to poll local prosecutors and officials in their districts about perhaps changing the state jail concept to be more like special lockups called Intermediate Sanction Facilities, which house mostly parole violators.
He said state jail inmates leave jail "with no supervision, no intensive treatment or programs, and their recidivism rate is as high as 34 percent, compared with about 28 percent for the inmates coming out of regular prisons."
"That doesn't seem to make much sense on its face. I think we can do better," he said.
McReynolds and others said they want to examine whether fourth-degree felons should be eligible for parole and other treatment programs, which they now are not.
Tony Fabelo, a national criminal-justice consultant who was the head of Texas' Criminal Justice Policy Council when state jails were established, said those statistics are misleading.
"Those offenders who we put in state jails had recidivism rates in the 60-percentages, and they were filling up prison beds that we needed for the violent offenders," he said. "State jails were supposed to be heavy on treatment and education, and over the years the funding for those programs had been cut again and again."
By the time the first state jail opened in 1995 in Houston, the Legislature had begun making the first of several changes in state law that proponents of the system argued at the time would impair its effectiveness.
State jails were set up to house only lawbreakers convicted of state jail offenses. Within two years, they were also holding other prison convicts to save the state money.
While probation for state jail offenses was supposed to be automatic, with violators to be locked up for up to two years if they violated the rules of their freedom, Republican George W. Bush lambasted Democratic incumbent Gov. Ann Richards, insisting she had been soft on crime in supporting the state jail law . Lawmakers subsequently changed it to mostly drop the automatic probation.
Lawmakers might scrap or revamp state jail system
Blind inmate dead after prison cell raid
By PEGGY O'HARE
HUNTSVILLE — The death of a blind inmate after a confrontation with correctional officers at the Estelle Prison Unit is being investigated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Inspector General's Office.
Thord Dockray, known as “Catfish,” a 42-year-old inmate from Lubbock County serving a five-year sentence for assault on a public servant, died May 13, the day after correctional officers used force against him when he became combative in his prison cell.
The Galveston County Medical Examiner's Office performed an autopsy, but the cause of death has not yet been released.
Dockray's actions and the confrontation were captured on videotape.
Dockray, housed alone in a cell in the prison's medical wing, began assaulting prison staff around 9:20 p.m. May 12 by throwing urine on them, said TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark. Dockray, who had a history of psychiatric illness, refused orders to stop and exit his prison cell, authorities said.
Guards released chemicals in Dockray's cell in the hopes of getting him under control, but he still refused to comply with officers, Clark said.
As a five-man team of correctional officers prepared to enter Dockray's cell to remove him, Dockray climbed on the top bunk bed and jumped to the ground, then stood up. The team of officers entered Dockray's cell and restrained him, Clark said. A nurse came to the cell and examined Dockray, who was placed on a backboard and taken to the infirmary.
Dockray was combative and uncooperative with medical staff and refused treatment several times. After he returned to his cell, security checked on him every half-hour, Clark said.
The next morning, prison staff tried to escort Dockray outside his prison cell, but he refused. Just after noon, Dockray was found lying face down in the cell.
Staff rushed him to the infirmary before he was moved to Huntsville Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1:20 p.m., TDCJ reports show.
No TDCJ employees have been disciplined or placed on leave for the incident so far.
peggy.ohare@chron.com
Blind inmate dead after prison cell raid
Texas prisons' treatment for DWI repeaters could be cut
April 7, 2010
AUSTIN – Most drunken drivers like John Patrick Barton mark time in the Texas prison system without specialized treatment, only to return to the streets and potentially to their drinking.
And with Texas facing a monstrous $18 billion budget hole next year, what prison treatment programs the state does offer may be sharply reduced or eliminated, officials said Tuesday.
Some vowed to try to protect treatment programs from the budget cuts.
"How in the world can the state of Texas lock somebody up for being a DWI offender and not spend any time trying to get them an opportunity or the ability to deal with their drinking?" asked Senate Criminal Justice Committee chairman John Whitmire.
He said he reviewed Barton's case after news of the fatal accident and was dismayed to see that he had "skated" while in prison, not receiving treatment for addiction.
"We've had him in prison twice and done nothing to treat his alcoholism. And now we have a tragedy," said Whitmire, D-Houston.
Barton was free on parole after his third drunken-driving conviction when, authorities say, he plowed into a car early Sunday in Lewisville, killing Kandace Hull, 33, and her daughter Autumn Caudle, 13, and injuring her husband and their two other children.
There are plenty of other examples. Four months ago, Ralph Lynn Foltz Jr. was charged with his 11th DWI after leading police on a high-speed chase through Galveston and Brazoria counties.
"DWI will kill you, just like a gun will. It's one of our most serious crimes," Whitmire said.
Even so, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice – ordered by the governor to identify a 5 percent cut in its budget – listed $7.8 million in its treatment programs, possibly eliminating help for 1,346 offenders annually.
Exemption sought
All agencies were asked to submit the 5 percent cuts in February. The prison system is seeking a special exemption for the treatment programs that were part of $240 million in potential cuts.
A reduction would be a reversal from recent action. Lawmakers boosted spending on state prison treatment to $97 million this year, up from $36 million in 2007.
TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said the extra funding allowed expansion of the programs. "We've seen it have a positive impact not just on the individuals, but overall on the inmate population."
She said around the time the treatment programs got a kick start, the state was projecting that the prison system would soon be 10,000 inmates over capacity.
But treatment has reduced the number of offenders who return to prison, Lyons said.
"That projection has completely reversed, and part of that is due to the programs that our lawmakers were able to put in place," she said.
Lawmakers took the state prison treatment spending from $36 million a year in 2007 to $97 million this year.
Among the 6,000 treatment slots created with the money was a 500-bed ward in East Texas exclusively for DWI offenders.
Three convictions
While Texas leads the nation in alcohol-related driving deaths – 1,473 in 2008 – it also has one of the largest inmate populations doing time for DWI, at 6,200. A third conviction becomes a felony punishable by 10 years in prison.
Barton, 30, served 10 months of a three-year sentence in 2009 after his third DWI conviction in 13 years. He also served six months in 1999 after his first DWI and a burglary charge.
Because of his DWI history, he has been charged with murder in the Sunday incident, in which police say he struck the Hull family's car from behind at a high rate of speed.
"All this stuff about murder, that's a good response to a bad case," said Bill Lewis, the legislative liaison for the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "But I don't think the Hull family is going to be satisfied with a murder or any other conviction. It's not going to make their family whole again."
Though MADD would like to see more car ignition locks and sobriety checkpoints – roadblocks where police check for drunken drivers – it also favors treatment, Lewis said.
"Once we catch someone like this, who's been arrested not once or twice but three times, we've found someone with a problem and we need to treat them," he said.
But he has worked with the Legislature for many years and fears what will happen with the budget crisis.
"I'm afraid Senator Whitmire and we will have an uphill battle in the next session to convince them that a longer-term and cheaper solution is to get treatment for these guys," Lewis said.
Bipartisan approach
Marc Levin, a criminal justice policy adviser for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation research group, said he would rather mothball outdated prisons than cut treatment programs.
It is a bipartisan approach that makes sense, he said.
"You're talking about people with a severe alcohol problem. They're all going to get out. It's vital to make sure they go through a program that has a track record of being successful so they don't endanger anyone anymore," Levin said.
In many cases, the programs work, said Whitmire, whose criminal justice committee will hold special hearings this summer on DWI laws.
Texas already has some of the toughest laws on the books to fight DWI, and longer punishments won't work as well as treating someone when you have them, he said.
Whitmire said the Barton case is the example that all lawmakers looking at cutting programs should think about next session.
"This is a tragedy, but as I read the report and go back through this person's history and how the system has treated him, it's just a classic case of mishandling a DWI offender from the very first time we had him," Whitmire said.
Texas prisons' treatment for DWI repeaters could be cut
Prison: 700 years in Houston child sex, porn case
The Associated Press
HOUSTON — A Houston man has been sentenced to three life terms in prison for sexual assault of a child and 720 years more for possessing child pornography.
Rodney Williams changed his plea to guilty during jury selection Monday in a case prosecutors say involved a 5-year-old girl.
Investigators say the case began last July, when his common-law wife found digital images on a camera that showed him sexually assaulting a child. Investigators also recovered more than 70 images of child pornography on computers in his home.
Williams, who's 23, must serve three life sentences for super aggravated sexual assault of a child under the age 6.
He was also sentenced to 720 years in prison for the child pornography found on his computer and digital camera.
Prison: 700 years in Houston child sex, porn case
___
2 Mexican inmates flee Texas prison
April 7, 2010
HOUSTON — Two Texas prison escapees from Mexico apparently are still on the run.
A fugitive watch list associated with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice indicated both men remained at large Wednesday.
Messages left with a spokesperson for the prison system were not immediately returned Wednesday to The Associated Press.
The inmates escaped Tuesday from the Briscoe Unit, in Frio County about 75 miles southwest of San Antonio, apparently by cutting through a perimeter fence.
Jose Bustos-Diaz and Octavio Ramos Lopez turned up missing during a routine inmate count.
Bustos-Diaz was serving 35 years for murder in Harris County. Lopez, who was convicted in Hidalgo County, was serving 20 years for two counts of aggravated kidnapping and 12 years for possession of cocaine and possession with intent to deliver cocaine.
___
Escape renews calls for prison agency shake-up
By PEGGY O'HARE
After facing serious questions about how 900 prohibited cell phones were smuggled into Texas prisons this year, along with drugs and weapons, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found itself on the defensive again Tuesday while trying to find an inmate who escaped despite being shackled to a wheelchair.
TDCJ officials could answer few questions about how convicted rapist Arcade Joseph Comeaux Jr., 49, escaped Monday from a prison van in Baytown after pulling a gun and handcuffing two transport officers, stealing their three guns and walking away. He remains on the loose today.
Nor could prison officials explain how Comeaux obtained the gun he pulled on the officers or how he convinced medical personnel that he needed a wheelchair for the past decade.
The chairman of the Senate corrections committee said the incident shows Gov. Rick Perry needs to shake up the state prison system and its oversight board.
Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, received a threat a year ago from a death row inmate using a smuggled cell phone. Whitmire said Perry and the TDCJ cracked down on contraband shortly after that. But Monday's escape shows the system has again become lax, Whitmire said.
“Maybe it's time with top state leadership to consider a major shake-up in TDCJ,” Whitmire said. “It's time for the governor to take what should be the next step in making certain the chairman and TDCJ and his director and staff understand what zero tolerance really means.”
The inspector general for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said Tuesday the state prison system, with its 154,000 inmates and 114 facilities, has “basically a good record.”
“There's obviously improvements to be made in any given circumstance,” John Moriarty said. “In my experience, what the prison system does, they do learn from their mistakes, they take action and make changes.”
The search for Comeaux, now wanted for escape and aggravated kidnapping, was centered in the Houston and Baytown areas, Moriarty said Tuesday.
Investigators would not reveal whether bloodhounds picked up Comeaux's scent during the search, how far the scent traveled or where it led. There is nothing to indicate Comeaux got access to a car, Moriarty said.
Moriarty revealed that the TDCJ had investigated Comeaux's mobility several years ago and whether he really needed to use a wheelchair, but medical personnel signed off on the inmate's need for the device.
“We rely on the doctors to tell us what inmates need, and (the prisoner) was adamant that he needed a wheelchair,” said TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.
Allegedly was paralyzed
Authorities have said he was supposed to be paralyzed on his left side.
Officers have spoken to his immediate relatives in the Houston area. Moriarty would not say whether Comeaux has tried to contact them.
Awards totaling up to $15,000 have been announced for information leading to Comeaux's capture.
Comeaux escaped Monday morning as transport officers tried to move him in a TDCJ van from the Estelle prison unit in Huntsville to the Stiles Unit in Beaumont. He was shackled to a wheelchair, a TDCJ report said.
When the van reached Highway 105 in Conroe, Comeaux pulled a pistol, overtaking the officers and firing a warning shot.
Comeaux then forced the officers to drive him to Baytown and stop the van near Lee College. Comeaux handcuffed the officers together and forced them into the back of the van. He put on one officer's gray uniform and black boots, then stole a 12-gauge shotgun and two semi-automatic pistols before fleeing on foot, leaving his pistol behind. The officers were discovered an hour later.
TDCJ - Arcade Joseph Comeaux Jr.
Chronicle reporters Harvey Rice, James Pinkerton and Ericka Mellon contributed to this report.
peggy.ohare@chron.com
Escape renews calls for prison agency shake-up
25 pounds of pot in fruit crate at Texas prison
November 11, 2009
EDINBURG, Texas — A police department's gift of fruit to a Texas prison turned out to contain 25 pounds of marijuana.
The illegal harvest was discovered by inmates at the Segovia Unit unpacking the crate.
Edinburg police Chief Ruirino Munoz says the fruit originally came from a produce truck that also had about 1,000 pounds of pot.
Loads of legitimate produce that yield drugs are often barred from being delivered to the intended location.
Munoz says the Segovia Unit near Edinburg accepts such food donations, which are inspected by police before being sent to the prison. Munoz says this time the marijuana apparently was missed by officers and drug-sniffing dogs.
Prison spokesman Jason Clark says inmates who reported finding the drug on Friday were strip searched to make sure nobody kept any of the marijuana.
Information from: The Monitor, http://www.themonitor.com
25 pounds of pot in fruit crate at Texas prison
Copyright 2009, The Associated Press.
Texas sex offender still at large after escaping during prison transfer
December 2, 2009
HUNTSVILLE, Texas – A convicted sex offender who escaped from Texas prison guards during a transfer is drawing the attention of legislative leaders.
Texas prison system spokeswoman Michelle Lyons told The Associated Press that Arcade Joseph Comeaux Jr. was still on the run Wednesday.
State Sen. John Whitmire of Houston, who chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, on Tuesday called for more answers on how the 49-year-old inmate was able to flee.
Comeaux was in a wheelchair Monday when he pulled a gun on two guards as he was being transferred from a prison in Huntsville to a unit in Beaumont. Both guards were released unharmed after being forced to drive to the Baytown area, where Comeaux took off on foot.
Comeaux was serving life in prison for aggravated sexual assault out of Brazos County.
Texas sex offender still at large after escaping during prison transfer
Inmate electrocuted on work detail
The Associated Press
HUNTSVILLE, Texas—A Texas prison inmate has been electrocuted while performing maintenance work on an underground water main outside the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Thirty-nine-year-old Todd Hughes was on a crew working on a broken water line at what's known as the Walls Unit Tuesday afternoon when he was electrocuted apparently by an adjacent electrical line. A second inmate on the crew was hurt and treated at the unit infirmary.
Prison officials said the agency's Office of Inspector General is investigating.
Hughes had been in prison since July 2007 and was serving a seven-year sentence for intoxication manslaughter from Orange County.
Inmate electrocuted on work detail
Water use likely to rise this year
* By Doug Myers
The explanation was simple.
Sprinklers were running Friday at the corner of North 12th and Pine streets in Abilene. The city has launched a public awareness campaign urging consumers to conserve water. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is Abilene’s biggest water user, records show.
“With food service, laundry, bathing and restroom facilities for this number of people, the water usage will be high,” Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said, referring to inmates and others at Abilene’s two state prison facilities.
To say the least.
Having used nearly 240.7 million gallons over a one-year span that ran from September 2008 to August 2009 — thanks to its Robertson and Middleton units — the TDJC is Abilene’s biggest water user, according to city records obtained through a public records request.
Overall, as the city has launched a public awareness campaign urging consumers to conserve, residential, commercial and industrial/institutional waters users are projected to use 5.7 billion gallons of water this fiscal year, up from nearly 5.6 billion gallons in calendar year 2008 and nearly 5 billion gallons during extremely rainy calendar year 2007.
Usage at TDCJ outdistanced Dyess Air Force Base’s nearly 236.7 million gallons, Coca-Cola’s 94 million gallons, Abtex Beverage Corp.’s 67.1 million gallons and Abilene Independent School District’s 66.9 million gallons, records indicate.
Clark attributes TDCJ’s high usage in Abilene to the approximately 5,000 offenders — as well as 900 employees — at the two prison units. The Middleton Unit also does all laundry for the Robertson Unit, Clark said.
TDCJ’s water usage at its Abilene prison units hasn’t come cheaply, costing more than $600,000 during the studied 12-month period — or roughly $1,600 per day, according to figures provided by Wayne Lisenbee, the city’s assistant director of water utilities.
Another entity with a hefty water bill is Abilene ISD, consuming an average of 183,184 gallons each day over the year ending Aug. 31.
Like TDCJ’s Clark, AISD Superintendent David Polnick said the sheer number of people in the system drives up water usage.
Noting that AISD has nearly 20,000 students and staff members, Polnick said, “That is a lot of hand washing and restroom use and a lot of dishwashing in the cafeterias as we serve breakfast and lunch.”
While the biggest users are in the industrial/institutional class, the largest chunk — about 56 percent — of the projected 5.7 billion gallons to be used this calendar year in Abilene are residential users.
While it is unclear what the four highest residential water customers used over the previous 12 months because of a law granting them confidentiality, the fifth-highest user — a local doctor who didn’t seek to remain secret — used 1.5 million gallons. That amounted to 4,156 gallons a day. Efforts to reach him for comment Friday were unsuccessful.
Of the top 10 residential users, seven sought anonymity through provisions of the law. The eighth- and ninth-ranked highest residential users used about 1.3 million gallons each, records show.
The 3.2 billion gallons residential customers are projected to use outdistances the 1.8 billion projected to be used by commercial users and 700 million projected to be used by industrial/institutional users, according to city projections.
The sheer amount of water used in total by its residential customers is a major reason why the city recently launched a campaign — using billboards and commercials — to encourage consumers to conserve and not waste a drop of water.
The city’s public service announcements focus on “simple things that residential customers could do to reduce waste in and around their homes,” Lisenbee said.
According to Lisenbee, conservation is “one piece” of a comprehensive water management strategy. Others, Lisenbee said, include reuse of treated wastewater, coordinated use of the reservoir systems, water production efficiencies and pricing strategy, among other things.
“Conservation is the one piece that the consumer can participate and directly impact the longevity of water supplies,” Lisenbee said.
Lisenbee said it’s important the city conserve to ensure there are sufficient water resources to provide for future growth.
The city’s effort hasn’t been lost on water users, including those with the TDCJ and AISD.
Clark said the TDCJ has taken steps to conserve water, including replacing 306 shower heads with “economizer shower heads,” which use 1.5 gallons of water per minute — with some having timers. TDCJ has also wrapped steam line pipes at the facilities with insulation to “help with evaporation and conserve energy as well as reducing the amount of water required when heat isn’t lost,” Clark said.
Clark said TDCJ has an active program statewide to reduce utility costs and the amount of usage and continually encourages all manners of conservation.
Additionally, Polnick said AISD takes measures to conserve water, including not watering non-athletic grounds.
“As we renovate buildings, we install more efficient toilets and faucets,” Polnick said. “Conservation of all natural resources takes education, and I believe that the children of today are very conscious of conversation because of the emphasis put on this by parents, schools, and even the media.”
Meanwhile, city of Abilene officials are expected to decide in the coming months — as the city attempts to blend conserving water with selling water to make ends meet — whether it has enough effluent water to sell to the Tenaska “clean coal” plant proposed for near Sweetwater.
Tommy O’Brien, the city’s director of water utilities, said the study on Tenaska’s average 1 million-gallon-a-day request for effluent water is projected to be presented to the Abilene City Council by the end of the year or beginning of next year.
Lisenbee said whether there is enough water for Tenaska is an “excellent question” that is “being studied and considered right now.”
“We will have the answer to that key question when the study is concluded,” Lisenbee said.
Helen Manroe, manager of Tenaska Business Development, said Tenaska’s request is “very modest by power company standards,” noting its proposed dry cooling process is “very efficient” and will require an average of 1 million a day as opposed to the west cool plant process that requires 10 million gallons of way a day.
Manroe said Tenaska’s plan is to use effluent water, as opposed to more treated drinking water.
“We’re still moving forward,” Manroe said, noting the plant has hired an engineering firm and is continuing with its air permit requests. “We’re continuing to do all the things we need to.”
Manroe said the city’s decision on whether it has enough water to sell to Tenaska is “certainly something that we’re highly interested in.”
Manroe said the company is looking at making the $3 billion investment, which will result in 1,500 jobs at peak construction and 100 full-time jobs once the plant goes live.
Manroe said Tenaska has some other water options, but “our focus is on the city of Abilene” and reaching a deal with Key City leaders.
Manroe said a major selling point is the amount of money the city will get from selling the effluent water — cash that the city could use for “the benefit of the citizens of Abilene.”
Lisenbee said the city is evaluating how to provide Tenaska with the requested 2,000 acre-feet per year of municipal treated effluent at the peak delivery rate of 2 million gallons per day.
“Until the evaluation is complete, the city does not have additional information to provide,” Lisenbee said.
New prisons lockdown under way
By Mike Ward
More than 35,000 convicts at 14 of Texas’ toughest prisons have been
placed on lockdown status in a new crackdown on contraband smuggling
— the largest in months, officials just confirmed.
The shakedown involves cell-by-cell searches and is the most
significant such action in Texas’ prison system in almost a year,
since Gov. Rick Perry ordered a lockdown of all 112 state prisons in
October 2008 after a death row inmate used a smuggled cell phone to
call — and later threaten to kill — the state senator who heads a
legislative prisons committee.
“We’re doing cell searches, and the units will remain locked down
until we complete that,” said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice that operates the state
corrections system.
“The units we have locked down are the ones that have the most
contraband seizures … from inmates and on visitors. The goal is to
keep contraband out.”
Prison officials identified the prisons as the Polunsky Unit that
houses death row outside Livingston, the Ferguson Unit in Midway, the
Lewis Unit in Woodville, the Michael, Beto and Coffield units near
Tennessee Colony, the Central Unit in Sugar Land, the Clemons Unit
near Brazoria, the Scott Unit in Angleton, the Darrington Unit in
Rosharon, the Stiles Unit in Beaumont, the McConnell Unit in
Beeville, the Connally Unit in Kenedy and the Allred Unit outside
Wichita Falls.
All are maximum-security prisons, Lyons said.
Today’s crackdown came after Senate Criminal Justice Committee
Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, blasted prison security earlier
this month after discovering a threatening letter attributed to death-
row inmate Richard Tabler posted on a Web site, blogginginmates.com.
In November 2008, Tabler threatened to kill Whitmire and this
reporter in a letter mailed to prison investigators. Tabler had
called Whitmire the month before and Whitmire had summoned
authorities, who busted Tabler, his mother and sister for contraband.
The subsequent shakedown of all state prisons resulted in the seizure
of dozens of cell phones and other contraband, including more than
two dozen cell phones and cell gear from death row — arguably
supposed to be the most secure part of the prison system.
In a lockdown, convicts are kept locked in their cells and routine
operations and programs are suspended as special teams of
correctional officers conduct a cell-by-cell search for contraband
and other prohibited items. Such shakedowns can take several days to
complete.
New prisons lockdown under way
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Prisoners soon won't have to check out through Huntsville
New law allows inmates release from any unit.
By Mike Ward
Today the countdown begins to the end of one of the Texas prison
system's oldest practices: the long ride back to Huntsville for
release for most convicts who are finishing their sentences.
It has been a staple of prison life for decades, perhaps well over a
century, so that the prison system could verify the identity of all
prisoners, in person, before they were given their freedom, a bus
ticket home and $50. Texas is the last state in the nation to handle
releases that way.
But thanks to cutting-edge recordkeeping and fingerprint technology,
and a new law passed by the Legislature last spring, prison officials
are working to establish at least six regional centers where convicts
will be released. Or, officials can release them from the prison
where they finish their sentence.
The new system — designed to save money — has to be in operation by a
year from today. Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle
Lyons said Monday the change could happen sooner. Prison officials
are evaluating which facilities will serve as release centers, she said.
Last year, a majority of the more than 42,000 prison convicts who
were released came through the historic 1849, red-brick-walled
Huntsville Unit — although all women were turned out from a prison in
Gatesville, as they have been for years. The prison system houses
about 12,000 women and 143,000 men.
Lyons and other prison officials said Huntsville and Gatesville would
still be used as release centers.
The savings — officials are not sure of a figure — will come from not
transporting tens of thousands of convicts to Huntsville or
Gatesville for release. Thousands of such trips take place annually
in a fleet of buses that the prison system has on the road daily to
move white-uniformed convicts between lockups, to medical
appointments and to court.
On average, more than 2,100 convicts are on the road each day in 80 buses and vans, Lyons said.
"There's a lot of reasons to make this change: It will save money; it
will help inmates' re-entry; 49 other states do it this way," said
state Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, who authored the bill changing
the tradition.
"Not only can they release them from regional centers, they can also
release inmates from other prisons. It will be a good thing," Madden
said.
Despite that optimism, there has been quiet grousing from local
officials who are not eager to have convicts discharging in their
communities, even waiting to catch a bus out of town.
In fact, when Texas embarked on a prison-building binge two decades
ago that tripled the size of the corrections system, local officials
in many cases were assured that no convicts would be released in
their area. "I've heard that ... and it will have to be taken into
account when they designate the release points," Madden said.
At the same time, Houston officials have complained for years that
many released convicts take the bus from Huntsville to Houston, then
stay to commit new crimes rather than continuing home. Prison
officials said a law requiring that convicts be paroled to their home
counties has thwarted such activity in recent years.
State Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and veteran chairman of
the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said the change makes sense.
"It's been nuts to take prisoners from 112 units and haul them all
the way back to Huntsville from El Paso, then let them out and buy
them a bus ticket back to El Paso. This change represents a huge step
forward. There's no reason for that long ride back to Huntsville to
continue."
mward@statesman.com
Find this article at:
3,900 stimulus checks went to prison inmates
August 26, 2009
WASHINGTON — The federal government sent about 3,900 economic stimulus payments of $250 each this spring to people who were in no position to use the money to help stimulate the economy: prison inmates.
The checks were part of the massive economic recovery package approved by Congress and President Barack Obama in February. About 52 million Social Security recipients, railroad retirees and those receiving Supplemental Security Income were eligible for the one-time checks.
Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration.
They were eligible because they weren't incarcerated in any one of the three months before the recovery package was enacted.
"The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment," Lassiter said.
The other 1,700 checks? That was a mistake.
Checks were sent to those inmates because government records didn't accurately show they were in prison, Lassiter said. He said most of those checks were returned by the prisons.
"We are currently reviewing each of those cases to determine whether or not the recovery payment was due," Social Security Commissioner Michael J. Astrue said in a statement issued Wednesday evening. "Where we determine payment was not due, we will take aggressive action to recover each of these erroneous payments."
The Boston Herald first reported that the checks were sent to inmates.
The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is performing an audit to make sure no checks went to ineligible recipients, spokesman George E. Penn said.
The audit, which had already been planned, will examine whether checks incorrectly went to inmates, dead people, fugitive felons or people living outside the U.S., Penn said.
The $787 billion economic recovery package included $2 million for the inspector general to oversee the provisions handled by the Social Security Administration. The audit is part of those efforts, Penn said. There is no timetable for its conclusion.
The federal government processed $13 billion in stimulus payments.
About $425,000 was incorrectly sent to inmates.
3,900 stimulus checks went to prison inmates
Copyright 2009, The Associated Press
Prisoners get stimulus checks in error
Associated Press
AUSTIN — More than 200 Texas state inmates were sent federal economic
stimulus checks even though most were ineligible to receive them.
Most were intercepted by prison officials, but nine inmates were
allowed to keep money because they were eligible for the payments.
The federal stimulus included $250 checks for anyone who received
Social Security, Veterans Affairs or Railroad Retirement Board
benefits between November 2008 and January 2009.
Incarcerated convicts generally are ineligible to receive federal
benefits checks, officials said. Those who weren’t in prison between
November 2008 and January 2009 could legally accept them, Social
Security Administration officials said.
Prisoners get stimulus checks in error
Investigations opened into Hondo inmate death
Web Posted: 08/15/2009
Two criminal investigations have been opened into an inmate death at
a state prison in Hondo.
So far, no one has been charged in the July 13 incident at the Torres
Prison Unit, but a correctional officer has been recommended for
dismissal because the crime scene was improperly secured, said Jason
Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
According to officials, a fight broke out between inmates
Vonghrachane Saykham and James Valdez while they were in a prison
common area. Valdez, 25, allegedly struck Saykham, 50, several times
in the head, Clark said.
Saykham, in prison on a murder charge, was airlifted to University
Hospital, where he died July 18. Valdez was later transferred to the
Connally Unit in Kenedy while an investigation continues.
Investigators arrived to find prison guards had cleaned up the scene,
which prompted a second probe, said Inspector General John Moriarty.
The Office of Inspector General investigates all serious TDCJ inmate
altercations.
Moriarty would not name suspects in that case, but the TDCJ's Clark
confirmed that Sgt. Larry McBride had been recommended for dismissal
July 30 because of “policy violation related to securing the crime
scene” after the fight.
Investigations opened into Hondo inmate death
Hutto detention center to change direction
By Miguel Liscano
An Obama administration official announced this morning that the government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor — where families are held while they await adjudication of their immigration cases.
The decision is part of a larger overhaul of the nation’s immigration detention system, said John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security.
He said the Taylor facility will be converted into an immigration jail for women. It was not immediately clear how soon families now housed at the facility would be transfered to another facility.
“I don’t expect the transition to last very long,” Morton said. “You will very quickly see no more families going in to the facility and a thoughtful but fairly quick transition to a plan being put together for those families that remain.”
Detained families will now be housed at Berks Family Shelter Care Facility in Pennsylvania. Morton said the facility, which is smaller than Hutto, will be filled to capacity and officials will look for alternatives to detention, such as supervised release, as possible options for some of the families.
“This change marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to enforce immigration laws smartly and effectively,” said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “We are improving detention center management to prioritize health, safety and uniformity among our facilities while ensuring security, efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”
The Hutto center, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corp. of America through a contract with Williamson County, has been housing families since 2006. Opponents of the facility, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have lobbied Congress and held protests urging that the facility be closed, and citizens have spoken out against it before county commissioners.
“We’re encouraged that this step is being taken,” Jose Medina, spokesman for ACLU of Texas, said this morning. “And, of course, well also very interested on seeing how this issue of detaining female inmates is going to proceed.”
In 2007, The University of Texas School of Law’s Immigration Clinic and the ACLU of Texas won a settlement in a federal suit that accused the government of violating the rights of minors held at the center.
The settlement agreement ordered enforceable standards at the center, including requirements that families be able to spend an unlimited time together in their rooms with the door open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., eliminating scheduled head counts and ordered five hours of schooling per day for children, among other things. That agreement was scheduled to expire Aug. 29..
Morton said the impending expiration of the settlement at the end of the month did not directly have an effect on today’s announcement.
But, “obviously, the concerns that were raised there did play a part in our overall assessment of whether or not the use of this facility to detain families made the ultimate sense,” Morton said. “At the end of the day, it was my judgement that we could use that facility to a much higher and more productive use.”
Williamson County Judge Dan Gattis said the administration’s move would take the pressure off the county, which he described as acting as the middle man between the federal government and Corrections Corp. of America.
Williamson County receives about $15,800 a month under its latest 2-year contract with the company, which commissioners voted to renew in December.
Hutto detention center to change direction
July 23, 2009
Expanding ranks of Texas lifers part of national trend
July 23, 2009
Texas has both life sentences which are eligible for parole (most of them) and also life without parole (LWOP). The latter in Texas is only a sentencing option in capital murder cases and as of 2008, just 71 Texans had received LWOP sentences, according to the report, while 8,558 offenders (6.1% of TDCJ's total inmate population) were serving life sentences in Texas adult prisons but will ultimately be eligible for parole.
"However," as the Sentencing Project correctly notes, "eligibility does not equate to release and, owing to the reticence of review boards and governors, it has become increasingly difficult for persons serving a life sentence to be released on parole."
Six states and the federal government have only LWOP sentences, says the Sentencing Project. The total number of people nationally serving life sentences quadrupled in the last 25 years, with just 34,000 total prisoners serving life sentences in 1984 and more than 140,000 in 2008.
Among Texas lifers, 43.5% are black, according to the report, 33.8% are white, and 22.0% are Hispanic. There are 422 juveniles mixed into the totals for Texas lifers - about one in 20 out of all life sentences. Three of those juveniles are sentenced to life without parole, but going forward that penalty was abolished for juveniles by the 81st Texas Legislature. Out of those 422, thirteen juvenile girls are serving life sentences.
Notably, California uses life sentences much more liberally than Texas, particularly for juveniles but really for everybody. In a prison system just a little larger than ours (serving a population that's 60% greater, it should be added), a whopping 20% of all California prisoners are serving life sentences compared to just 6.1% in Texas. Of the more than 34,000 lifers in California, 10.8% are in for LWOP.
Does anyone wonder why California is cutting prisoners loose because it can't afford to incarcerate them all?
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast
Labels: LWOP, TDCJ
America's Jail Crisis
Budget-strapped cities and towns are being crushed by the costs of incarceration. But there are solutions.
HOUSTON -- Out the 20th floor window of the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, the sprawl and elevation of buildings look like the campus of a law enforcement university, filling up the northeast corner of downtown. A juvenile justice center as big as a hospital. Two high-rise courthouses. An overrun booking tank. Beneath it all, tunnels run like veins through the complex, filled with inmates shuffling to hearings from the third biggest jail in America.
An average of 10,000 inmates were held per day in the Harris County Jail in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, not including an additional 1,100 bused six hours to and from northern Louisiana. With an average stay of 45 days in three drab detention facilities, the jail is consistently overcrowded.
"This really wasn't built for this," says John Dyess, chief administrative officer of the sheriff's office, which oversees the jail. "I don't know if we can build our way out of where we are today."
Money may decide the issue. A stunning 25% of Harris County's annual $1.5 billion budget goes to law enforcement, with more than $750,000 a day spent on detainees. A shortage of guards means the jail shells out $35 million a year on overtime; some guards are topping out at $100,000 a year in total pay.
Houston is far from alone. Amid budget crises, falling tax revenue and national unemployment approaching 10%, jails--usually city- or county-run holding facilities for those serving short sentences or awaiting trial--saw their populations grow nearly twice as fast as state and federal prison populations during the first half of the decade, according to a 2008 report by the Justice Policy Institute. The report says that local governments spent $97 billion on criminal justice in 2004, up 347% since 1982, while detention expenses climbed 519% to $19 billion. Between 2006 and 2008, Harris County's jail population grew 21%, adding 1,900 more mouths to feed three times a day.
In 2000, there were 621,149 people in America's local hoosegows; by midyear 2008 there were 26% more, or 785,556 inmates housed at an average 95% of rated capacity.
Los Angles County has the largest daily jail population, 19,836, twice as much as in Harris County, followed by New York City. Rounding out the rest of the 10 biggest jail jurisdictions are Cook County, Ill.; Maricopa County, Ariz.; Philadelphia; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Dallas County, Texas; Orange County, Calif., and Shelby County, Tenn.
From behind the brick walls in Houston, doctors write $1 million in prescriptions a month; dentists pull 330 teeth. Women are lined up shoul der-to-shoulder to fold bright orange clothes that come out of a battery of dryers that can handle 170 pounds of laundry a load. Men prepare 35,000 meals a day and 13 million meals a year at an average of 88 cents a plastic tray. A recent day's potatoes were wheeled into the kitchen on a crate stacked seven rows high, past a guard and an inmate shouting at each other--apparently the golden rule of not getting within "sight and sound" of female inmates was broken. Tensions are high since a brawl a few days before.
The $200 million spent on detention a year "puts a strain on resources" for other programs, says Dyess. But counties are legally obligated to provide a safe place for inmates and guards.
Harris County has failed several jail standard tests and was recently cited for excessive use of force, inmate deaths, and poor medical and mental care (the jail says it serves as the biggest mental health facility in Texas).
The National Association of Counties is calling on communities to invest more into pretrial services so that people charged with non-violent offenses who don't need to be confined can be quickly vetted for 20 community programs and the mentally ill can be put under health care services or, if needed, placed in a secure health facility. In Harris County, for instance, some people are detained for speeding tickets, yet potentially could be among those who cost about $485 a day for a bed in a local hospital.
"Many people are in jail because they are too poor to post bail," says Donald Murray, senior legislative director for justice and public safety for the association. "If you have a first-class pretrial program, a county is often in a better position because they can carefully analyze the individual, can figure out better what needs to be done."
The Justice Policy Institute says eight out of 10 people in jail earned less than $2,000 a month before they were locked up. Nearly two-thirds of the people behind bars are waiting for trial, while the length of pretrial detention has increased. Meanwhile, between 1986 and 2005, violent crime arrests climbed 25%, while drug arrests jumped 150%, 82% of them in 2005 for possession (about half for marijuana). And an estimated six out of every 10 jail inmates have a mental disorder, compared to201-in-10 in the general population.
A guard in the 225-bed psych ward here sits near a sign that illustrates how to cut away a noose. Beneath it, a safety knife is held in a container for emergencies. Deputy Simon Ramirez Jr., 54, talks about how he's evolved from relying on the use of force in his youth to a more cerebral approach, as he and other guards in the ward "compete with the voices" in inmate heads. Many of his clientèle are homeless and arrive on repeated criminal trespassing arrests.
"A lot of these people just have to be by themselves," Ramirez says. "Nobody wants to build a mental health hospital. They use jails to warehouse people who have mental health issues."
State prisons aren't faring much better, with corrections nationwide costing more than $50 billion a year, according to a March report by the Pew Center on the States, called "One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections." The title comes from the r atio of people under some form of correctional control in the U.S.
As states operate in a drastic budget climate, jails and prisons stand to face cutbacks, despite harsher sentencing guidelines passed in the 1980s and '90s that have glutted cellblocks.
In 2008, the total jail and prison population reached 2.3 million, topping for the first time the ratio of one in every 100 adults.
Meanwhile, in the past 25 years, the number of people on probation and parole has increased from 1.6 million to 5 million. Many are caught in a revolving door: 40% of probationers don't complete their obligation successfully and more than half the number of parolees land back in jail after three years of being released. Yet the cost differences in 2008 are clear: $78.95 a day for a prisoner compared to $3.42 for supervising a probationer.
After an "extraordinary" 25 years of prison growth, the Pew report says "we are well past the point of diminishing returns."
"Serious, chronic and violent offenders belong behind bars, for a long time, and the expense of locking them up is justified many times over. But for hundreds of thousands of lower-level inmates, incarceration costs taxpayers far more than it saves in prevented crime."
Some states are changing. Georgia, for instance, bolstered the authority of probation officers to impose administrative sanctions on violators in certain circumstances. The theory is that quicker punishment for those who break the rules of their release will cut down on the chances of more serious crimes that lead back to prison.
A pilot program of four Georgia courts has freed up probation officers to supervise more and spend less time waiting for a judge in court. It's also cut jail time for inmates waiting for a court appearance by more than 70%. Total savings? $1.1 million between 2006 and 2008. Harris County burns through that in two days, but it's a start. The program became available statewide July 1.
From Forbes Magazine:
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Ruling gives courts access to prison trust funds
Money could be used to pay prisoners' court costs, fees.
By Mike Ward
Texas state prison convicts could soon see their trust funds — more than $33 million overseen by the state — getting tapped to pay overdue court costs and related expenses.
A recent Texas Supreme Court decision allows prison officials to withdraw funds from the inmate trust accounts without first notifying a convict.
Before that, officials said, convicts had to be alerted in advance so they could challenge the garnishment — and many did.
"This changes everything — and allows the counties to go in and collect back court fees and costs up front, and the inmate will have to challenge that after the fact," said Huntsville lawyer Bill Habern, who is familiar with the case. "That will be difficult."
In addition, he said, the debits will likely come as a surprise, because many convicts are not notified of their court costs until after they are in a prison cell, if then.
"Considering the economic situation, we expect the counties to start fleecing trust fund accounts," said Helga Dill, a Dallas-based prison rights activist. "Our concern is that the inmate is deprived of funds sent by family members who are in most cases poor. ... If an inmate can waive child support until he is released and has employment, then that should be possible with court costs as well."
Lest convicts worry that they could now wake up to find their trust funds emptied to pay old court costs, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said state law limits how much money in those accounts can be taken: only 20 percent of the initial deposit into a trust fund, and 10 percent of any subsequent deposit.
In all, prison officials said the inmate trust accounts contain more than $33.6 million — including about $17.6 million in cash and another $16 million that is invested in Treasury bills.
Although most of the accounts contain only a few hundred dollars, which convicts use to buy snacks, hygiene items and other commissary items, some funds contain much more — including inheritances and other payments they received after going to prison. As of last week. the largest account contained almost $234,000, and next-largest was more than $168,000, prison officials confirmed.
Lyons said that more than $13.5 million is being sought from the inmate accounts by court officials across Texas, though she did not know the total amount that inmates owe.
In contrast, only $1.9 million has been paid from the inmate accounts for various court fees and fines during the past 14 years, prison officials said.
That figure could increase dramatically if counties push ahead to collect unpaid court fees under the June 5 decision of Texas' high court. Such fees can range from about $25 to thousands of dollars, depending on the case and judges' discretion.
In the past, the trust funds could be tapped by a court order to recover overdue child support restitution and to pay some health care costs while in prison, among other things.
But officials had not been able to collect court costs in most cases because of a tangle of legal challenges and decisions. Appeals courts in Waco and Amarillo had declared the court costs to be part of the criminal case, meaning inmates had the right to challenge the garnishment in court, while San Antonio and Texarkana courts had ruled they were a collection process not subject to such notice.
"We agree that withdrawal orders are more civil in nature than criminal," the high court's decision says.
The ruling came in the case of Walter Harrell, serving prison time on drug charges. When court officials tried to collect $748 from his trust account to pay court costs and the costs of his court-appointed lawyer, Harrell objected.
The Supreme Court decision summed up the convict's position this way: "The State gave Harrell notice and an opportunity to be heard when it came to his liberty. However, when it came to his property, the State just took it."
While the decision indicates that lawbreakers know how much they owe when they leave court, Habern said that is often not the case. "That's a fallacy ... because many courts don't calculate the fees until some time after the case ends," he said.
"It's going to be a surprise, not a good one," he said. "My guess is it will cause some additional litigation."
Even so, county officials seem elated by the decision.
"We don't know exactly how much we are owed because some of these cases go back years and years. It's certainly something that we'll be looking at — especially with our budget the way it is," said Leroy Nellis, Travis County's budget officer.
In most cases, county officials said, they wait until a convict is paroled to collect the fees. As part of their parole, they have to get a statement of fees owed to the county where they were convicted, so parole officials can make sure they start paying them off.
In Houston, Harris County officials collected $107,000 from 156 parolees in April as part of a program to aggressively go after the fees. Only $38,000 was collected in February, the month before the program started.
In all of 2008, Harris County officials said, $111,605 was collected.
mward@statesman.com
Ruling gives courts access to prison trust funds
Texas plans to move some inmates from county jails
Associated Press
AUSTIN — Texas prison officials plan to cancel contracts to house up
to 1,900 state convicts in county lockups because the number of
convicts in state prisons has fallen.
Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice, told the Austin American-Statesman that officials plan to
move the convicts now housed in county lockups back into state
prisons by the end of August. Lawmakers, who directed the move,
anticipated the population decline and did not appropriate $28
million to continue leasing the contract beds.
The decrease in the Texas inmate population — part of a national
downtrend — coincides with an increase in correctional officers at
the state’s 112 adult prisons where the vacancy rate of guards has
dropped to about 5 percent. It’s the lowest numbers in more than a
decade for the state, which has long had a guard shortage.
Texas has just 1,262 correctional officer jobs now open, compared
with more than 3,700 openings just over a year ago. Officials say
more people have become guards because of pay incentives and the
struggling economy.
“It’s the economy. No doubt about it,” said state Sen. John Whitmire,
D-Houston. He chairs the Criminal Justice Legislative Oversight
Committee that oversees prison operations.
Texas prison guards start at about $26,000 a year. After eight years,
the salary tops out at about $34,600. Even with the pay raises, Texas
still ranks low nationally in correctional officer pay. Last year, it
ranked 13th among 16 southern states, according to prison officials.
Prison officials said some remote prisons, such as those in Dalhart
and Fort Stockton, are operating more than 20 percent short on staff.
A year ago, Dalhart was struggling with a 38 percent vacancy rate
that forced officials in January 2008 to mothball more than 300 beds.
Brian Olsen, executive director of a union that represents some Texas
correctional officers, and Whitmire say the drop in the vacancy rate
should be an opportunity to upgrade the force.
Texas plans to move some inmates from county jails
Measuring public attitudes on criminal justice
June 08, 2009
Via The Crime Report, I was surprised to see the results of this Zogby Survey done on behalf of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Among the highlights:
• A majority of US adults believe that some crimes, for which offenders are currently incarcerated, do not demand time behind bars.
• Eight in ten (77%) adults believe the most appropriate sentence for nonviolent, nonserious offenders* is supervised probation, restitution, community service, and/or rehabilitative services; if an offender fails in these alternatives, then prison or jail may be appropriate.
• Over three-quarters (77%) believe alternatives to incarceration do not decrease public safety.
• More than half (55%) believe alternatives to prison or jail decrease costs to state and local governments.
• US adults more often think alternatives to incarceration are more effective than prison or jail time at reducing recidivism (45% vs. 38%).
• Respondents cited a variety of reasons they believe justify sending fewer people to prison or jail, including expense, overcrowding (danger to guards, danger to inmates), the ability of proven alternatives to reduce crime, and the fairness of the punishment relative to the crime.
Another striking result from that poll found a lack of public confidence in the effectiveness of prison at altering behavior: "More than half (54%) do not think that serving time in prison or jail reduces the likelihood that a person will commit more crime in the future, while about two-fifths (38%) hold the opposite view."
Meanwhile, Steve Hall from the Stand Down Texas Project alerts us to a separate poll by CNN concerning attitudes about the death penalty that suggests a very different public sentiment, though I think the question was framed in a biased way. For starters, before asking the pro or con question, the only example of an executed inmate given to the poll-taker was a serial killer who murdered 8 women in Connecticut, a particularly heinous crime that's not representative of the average death row inmate's case. (In Texas, even accomplices can be convicted of capital murder under the "law of parties.")
CNN's poll found 53% of Americans favored the death penalty for murder, while 43% preferred life without parole (the only choice offered besides "not sure").
The findings, though, are extremely suspect regarding their application to real-world policy because the options didn't include the most common sentence in murder cases - incarceration that's LESS than LWOP and frequently leaves the murderer parole-eligible after a certain, minimum sentence, if they can convince the parole board they're no longer a continuing threat.
In 2007, according to TDCJ's annual report (pdf) Texas state prisons received 1,078 offenders convicted of charges of homicide (p. 18). Only 37 of them received sentences of LWOP, while just 14 went to death row. So that's a pretty biased way to frame the question if the goal is to present realistic policy alternatives.
RELATED: Poll: Tough on crime messages don't resonate with critical swing voters.
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast
Labels: Public Opinion
Texas prison cell-phone scandal making national news
May 31, 2009
The latest issue of Wired magazine includes a feature on the problem of cell phone smuggling in Texas prisons by Vince Beiser, highlighting the much-ballyhooed case where a death-row inmate began calling state Sen. John Whitmire, launching a statewide lockdown that revealed dozens more phones at units statewide.
Though certainly there are cases out there of prisoners using phones to commit crimes, and Wired runs through the most frequently cited examples, most cell phone use, of course, is to stay in touch with family and friends not to "order hits" or commit new offenses. Still the issue certainly constitutes a security threat, most immediately because it contributes to guard corruption, a point the story emphasizes:
The easiest—and probably most common—way mobiles are moving into prisons is in the pockets of guards and other prison staff. "There's no question that corrupt officers are involved," says Texas inspector general [John] Moriarty. The risk is small, the payoff big. Correctional staff coming to work are typically searched only lightly, if at all, and a phone can fetch a couple thousand dollars. One California officer told investigators he made more than $100,000 in a single year selling phones.
Deep into the article after listing several stories of crimes related to illegal cell phones, the tone changes when Beiser begins to talk about solutions:
There's no question that prisoners are using cell phones to foment all kinds of mayhem. But investigations have established that most calls placed on contraband mobiles are harmless—just saying hi to family and friends. Whatever their crimes, most convicts have parents, children, and others they're desperate to stay in touch with. Letters are slow, and personal visits often involve expensive, time-sucking travel. Some prisons have public phones for making collect calls, but access is limited, conversations are often monitored, and phone companies often charge much higher rates than on the outside.
Texas prison officials quoted in the story agreed part of the solution must be expanding legal communication between inmates and their families:
the most compelling reason to let inmates ... talk to their families isn't that it's nice for them or even their mothers. It's that it could reduce crime and save the public a bundle by cutting recidivism. Most of the more than 2 million men and women behind bars in the US will eventually be released, and decades of research show that those who maintain family ties are much less likely to land back in jail. Every parolee who stays straight saves taxpayers an average of more than $22,000 a year.
Even tough-on-crime Texas has embraced that logic. The state has long refused to allow phones of any sort for inmates in its prisons, but this year officials are installing landlines. "Once they're in place, we expect a decrease in the problem," Moriarty says.
Wired's story was followed up by pieces in Time magazine and on CNN referencing Texas' cell phone smuggling woes.
The best solution here, unfortunately, must come from the federal level: A 1934 law bans state and local governments from jamming broadcast signals and would have to be altered by Congress, according to officials at the FCC.
See related Grits coverage:
Senate committee examines reasons for contraband smuggling
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast
Labels: contraband, phone service, TDCJ
Drug war corruption deja vu
May 25, 2009
I had a serious deja vu moment last night watching 60 Minutes' expose on a bizarre case involving a multijurisdictional drug task force in Missouri in which some 20 people were arrested in an undercover drug sting before it unraveled in a web of lies and scandal.
Anyone who followed the "Tulia" case in Texas would be hard-pressed not to think of convicted perjurer and former police officer Tom Coleman, whose accusations sent dozens of people to prison before he was proven a liar and his victims were released and pardoned. (That nightmarish episode was also profiled on 60 Minutes a few years back.) A similar drug sting in Hearne, TX has been portrayed on the silver screen in the movie American Violet, which came out last month.
The Missouri case added an even more bizarre twist: The main cop in the story turned out to be an impostor, a fake who got a phony badge off the Internet, printed up his own business cards and convinced the small-town cops he represented a federal agency. Unreal.
This let's you know that locals elsewhere don't provide any more supervision for drug task force officers than did the folks in Tulia and Hearne. We got rid of these troublesome pseudoagencies in Texas and it's about time the rest of the country followed suit.
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast
Labels: drug policy, drug task forces
Inmate hangs himself
Publication Date: 05/15/09
A convicted rapist and murderer committed suicide Tuesday at an area
prison, state prison officials said.
Bennie Cleveland, 51, reportedly hanged himself in a single-person
cell at the William P. Clements Jr. Unit.
Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
said Cleveland was found about 11 a.m. hanging in his cell. Guards
cut him down and an automated external defibrillator and CPR were
used in an attempt to save his life.
Cleveland was pronounced dead a half hour later in the unit's medical
unit.
Cleveland had been in prison for 25 years. He was serving a life
sentence for capital murder with a deadly weapon and rape.
Clark said the case will be investigated by TDCJ's Office of
Inspector General, which reviews all in-custody deaths.
"There does not appear to be any foul play involved," Clark said.
This is the second suicide at the prison this year.
- Staff writer Sean Thomas
Click here to return to story:
© The Amarillo Globe-News Online
'Writ Writer' film wins ABA award
May 09, 2009
Congratulations to Susanne Mason for winning a "Silver Gavel" award from the American Bar Association for her documentary film, "Writ Writer," chronicling the history of Texas prison inmate and famed jailhouse barrister, the late Fred Cruz.
The film aired on PBS' award winning Independent Lens series and earlier this year was screened at the Texas Capitol.
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast
Labels: Arts
TDCJ to stock up on paper masks and gloves in preparation for possible swine flu troubles.
By: Tonya Peters
TDCJ has now taken a more proactive step in preparing for the worst as it pertains to swine flu. In a positive move to benefit employee/offender health, TDCJ has begun to stock up on paper masks, and plastic gloves as a move to help prevent the swine flu from entering TDCJ prisons.
Last week TDCJ spokesperson Michelle Lyons issued a statement to the Backgate stating that TDCJ was segregating offenders that exhibited the symptoms of the swine flu within TDCJ, while at the same time couldn't offer a plan that would pinpoint employee precautions being developed to protect against the illness. After our article detailing the issue, TDCJ has now inacted a plan to attack the illness before it can enter the prison.
Employees will now have the ability to protect themselves should the virus show up on their unit. This is a move that may have already been in the planning stages, or it may have been the attention we brought to the issue. Either way it's a job well done for the TDCJ administration. As of right now, there are no confirmed cases of infected offenders within the TDCJ, but two counties that conatin several TDCJ facilities have had confirmed civilian cases reported.
******
In an update; TDCJ has reinstated all inmate visitation statewide beginning this upcoming weekend (May 9th, 10th)
Beeville inmate remains hospitalized after fight
By Elaine Marsilio
BEEVILLE — A 35-year-old inmate remained in stable condition Monday
morning after a weekend fight in the McConnell Unit in Beeville,
Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials said.
Jeremy Sadler was flown by helicopter about 5:30 p.m. Saturday from
the prison to Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial, HALO-Flight officials
said. Sadler was believed to have facial fractures, head lacerations,
a broken arm and missing teeth.
He was one of two inmates assaulted, officials said.
The three attackers identified have been isolated from the general
prison population, pending disciplinary hearings, officials said. The
Office of Inspector General is investigating.
Sadler is serving a 20-year sentence from Tarrant County for driving
while intoxicated and burglary.Another inmate, Daniel Ange, was
treated at the unit medical facility for head lacerations, officials
said. Ange is serving a five-year sentence for burglary in Brazoria
County.
Contact Elaine Marsilio at 886-3794 or marsilioe@caller.com
Beeville inmate remains hospitalized after fight
Indictments in prison contraband probe
By Mike Ward
A Polk County grand jury today indicted death row convict Richard Lee Tabler, his mother and sister and a former death row offender for alleged cell-phone smuggling that sparked a statewide controversy and lockdown of all state prisons.
Tabler was also indicted on a felony charge of retaliation, for threatening to kill state Sen. John Whitmire after the veteran lawmaker reported cell phone calls from Tabler to police and got the convicted Killeen killer busted. Whitmire chairs the Senate committee that oversees Texas’ prison system.
At the same time, a former guard and two convicts were also indicted for bribery amid allegations they paid the guard more than $1,100 over a few months to smuggle tobacco into the Polunsky Unit, where death row is located.
“We are sending a message with these indictments,” said Special Prosecutions Chief Gina DeBottis, whose office is prosecuting the case. “Our investigation is continuing.”
DeBottis said Tabler, 30, was indicted along with Lorraine Tabler, 60; Tabler’s sister, Kristina Martinez, 36, of Salado, on charges of possessing contraband in a state prison — a third-degree felony crime that carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
Tabler is accused of using another inmate’s cell phone to make calls, and his mother and sister are accused of buying minutes for that phone — authorities said the minutes are a “component” of a cell phone that is illegal in a prison.
The contraband charges are second-degree felonies and can mean up to 10 years in prison. The retaliation charge will be enhanced to a second-degree felony because of Tabler’s criminal past, DeBottis said, and will could bring a life sentence.
Tabler was condemned to die for two Killeen slayings in 2004. His execution date has not been set.
Indicted on similar contraband charges by the grand jury Michael Roy Toney, 43, who prosecutors said was on death row at the time but has since been granted a new trial. He was convicted in the Thanksgiving Day 1985 bombing in Fort Worth that killed three people.
After Tabler was busted last October, Gov. Rick Perry ordered Texas’ 112 state prisons locked down and searched from top to bottom for cell phones and other contraband. In the following weeks, officials found dozens of cell phones, drugs, tobacco and other items.
DeBottis said at least two cell phones and related gear were confiscated from Toney during shakedowns on death row.
In cases unrelated to the death row investigation, the Polk County grand jury indicted former correctional officer Betty Clements, 30, and convicts Darnell Page, 43, and Terrance Holland, 35, on bribery charges.
Prison officials said Page is serving life for on drug and robbery charges from Houston. Holland is serving a 20-year sentence for drug possession, robbery and car theft convictions in Jefferson County, officials said.
DeBottis said the inmates over several months last year allegedly arranged to have money wired to Clements — $1,175 in all — to have Bugler tobacco smuggled to them inside the Polunsky Unit near Livingston, in Polk County east of Huntsville.
On one occasion, DeBottis said, one of the inmates sent Clements a text message on her cell phone to confirm he received the contraband.
Reached by phone late this afternoon, Whitmire applauded the indictments. “People should be held accountable,” he said.
“All this should remind us of how this state should maintain a zero tolerance for all contraband in our state prisons, and how we need to secure our prisons — whatever it takes,” Whitmire said.
Get more Legislative coverage inside the Virtual Capitol
Indictments in prison contraband probe
What is TDCJ doing about Swine Flu?
As of 4/28/09
TDCJ is focusing on efforts to keep swine flu out of
the system.
Offenders entering through intake units will be kept
separate from the general population until we can be sure they are
not carrying the virus.
Employees and visitors are being observed for
signs of illness before allowing them onto the units.
At the present time, visitation is not being stopped, but potential
visitors who may be carrying the virus will not be allowed on the
unit. If you are sick or have any of the following signs and
symptoms, you should not attempt visitation:
Fever over 99.5 degrees
It is important to be honest in your responses to any questions about
your health when you attempt visitation.
If you have these symptoms but do not admit to them so that you can visit, you may be threatening the health of your incarcerated loved one as well as that
of all other offenders in TDCJ.
You may be asked to wash your hands before entering the unit. If TDCJ
staff observe you having possible flu symptoms, you may be asked to
leave before visitation is over.
We are stressing the importance of good handwashing with offenders
and staff because that is the single most important thing a person
can do to reduce their risk of catching swine flu, until a vaccine is
available.
We have increased our surveillance for flu-like illnesses and testing
for influenza on the units so that we can detect the entry of swine
flu into the system.
If swine flu does enter TDCJ, we are prepared to treat infections and
to take additional measures to reduce the chances of spread within
the units and between units.
We are continuously re-evaluating our control measures and staying
abreast of recommendations from the Department of State Health
Services and the centers for Disease Control and Epidemiology to be
sure we are doing all we can to protect the health of our staff and
of the offenders.
Houstonian in prison counts hours until first free breath in 22 years
By ROMA KHANNA
HUNTSVILLE — In the 22 years that Gary Alvin Richard sat in prison
for a rape that forensic tests now suggest he did not commit, his son
grew from a boy of 9 to a man of 32, with two young children of his own.
Richard’s mother died, as did his father and brother.
And Richard himself, living under the weight of a life sentence in a
1987 Houston rape, became resigned to dying alone behind bars.
“I told my myself I was not going to have a life for living — that I
was not going to have any family left — if they ever let me out,”
Richard, 53, told the Houston Chronicle during an interview Tuesday
at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Huntsville Unit on what
may have been his final day locked up in a Texas prison.
Richard, soft-spoken and barely audible over the prison din, wiped
tears from behind the black-framed bifocals that dominated his face
beneath a receding and graying hairline. He spoke about time he has
lost, the faith he has found and the peace he has made with his ordeal.
“It was God’s will for me to be sent here. I probably would have
ended up back in prison or dead,” he said, referring to his past
convictions for dealing drugs and theft. “I have gotten ahold of my
life. I am not angry.”
Richard will return to the Harris County Jail Wednesday and should be
released Thursday after prosecutors and his defense attorney ask a
judge to set him free on bail. Lawyers then will weigh what to do
with his case, a case crumbling in light of new evidence that
discredits tests from the Houston Police Department crime lab that
helped secure his conviction.
Both sides agree Richard should be released but differ on whether the
recently completed tests clear him.
Faulty HPD forensics
Richard’s lawyer, Bob Wicoff, said the evidence proves his client’s
innocence. Prosecutors concede that the analysis of Richard’s body
fluids contradicts 1987 crime lab evidence, but say it is too early
to tell if his is a case of actual innocence.
Richard is untroubled by the uncertainty.
“God has brought me this far and he is going to take me the rest of
the way,” he said.
If cleared, Richard would be the fourth Harris County man with a
conviction overturned because of faulty forensics from HPD’s crime lab.
Richard received a life sentence in the kidnapping and rape of a
Houston nursing student. Prosecutors built a case on the victim’s
identification of Richard, made some seven months after the attack,
and on the now-discredited crime lab evidence.
His case is receiving new scrutiny as part of a review of 160 cases
with questionable blood-typing, or serology, evidence from the crime
lab. Lawyers discovered that in Richard’s case HPD analysts obtained
two sets of conflicting results, but reported only the conclusions
favorable to the prosecution.
They also discovered that the physical evidence from the crime,
samples from the victim and her clothes, had been destroyed,
eliminating the possibility of DNA testing. So, Wicoff and
prosecutors agreed to less a discriminating analysis.
Those tests, completed Friday, show Richard is not a match for the
evidence, prompting lawyers to summon him back to Houston.
Too far away for family
Richard described his time in prison as isolating. He served much of
his sentence at a prison near Wichita Falls, too far for his family
to visit. He had not seen any relatives in seven years when he was
returned to the Harris County Jail three weeks ago to give a saliva
sample for the new tests.
There, he saw his son for the first time as an adult. He met his
grandson and granddaughter. He also reconnected with his ex-wife, Zoe
Woodard, whom he called a constant source of support.
The couple, sweethearts since junior high, remained married through
the first 15 years of Richard’s sentence, until Woodard wondered if
he ever would be set free. She remarried, but currently is separated
from her second husband.
“Can you imagine the heartache I felt every time I got a letter and
he was denied something or was sick or was in pain and I can’t do
anything about it?” said Woodard, who lives in Houston and hopes to
reconcile with Richard when he is released.
“He is my son’s father,” she said. “And I love him and I knew he was
innocent. How could I not?”
What’s next?
Richard’s plans for his freedom are simple. He wants to visit his
parents’ graves and take his granddaughter on the fishing trip she
requested when they met.
“I never been fishing, but we will learn together,” he said, smiling.
He has not thought about the money he could receive in state
reparations — possibly as much as $1 million — if he is exonerated.
“That is the furthest thing from my mind,” Richard said. “I have been
poor all my life. I just want to get to know my family, just try to
live my life for God.”
roma.khanna@chron.com
Houstonian in prison counts hours until first free breath in 22 years
How Texas inmates get contraband
Apr. 26, 2009
BY DEANNA BOYD
Prison wardens love calls like this.
On the phone was the mother of an inmate who, at her son’s request,
sent a cellphone and money order to a P.O. box, apparently unaware
that it’s illegal for him to have a phone.
"Her son was telling her he wasn’t getting good cellphone
reception," said Inspector General John Moriarty with the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice. "Being a good mother, she called the
warden and said, 'Can you move my son? He’s got bad cellphone
reception.’"
The warden promptly answered, "Absolutely. Who is your son?"
Busted.
But more often than not, officials say, finding contraband in jails
and prisons is a daunting task. Inmates will go to great lengths to
hide contraband, even concealing it in their orifices.
"It’s a constant assault on the security operations," said Moriarty,
who recalls how an X-ray once exposed that an inmate had hidden a
cellphone and charger in his rectum. "That’s what the prison system
has to deal with — the constant daily assault on beating the
security to get stuff in."
Inmates caught with contraband can face at least third-degree felony
charges.
In 2007 and 2008, the Special Prosecution Unit, which prosecutes most
crimes in Texas prisons, accepted about 280 cases involving
prohibited substances in a correction facility, including tobacco,
cash, drugs and cellphones. In 191 of those, inmates were defendants.
The rest were against correctional officers and civilians, often
relatives and friends of inmates, said Gina DeBottis, executive
director of the unit. Inmates caught with contraband also risk
internal discipline, such as visitation restrictions and loss of
"good time" privileges.
In Tarrant County, jailers find contraband daily through shakedowns
of the various housing units, ranging from minor things like more
books than allowed to homemade weapons, said Alan Dennis, supervisor
of confinement housing.
Dennis said officers have found contraband tucked inside bags and
secured with a string, then flushed in the toilet or tucked into air
vents. Inmates later pull the string to retrieve their goods.
Most commonly, Dennis said, officers find extra food stored away. "A
lot of times they try to make homemade alcohol, so they will save
fruit and bread products to make that," he said. "They are very
ingenious."
A few times prison officials get lucky, Moriarty said, like when an
inmate in Beaumont used his illegal cellphone to call 911 and
complain about an officer with whom he’d had an altercation. "A lot
them are not rocket scientists," Moriarty said.
DEANNA BOYD, 817-390-7655
How Texas inmates get contraband
10 years in prison for one rustled cow?
By Mike Ward
Saddling up to lasso a growing problem with rustlers, the Texas Senate today approved a bill that would jack up the penalties for stealing livestock.
In a state that once hanged rustlers, the brief debate focused only on whether the new penalties were too harsh.
Senate Bill 1163 makes the theft of any cattle, horses or exotic livestock punishable by up to 10 years in a state pen — er, prison.
Rustling is now a state jail felony, punishable by up to two years in a state jail.
Under the measure, the theft of 10 or more goats, pigs or sheep is a third-degree felony, as well. Under that: Still a state jail felony.
“The problem with rustlers is increasing, especially in my district in the Texas Panhandle,” said state Sen. Kel Seliger, R-Amarillo. “One of the problems it that the evidence is often eaten or done away with … We want to stop this dead in its tracks.”
According to the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, 6,404 cases of rustling were reported in Texas in 2008, compared with just 2,400 the year before.
Seliger said rustling penalties are tougher in Oklahoma, New Mexico and other surrounding states. “That may be why it’s increasing here,” he said.
Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, questioned whether making a third-degree felony was too much.
“Up to 10 years in prison for one cow?” he asked.
“This will deter rustling,” Seliger said.
The Senate agreed, voting 29-2 for final passage of the measure.
Uresti and state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, voted no.
In a statement after the vote, Larry Gray, executive director of the cattle raisers group, applauded the Senate vote.
“Cattle theft is very active in Texas, especially during tough economic times,” he said.
“While stealing a car or television will get a thief pennies on the dollar, stealing cattle can return actual market value within hours. A thief can steal one cow, take it to the auction the same day and receive the value of that animal.”
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10 years in prison for one rustled cow?
Categories: Criminal justice
New rules let prison inmates make regular calls
By MICHAEL GRACZYK
AUSTIN — Texas prison inmates are making routine phone calls for the
first time.
The Texas prison board was told Friday the first of a planned
systemwide program of telephone service to be available to most
inmates began working this week at the Henley State Jail in Dayton,
east of Houston. The system is being phased in this year throughout
the 112 units of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the
nation’s second-largest corrections agency.
Under terms of a contract with a Kansas telecommunications firm, the
country’s most restrictive telephone policy for state prisoners is
ending for an estimated 120,000 inmates who will be allowed up 120
minutes of prepaid and collect calls each month.
Three more prisons — Vance, in Fort Bend County; Luther, in Grimes
County; and Hobby, in Falls County — are to have phone service next
week and should be among 13 brought up in April.
Texas is the last state to bar routine phone access for inmates. Most
Texas prisoners now are allowed one five-minute collect call every 90
days, and only with a warden’s permission and only with a prison
officer present to monitor the call.
The new system will allow inmates up to 15 minutes per call to
friends and family on an approved list of visitors. Inmates and their
families can prepay for telephone calls at rates of about 23 cents a
minute for in-state calls and 39 cents for out-of-state calls.
New rules let prison inmates make regular calls
Family of dead inmate suspects he was beaten
As relatives demand answers, Harris County investigates man's death
after jail transfer
By RENEÉ C. LEE
In response to concerns from a dead inmate’s family members, Harris
County officials are reviewing the sudden death of a man who died
last week after being transported to a state jail.
Freddie Lee Bell died March 18 at Memorial Hermann Hospital-The Texas
Medical Center. His death came five days after being transferred to
the Lychner State Jail from the Harris County Jail on March 13,
officials said.
Although a cause of death has not been determined, family members
said they believe the man was beaten to death.
“A man has been killed and we don’t know the circumstances,” said
Pastor Robert Jefferson, a coordinator of the Houston Ministers
Against Crime, a group that focuses on criminal justice issues. “His
mother has been crying out. Our beef is that no one has called to
tell her what has happened.”
Bell, 31, was transferred to state jail to serve an eight-month
sentence for possession of a controlled substance. Texas Department
of Criminal Justice officials said he was vomiting when he came off
the transfer bus. He was taken to the jail infirmary where medical
personnel didn’t find any problems.
He was later transferred to Memorial Hermann after complaining of
stomach problems, said TDCJ spokeswoman Michele Lyons.
Lyons had said Bell’s preliminary cause of death was gastrointestinal
bleeding, but an official with the Harris County Medical Examiner’s
Office on Tuesday said the cause of death is still pending.
Harris County sheriff’s officials said they have reviewed all
medical, detention, and inmate grievance records and did not find
anything that indicated Bell was ill or had complained about being
sick. They also have interviewed the jailers who had contact with
Bell and transported him to the state jail and found nothing out of
the ordinary, said spokesman Paul Mabry.
“We want to make sure this was nothing more than an unfortunate
death,” Mabry said. “We want to make sure everything happened by the
book.”
Meanwhile, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office has expressed
concern over not learning of the inmate’s death until Tuesday.
Donna Hawkins, a district attorney’s office spokeswoman, said her
office will investigate why officials weren’t notified sooner. The
office traditionally investigates all deaths that occur in police
custody, she said.
The Office of Inspector General is also investigating the death but
couldn’t be reached for comment.
At the news conference Tuesday afternoon, Bell’s family presented
more than a dozen pictures of what they say is Bell’s bloodied and
beaten body.
Family members say they took the photos after the body was released
to the funeral home. In the photos, a man's face is swollen and
bruised and he has bite marks and open wounds on his body.
“What in the hell happened to my son in the care of the system?”
Betty Bell said. “Somebody killed my son and beat him to death like a
dog.”
renee.lee@chron.com
Family of dead inmate suspects he was beaten
Officials investigate inmate's death after transfer to jail
By ANITA HASSAN
Authorities are investigating the death of an inmate who died five
days after being transferred to a state jail facility, Texas
Department of Criminal Justice officials said.
Freddie Lee Bell, 31, sentenced to eight months in a state jail for
possession of a control substance, died on March 18 shortly after
midnight at Memorial Hermann Hospital-The Texas Medical Center, said
said TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.
Bell was transfered to the Lychner State Jail from the Harris County
Jail on March 13, Lyons said.
“When he came off the transfer bus, he was vomiting,” she said.
The inmate was immediately taken to the jail infirmary where medical
personnel could not find any problems, Lyons said.
At some point, after complaining about stomach problems, Bell was
taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital.
His preliminary cause of death was determined to be gastrointestinal
bleeding, Lyons said.
No further information was immediately available.
The case is being investigated by the Office of the Inspector General.
anita.hassan@chron.com
Officials investigate inmate's death after transfer to jail
Illicit goods keep flowing into prisons
300 employees reprimanded from '03 to '08
By LISA SANDBERG and MATT STILES
AUSTIN — Knives and drugs, cell phones and smokeless tobacco. Even
McDonald’s hamburgers.
Texas prisons were a virtual bazaar of prohibited and illicit goods
smuggled in by guards and correctional employees who rarely faced
harsh punishment when caught, according to a Houston Chronicle review.
Nearly 300 employees, many lowly paid correctional officers, were
reprimanded for possessing prohibited items at 20 prison units with
the most pervasive contraband problem between 2003 and 2008, records
show.
Of the 263 employees disciplined solely for contraband, about 75
percent, were given probation. Thirty five were fired; 26 received no
punishment at all. One of the 263 was criminally prosecuted for the
contraband, but served no prison time.
Contraband trafficking, one of the biggest security problems facing
the state’s 112-unit prison system, gained national attention last
fall when a death row inmate used a smuggled cell phone to threaten a
prominent lawmaker.
The phone was used by fellow death row inmates to place nearly 3,000
other calls.
John Moriarty, the prison system’s inspector general, called
contraband “the biggest security problem the prisons face.”
Until recently, guards found introducing contraband into the system
were more likely to be handed minimal penalties rather than fired and
the punishment varied widely, a newspaper review of five years of
disciplinary records shows. In 47 cases in which an employee
attempted to deliver contraband to an offender, only seven cases
resulted in dismissals, according to the analysis.
Firing not automatic
Top prison officials have called for zero tolerance in stamping out
prison contraband, though it “doesn’t mean someone is terminated,”
said the prison system’s spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons.
“It means it’s addressed and is dealt with accordingly. In some
cases, depending on the contraband, the fitting punishment is
probation or suspension,” she said. “In more serious cases, where the
facts support that the person intended to introduce contraband to an
offender, then it’s dealt with possibly by termination.”
But in 2003 a correctional officer at the Estelle Unit was given 10
months probation and suspended for four days without pay after his
backpack turned up an assortment of knives, prescription drugs, a
cell phone, two electric razors, a box blade, a lighter, a set of
portable radios, cigarettes and cigars.
Another correctional officer with an otherwise clean record at the
Beto Unit got six months probation, simply for walking through a
metal detector with an unopened can of chewing tobacco.
A retired Estelle Unit prison guard said getting cigarettes into the
prisons was never a problem. “I used to walk behind the cell blocks
every night and would find cigarette ashes out there behind maybe a
third of the cell blocks,” said the former guard, who was once placed
on probation for being found on prison grounds with a bag containing
a paring knife, a spoon, scissors, an alarm clock, a deck of playing
cards and an ashtray.
Not all contraband is intended for inmates. “A lot of it is personal
use stuff,” Moriarty said. Officials must try to figure out whether a
guard simply forgot to unload his cell phone before entering a
prison, or intended to deliver it to an inmate, and pocket as much as
$2,000 for one destined for death row, he said.
Smuggling now harder
Lyons said changes instituted after the death row cell phone scandal,
such as pat-downs of everyond entering the prisons, have made it
harder for contraband to get in.
Still, more than 200 cell phones have been confiscated systemwide
since a lockdown for illicit items ended in November, including eight
seized from death row.
While contraband has been a problem for years, the issue received
scant attention until Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, received several
threatening calls from death row inmate Richard Tabler, a man linked
to four murders.
Low pay called a factor
Whitmire said last week that few inside the system would acknowledge
the problem until he found himself on the line with a death row
prisoner. Now, the lawmaker is calling for a no-tolerance policy
regarding contraband.
He said staffing shortages have forced prison administrators to
compromise in both discipline and hiring practices, adding, “There
are instances where they are hiring people with matters in their
background who normally wouldn’t be hired.”
He said rank-and-file officers’ salaries — their base pay is capped
at $34,000 annually — contribute to the problem. “The low pay
certainly would make those who are susceptible to being dishonest
cross the line.”
One legislative proposal would give correctional officers as much as
a 20-percent raise — at a two-year cost of at least $400 million.
Pressing prosecutions
Brian Olsen, executive director of the Texas branch of the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a union that
represents prison workers, said the contraband problem could persist
unless guards receive professional wages.
Still, he said most officers follow the rules, and others get into
trouble for “trafficking” in seemingly harmless items, such as candy
and soft drinks. “There are going to be bad officers,” Olsen said. “I
don’t think it’s as rampant a problem as everyone says.”
The newspaper analysis found smokeless tobacco to be the most popular
contraband linked to correctional employees, followed by cell phones
and alcohol.
The Stiles Unit in Beaumont, the Michael Unit in Tennessee Colony and
the Allred unit in Wichita Falls had the most documented incidents
involving workers and contraband.
At four units, Connally in Kennedy, Hughes in Gatesville, Estelle in
Huntsville and Smith in Lamasa, all employees disciplined for
contraband received probation, rather than dismissal. Six other units
gave probation to their staff for contraband in more than 80 percent
of the cases.
Gina DeBottis, head of the prison system’s Special Prosecution Unit,
has sought to prosecute 68 prison employees for contraband since
2003, filing more than 90 charges. At least nine cases were dismissed
after indictment for various reasons, and grand juries refused
charges in three other instances, records show. The rest are pending,
she said.
The contraband prosecutions include at least 26 cases involving
tobacco and another 17 related to mobile telephones. There were also
at least seven cases from allegations that inmates bribed prison
employees.
matt.stiles@chron.com
Illicit
goods keep flowing into prisons
TDCJ lawsuit settled
Mother to receive $85K
By Sean Thomas
State officials along with Texas Tech University have settled a
federal lawsuit stemming from the suicide three years ago of an inmate.
The $85,000 settlement will go to Mary Daniels, the mother of
Theodore Schmerber, who killed himself in October 2006 while on
suicide watch. Schmerber, 29, was serving a 15-year sentence for
murder at the William P. Clements Jr. Unit, northeast of Amarillo.
The settlement ends a 2007 lawsuit against guards with the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice, claiming they failed to adequately
supervise Schmerber, who was from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Neither
TDCJ nor the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center admitted
wrongdoing in the settlement. The lawsuit recently was officially
dismissed.
Jeff Edwards, who represented Daniels, said the lawsuit not only
provided justice for the family but may prevent future suicides.
Twenty prisoners killed themselves in 2007 while in state custody.
That number increased to 32 last year.
"To (TDCJ's) credit they examined the cells and made sure the manner
in which Schmerber committed suicide couldn't happen again," Edwards
said. "One of the reasons my client was willing to resolve the case
was because they were taking proactive steps.
"Anytime you show some light on a tragedy and the reason why it
happens to high-ranking officials, they are much more likely to
improve their training."
Schmerber tore a blanket that was designed not to rip so that it
couldn't be used in suicide attempts. He then was able to tie it to a
light fixture because there was a gap between the fixture and the
ceiling. The fixtures have since been covered.
The two guards who were supposed to check on Schmerber every 15
minutes were put on probation for six months by TDCJ. One of those
guards no longer works for the department.
Texas Tech was involved because it provides health care to about 32
TDCJ facilities.
"He was diagnosed as a suicide risk and someone who needed to be sent
to a psych facility for stabilization (but wasn't)," Edwards said.
"He shouldn't have been there because he was actively suicidal."
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© The Amarillo Globe-News Online
1 in 22 adult Texans in corrections programs
By Mike Ward
Texas details from a new study released yesterday by the Pew Center on the States:
1 of every 22 adults in Texas is in prison, on parole or probation.
The national average is 1 in 33.
Texas, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts and Ohio had the highest percentages of adults under correctional supervision.
In Texas, that amounts to 797,254 people — slightly more folks than were estimated to live in Austin in the 2007 U.S. Census update.
In the United States, the number of people on probation or parole nearly doubled to more than 5 million from 1982 to 2007. The total population of the U.S. corrections system now exceeds 7.3 million.
Bottom line: As Texas and other states lock more offenders in prison, they spend more taxpayer dollars to do so. And while state prison costs continue to increase, in tight budget times, states will have to make tough decisions about whether to continue growing their corrections systems at the expense of education, social programs and other areas of the budget.
In Texas, amid concern about that issue, lawmakers two years ago voted to greatly expand addiction-treatment and rehabilitation programs rather than build expensive new prisons.
So far, Senate and House leaders said last week, that initiative seems to be paying off — as the growth of the prison population in Texas has leveled off in recent months.
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1 in 22 adult Texans in corrections programs
Movie 'Writ Writer' to be screened at Texas capitol: How could the Lege help writ writers help innocent people get out of prison?
February 16, 2009
Quite a few of exonerated clients of (my employers at) the Innocence Project of Texas , most of whom have been freed based on DNA evidence years or decades after their original conviction, were ironically labeled "writ abusers" by the courts for their frequent, post-conviction habeas corpus appeals challenging their final conviction.
Those engaged in legislative oversight, legal advocacy or even adjudicating habeas writs should take advantage of an opportunity next week to see the film, "Writ Writer," if you haven't already. Learn more about the post-conviction writ process from the perspective of prisoners filing the documents and the in-prison writ writers who assist them. Via email I'm told that:
Representative Elliott Naishtat and the Austin Film Society are presenting a special screening of "Writ Writer" on Friday, February 27th, at 2:00 p.m. in the Texas Capitol Extension Auditorium, Room E1.004.
There will be a Q&A afterward, attorney Steve Martin (former chief counsel to the Texas Department of Corrections) will be joined by attorney Scott Medlock of the Texas Civil Rights Project, poet and prisoner rights activist Antonio Renaud, and of course Susanne Mason, the director and producre of "Writ Writer." We will discuss current prison issues with emphasis on prisoner litigation and reentry. Rep. Naishtat has invited legislators and their staffs, so if you haven't yet seen "Writ Writer" this is a great opportunity, and it's free.
For more information about the film, please visit; Writ Writer.
I've not yet seen this, so I'm definitely going to attend. The documentary focuses on storied Texas writ writer Fred Cruz, now deceased, whose quixotic career as a writ writer behind prison bars helped spawn a fascinating and rarely examined legal subculture.
Whenever I think of a pro-writ writers' legislative agenda, I think of Brandon Moon, a DNA exoneree from El Paso now living in Missouri; the forensics in his case were botched by the DPS crime lab in Lubbock. Once in prison, he took up the writ writer's mantle, telling the Senate Criminal Justice Committee when he got out that:
First, Texas prisoners have no right to receive information about their case, or anything else, under the Texas public information act, so Moon couldn't get access to the information he needed to combat the prosecution' s claims. ...
Second, inmate writ writers just aren't taken seriously in the courts, he said, and Moon couldn't get hearings on most of his motions before Sen. Ellis' new law allowed the new DNA testing. The New York Times quoted Moon on this point (if a bit out of context): "I had no method of enforcing procedures," he said. "I could file all the motions I wanted, but I couldn't get heard."
While many guilty people file similar writs of dubious merit, and surely it's difficult for judges to separate the wheat from the chaff, it's also true that within the flood of pro se habeas writs headed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals each year, some proportion of them, as was the case with so many of the "writ abusing" DNA exonerees, are actually innocent but cannot to a certainty prove it, or have already used up their appeals.
The Legislature has never seriously considered Moon's primary suggestion to the Senate Criminal Justice Committee in Houston now four years ago: Give prisoners open records access to information about their own cases. Presently prisoners have no rights to request information under Texas' Public Information Act, about their own cases or anything else.
Posted by Gritsforbreakfast at;
Labels: DNA, Innocence, Open records, post-conviction writs
First prison phones connect March 30
By Mike Ward
Using voice-identity technology once used to order U.S. military air strikes, Texas on March 30 will begin allowing prison convicts to make legal phone calls for the first time — on old-fashioned, hard-wired handsets that promise to earn taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Texas is the last state in the nation to allow an inmate phone system.
Prison officials announced today that the first eight phones will be activated at the Byrd Unit, the prison system’s primary intake and assessment unit in Huntsville. Within a month, five additional prisons will get hundreds more.
Only outgoing calls will be allowed. All of Texas’ 112 state prisons should have inmate phones ringing by September, when the final lockups are to be hooked up. That’s two months later than initial projections, a delay that officials attributed to planning delays. Ironically, the change comes as authorities officials are battling to rid prisons of smuggled cell phones and other contraband, an issue that came to light last October after a death row inmate called — and then threatened — a state senator with a smuggled cell phone.
For years, as other states installed inmate phone systems, Texas prison officials resisted such a move.
But two years ago, lawmakers changed state law to allow for prison phones as a way to generate revenue for state coffers and the Victim’s Compensation Fund.
Officials said they hope the new phone system will lessen the demand for smuggled cell phones, although that has not necessarily proven the case in other states that already have inmate phone systems.
Project manager Wendell Stewart and Paul Cooper, director and general manager of inmate phone systems for Embarq, the company hired to install and operate the phones, said the system will work like this:
¢ Convicts must be approved to make calls, and the numbers they are calling must be pre-approved by prison officials to ensure that no victims or their families are included.
¢ Each time they make a call, the system will validate the convict’s prison number, their “biometric voice print” — verify their voice — and the number they are calling.
¢ People who answer the calls will hear a recorded voice message alerting them that the call is coming from a prison, and giving them the option of accepting the call, declining it or blocking all further prison calls. Stewart said the system will allow for collect calls, or for calls pre-paid from an account into which family members can transfer money or convicts can transfer funds from their trust accounts. Inmates’ family members will be able to sign up online.
More than a million people are expected to register to receive calls from the 140,000 convicts who will be eligible to make them, Cooper said. “I have never encountered a project with as many details as this project,” Stewart said. Cooper told the Texas Board of Criminal Justice that the “biometric” aspect of the new system “was used in Vietnam in air strikes … to verify that the person asking for the air strike was approved to do so.”
Cooper said secure underground cables and other equipment are being installed in prisons, and crews expect to complete the work at a rate of about 15-18 prisons per month.
Board member Tom Mechler questioned whether a security lapse could occur if a convict called his mother’s house — an approved number — “and his mom is gone and his drug contact is at home.”
Prison officials acknowledged that calls could be answered by someone not approved to receive them, but they insisted such calls would be quickly detected by other security measures being built into the system.
All calls will be recorded, and the calls will be monitored on a sporadic basis by prison investigators, gang specialists and even wardens.
Wardens can turn off all phones if a problem arises, officials said. Mechler appeared assured by the detail, noting he was confident “we’ve taken every effort to make sure we’re doing everything right.” Added John Moriarty, the prison system’s inspector general: “I think we’ll have the most secure inmate phone system in the country.”
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First prison phones connect March 30
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