First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System

Chapter 5 Cracks in the Color Line

ChaPTer 5 Cracks in the Color Line In 1970, Dr. George Beto was nearly at the end of his tenure as director of the Texas prison system. At that time, he oversaw a prison system with roughly 15,000 prisoners, housed in roughly a dozen prison units scattered throughout East Texas. The system’s operating budget was approximately $18 million. Under Beto’s administration, litigation activity by inmates was sporadic and fundamentally a nuisance. For the most part, inmate life on any of the prison units was the same as it had been in the 1960s and even the 1950s. When the work bell chimed, the hoe squads hit the hallways, were counted, ran to the waiting trailers, and went to work in the fields “flat weeding” or picking cotton. Prelude to Change Only one month after Beto’s retirement in 1972, roughly two years before the December 1974 final report by the Joint Committee on Prison Reform, the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) faced a prisoner lawsuit that would have a massive impact on the system’s operation. On October 17, 1972, black TDC inmate Allen L. Lamar filed a Section 1983 lawsuit (federal Civil Action for Deprivation of Civil Rights) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, alleging that system-wide practices of racial segregation and discrimination deprived inmates of their civil rights.1 As the Joint Committee’s investigation entered its early stages, pretrial events in the Lamar case were gaining momentum and the case was expanding . Only weeks after Lamar filed suit with the court, on November 6, eight Spanish-speaking inmates (including David Ruiz, the plaintiff of Ruiz v. Estelle) moved to intervene as additional plaintiffs.2 Two more black inmates 90 The Inside then moved to intervene in the case in December.3 In January 1973, the court granted these motions for intervention. In what would turn out to be one of the most important developments in the case, on May 24, 1973, the U.S. attorney general directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to file a motion to intervene on behalf of Lamar and the other inmate plaintiffs. This was granted on July 6. Soon after, two white inmates intervened in support of TDC, and two years later, on June 6, 1975, four additional black inmates and two Hispanic inmates also joined in support of TDC.4 By the time the committee issued its final report on the Texas prison system in December 1974, the Lamar suit had blossomed into a full-scale attack against alleged practices of racial segregation and discrimination in TDC. Although the claims made in the original 1972 complaint by Lamar were numerous, the case would continue to expand even further. Several months after Lamar filed his original complaint, two additional prisoner lawsuits with separate but related claims of racial and ethnic discrimination against TDC were consolidated with Lamar.5 Once consolidated, the Lamar lawsuit was certified as a class action—Allen L. Lamar et al. v. H. H. Coffield et al., Civil Action No. 72-H-1393—and became one of four major class-action lawsuits faced by TDC in the 1970s, in addition to numerous other non-class actions.6 Once certified as a class action, the Lamar suit pertained to “all past, present and future inmates of TDC” and placed scrutiny on the practices of the entire Texas penal system. The case was even more unique for having garnered the attention of the U.S. attorney general and the Department of Justice. Adding problems for TDC was that the suit came at the heels of the committee’s investigation whereby long-held prison practices, once isolated from outside scrutiny, were now being openly questioned. The convergence of the above factors created a virtual perfect storm of prisoner litigation. Lamar’s allegations The Lamar suit was delineated among three different classes of inmates: (1) black TDC inmates who were plaintiffs, (2) Spanish-speaking inmates who were plaintiffs or plaintiff-intervenors, and (3) a mixed group of AngloAmerican , black, and Spanish-speaking defendant-intervenors.7 The allegations made by Lamar and the other inmate plaintiffs were wide-ranging. They charged TDC with racial and ethnic discrimination in the following venues:8 Cracks in the Color Line 91 • In assignment to the various prison units within TDC. • In assignment to living quarters within the various prison units. • In assignment to agricultural work...