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DEATH BEHIND THE WALLS: RITUALS, FOLKTALES, AND TRUE STORIES by Ruth Massingill  WELCOME TO THE EXECUTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD Huntsville, a tiny dot on the map, marks the location of an East Texas town of 35,000 residents. Motorists traveling seventy miles an hour on Interstate 45 could easily miss the exit sign about an hour north of Houston, but mention Huntsville to anyone in the state and there will almost assuredly be instant recognition. Go fartherafield—New York, Canada, England, or France—and many have heard of Huntsville. Since 1924, death sentences for the State of Texas have been carried out in this East Texas town where incarceration and education are the twin pillars of the local economy. Mostly, the populace prefers not to be reminded that their town is sometimes called the execution capital of the world. In fact, the death ritual occurs so frequently—usually several times a month—that local citizens scarcely notice “routine” executions. Only when national or foreign media roll into town for a high-profile case does attention focus on the Huntsville Walls unit, site of more than 400 executions in the past twenty-five years alone. Although the prisoners’ families may mourn their passing, few in Huntsville grieve for the killers who meet their fate there. For the most part, Huntsville’s citizens, like Texans in general, unwaveringly support the death penalty despite recurring hints of wrongful convictions and corruption in the criminal justice system. On a global scale, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, housing more than two million prisoners—one fifth of the world’s inmates1—at an annual cost in excess of $57 billion.2 This prison population crosses every cultural border known to humankind. Many people, regardless of 119 social strata, are touched by the criminal justice system, either directly or indirectly. Crime and punishment have become highly charged emotional issues successfully used for political gain by world leaders and by small-town politicians alike. For these reasons , Huntsville can be said to have broad social significance as a community that lives daily amid issues of international concern. Beneath these outward political concerns, a wealth of lurid folk legends surrounds the death tradition; native East Texans have grown up hearing such stories. The urban legends are born of misinformation and superstition, but plenty of bizarre stories actually occurred. The best sources for these gruesome vignettes are the public information officers (PIOs) for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the veteran Texas reporters who have covered the TDCJ beat for years. These eyewitness tales are as varied as the human experience, ranging from poignant to macabre. Ultimately, each one is, as they say in East Texas, serious as a heart attack, because they all end in death, for both the convicted and their victims. LIVING—AND DYING—BEHIND THE WALLS The nerve center for the death tradition in Huntsville lies behind red brick walls only two blocks from the downtown square but a world away from the slow-paced, conservative lifestyle of this small pineywoods town. The compound of prison and support services occupies about ten square blocks of prime downtown real estate. Shaded by ancient oaks, the two-story fortress constructed in 1848 and known simply as the “Walls” is at the center of the complex. Barbed wire tops the thirty-two-foot-high walls, scanned by armed guards in the corner towers. A hodgepodge of brick structures has been added over the years. Administration buildings, warehouses once used to gin cotton for prison garments, and living quarters for high-ranking corrections officers encircle the prison. Perhaps it is telling that few residences in old Huntsville neighborhoods are constructed of red brick—for many, red is the color of prison. The deep orange-red of the buildings in the prison complex is the hallmark of “Corsicana 120 Getting There: Rituals, Ceremonies, and the Process of Dying Reds,” bricks made of native clay, fired in kilns in the East Texas town of Corsicana, and thereafter making them cheap and readily available. Ironically, the first Texas inmate to be executed by electrocution in 1924, Charles Reynolds, was from Red River County, in the red-dirt country north of Corsicana. Three hundred and sixty inmates followed Reynolds to the Texas electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky,” until the U.S. Supreme Court declared capital punishment “cruel and unusual” in 1972. A year later, the Texas Penal Code was revised to allow assessment of...

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