Eleven Days in Hell: The 1974 Carrasco Prison Siege at Huntsville, Texas

Two—“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

14 The Texas Legislature created the Windham School District in the Texas Department of Corrections in 1968. It was subject to the certification requirements and regulations of the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education. Its purpose was to provide educational and vocational opportunities for prison inmates that would help them when and if they returned to the general population. Attendance at once-a-week, six-hour classes was required for inmates having less than a fifth-grade education and it was voluntary for others. At the Walls Unit, the Windham group of about fifteen teachers and librarians was housed on the 11,250 square-foot top floor of a rectangular, three-story building made of reinforced concrete faced with masonry bricks with steel roof trusses. It was, unintentionally, a fortress. The 167-by-67 foot area was remodeled in 1972 from an auditorium into the educational facility.About fifty percent of the room’s interior was classroom, thirty percent was library, and the remaining twenty percent—which divided the two larger rooms—was ChapterTwo “Let’s get the hell out of here.” —Steve Roach, inmate 15 “LET’S GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE.” restrooms, administrative offices, work rooms, and storage areas. A separate section of the library was set off by glass partitions as a special law library—the Writ Room. There was only one entrance to the third floor complex—through a pair of adjoining plate glass doors that opened out to a concrete ramp. The ramp paired off left and right in a series of four right-angle turns for about one hundred feet in total length down into the prison’s recreational yard two floors below. To prevent distractions from recreation yard noises, the library/classroom windows were bricked up. That distressed the civilian employees in the complex from day one. “We asked that that not be done and it was still done,” said Novella Pollard. “When we moved into this building, we asked for windows,” she continued. “I mean we don’t even have a fire escape in this building, although we’d asked for one.”1 Her concerns were echoed by then Education and Recreation Director Dewey Morgan who “hollered every time they closed a window with brick” and complained to the wardens, according to Pollard. He warned them, she said, “that all any prisoner had to do is secure that front door and they’d have that building.”2 As part of the 1972 remodeling, the room’s interior circumference was lined with fully stocked, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The concrete ramp that extended from the Library/Education Center also provided entrance/exit to the building’s second floor. In looking at the ramp headon , it had the appearance of a gull-winged bird. The six-foot wide inclines with their three-foot high walls, had brass handrails to aide those that received medical attention in the prison’s hospital, a major medical facility located at Huntsville Prison for inmates in all TDC Units throughout southeastern Texas. At the building’s ground level were the staff dining room, the prison’s bakery, and food storage and preparation areas. The second floor consisted of two large inmate-dining halls, kitchen facilities, and dishwashing areas. While Aline House and Ann Fleming were checking catalogs and discussing new book purchases, Woodman’s chore was unpacking and shelving a new supply of books. Judy Standley was busy pasting slots for checkout cards in the backs of other library books. Jack Branch, and 16 CHAPTER TWO fellow teacher Ron Robinson had just started their noon-to-six shift. They were monitoring an Educational Achievement math test for some inmates. Like most of the civilian employees in Texas prisons, all of them felt fairly safe and secure. Actually, many said they felt safer inside prison walls than they did outside on the streets of a big city like Houston, seventy miles south.As House, who spent twenty-seven years as a public school teacher prior to coming to the Walls, put it, “I feel safer up here than I did in the schools.”3 And it was only a few weeks earlier, on July 7, 1974, that TDC Director Estelle was quoted in the Temple Daily Telegram as saying he was “safer in every part of my prisons than most of you are on the streets of your communities.”4 It was while in...