Behind the Walls: A Guide for Families and Friends of Texas Prison Inmates

13. General and Law Libraries

81 All TDCJ units provide inmates access to both a general library and to a legal library. However, access to the general library is considered a privilege that can be revoked for disciplinary infractions. On the other hand, every inmate in TDCJ—whether in solitary confinement, in the lowest levels of administrative segregation, or in transit—will be able to either visit the legal, or law, library or have legal materials brought to him. The courts have held that TDCJ cannot deny any meaningful access to the courts, and the system, in my opinion, has done a decent job of fulfilling that mandate. While access to the legal libraries is pretty uniform throughout the system, there is a wide gap between what access is allowed by the different units to their general libraries. The libraries are attached to the unit educational departments and are usually supervised by librarians with free-world training and staffed by TDCJ officers with a few convict clerks to perform the checking in and out of books, updating card catalogues, etc. Access to the library itself is dictated by security. As security on the different units is dictated by the attitude of the wardens and higher-ranking officers, one unit may be more accommodating of inmates who desire to use the library, while others may consider it an unnecessary general and law libraries Chapter thirteen 82 Chapter Thirteen privilege and a security headache. So, one unit may offer each inmate two hours weekly in the library, while another may leave the library open all evening to any inmate who is otherwise unoccupied. One unit may call inmates from separate living quarters on a sporadic basis, or only call thirty inmates at a time, and then allow them to stay only fifteen minutes at a time, hardly enough time to browse, much less read a newspaper or magazine. Most units have the current issues of national magazines, including Time, Newsweek, Ebony, Jet, Cycle World, Hot Rod, Discover, Rolling Stone, Christina, Black Beat, National Enquirer, National Geographic, ESPN Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Hispanic, Sporting News, and TV Guide. Most libraries will also have subscriptions to the larger Texas metropolitan daily newspapers, along with USA Today and some smaller, local papers. However, unless an inmate is in school and thus goes to the library with his class on a weekly basis for two hours at a time, or lives on a unit with liberal library privileges, he will rarely get more than a few moments to glance at a magazine. They are not for checkout purposes, and anyone caught taking one or ripping out pages will receive a case. Neither will he be allowed to keep old magazines. The volume of magazines is tremendous, and it would be easy for units to give old issues of magazines away, but the popular ones find their way to the officers’barbershop , while the rest are simply tossed out. Inmates not on recreation restriction are allowed to check out books, usually on a weekly basis. Some units allow inmates to check out one book, some allow two. TDCJ dictates that its units have at least five books for each inmate, so a typical 2,500-man unit will have over 12,000 books. The books will cover a spectrum—non-fiction, how-to-books, language, Spanish-language, career, history, religion, psychology, and of course fiction: from Lynn Abbey to Roger Zelazny, and many authors in between. TDCJ cannot be faulted for its library resources. But, and it bears repeating—access to the library is so sporadic that on many units only a handful of inmates, other than those allowed to take Windham classes, get meaningful access to any given library. This means that if an inmate is in college and wants to do in-depth research, he will most likely need someone in the free-world to assist him in ob- General and Law Libraries 83 taining reference materials, because he will not have the chance or the time to use the ones in the unit library. Before Ruiz v. Estelle, Texas prisons had abysmal records when it came to allowing inmates time and opportunity to do legal research or fight their convictions in a meaningful way. In fact, inmates who insisted on doing legal work—writ writers, as they were and are called— were frequently beaten by guards and by “building tenders”. “Building tender” is the generic term for inmates...