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

Introduction

xi Introduction I am going to tell you about Texas prisons. Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. Forget what you’ve read in newspapers, and what you are shown for a few minutes on your local news. The media, which seldom can be rightfully accused of purposely misinforming Texans about their prisons, nevertheless relies on official sources for its news. Newspapers and news stations rarely show you an inmate’s view of prison. What is important to the prison director may not be important to the inmate’s wife, or mother, or son. I first came to prison in 1977, left for eight months in 1979-80, returned in May of 1980, paroled in 1987, returned in 1991 and will not leave until at least 2006. Despite my criminal history, I am an intelligent , educated man, and for years I have considered how I might address the problems that face convicts and their families. Because, for decades, those who care about inmates have been kept in the dark when it comes to almost every imaginable facet of prison life. They have been forced to rely on officials—who often have treated them with the contempt those officials feel for inmates—or they have been forced to depend on the inmates themselves, many of whom are inarticulate, do not understand the system themselves and thus cannot explain it, or will simply not tell the truth, even to their families. In turn, without meaningful help, many convicts have never addressed the personal problems that caused their criminal behavior. They then returned to prison, leaving behind shattered lives and children who, more often than not, followed in their criminal footsteps. What I say may surprise you. It may bore you. It may horrify you. It will surely anger some Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) officials, who would prefer you remain unaware of the differences between official policy and daily practice. What I say will anger certain inmate groups, who would prefer the public not know of their existence, much less their aims and methods. Within the limits of respect and reason , I don’t care if I offend those two groups. The friends and families of inmates are also victims, torn between their sympathies for the people directly affected by criminals and their xii Introduction empathy for their sons, daughters, fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, and friends in prison. Their loyalty will not allow them to abandon their loved ones, even as they struggle with shame, embarrassment, disbelief and maybe disgust at what those loved ones did. Their plight is a difficult , long-ignored gray area in prison politics. I hope this book helps them. I want to point out a few things you should keep in mind while you read the topics I will later discuss in depth. 1. Almost everything that concerns inmates—where and how often they are allowed to recreate; whether they are allowed contact visits; when they will become eligible for parole; everything is affected by their custody level, sometimes referred to as their status. I will refer to both frequently. They are the same. For all intents and purposes, any penal institution in Texas that is surrounded by razor wire and guarded by armed guards with orders to shoot escapees is a maximum-security facility. Custody levels are simply the classes within each institution that govern how much freedom and how many privileges inmates have within that particular prison. More about this in chapter one. 2. In any particular prison, the warden is God. I do not exaggerate. Some guards tremble when the warden comes around. He, or she, sets policy, hands out favors and decides by his or her actions the tone and mood of that unit. This is important to remember . If you are confronted with a policy contrary to those described in this book at a unit your son or daughter is assigned to, it is most probably because of a warden’s direct order or indirect approval. 3. In every Texas prison, security is the most important thing on any guard’s mind. Security is simply preventing escapes, and any action or person who helps or encourages an inmate to escape affects security. Everything else is secondary, including staff and inmates’ rehabilitative needs—everything. Two examples: Introduction xiii a) In 1974, Fred Gomez Carrasco took eleven hostages at the Walls Unit in downtown Huntsville and attempted to use them...