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xv A Short History of Texas Prisons In order to understand the Texas prison system and how it deals with inmates and their families, you need to know a little of Texas prison history and the psychology that drives prison officials. First, prisons don’t make money for the state, and this irritates bureaucrats to no end—that, with more than 100,000 able-bodied, convicted criminals at their disposal, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) cannot be labor intensive enough to at least break even, or make a dollar, as it used to. At one time, under the convict lease system —in which corporations or wealthy individuals would lease convicts from the state for private use—enough money was made so that Texas didn’t need to appropriate funds from prisons. Convicts used to be leased to railroads, plantations, and mining corporations. However, the lessors—Ward Dewey Corporation of Galveston, which leased the entire penitentiary from 1871 to 1877; E. H. Cunningham and L. A. Ellis, who leased Huntsville prison from January 1878 to March 1893; and many others—spread the wealth around. They paid Texas officials for the right to have their hired prisoners pile up the profits. By 1910, corruption in the prison system was so pervasive that the fountain of wealth—the leasing system—was abolished in a wave of reform, but scandals continued. During Miriam “Ma” Ferguson’s reign as governor, she and her husband, ex-governor “Pa” Ferguson, were accused of pardoning an average of one hundred convicts monthly for payments in cash or land. Their excesses led to a state amendment that abolished the Board of Prison Committee and established a nine-member Texas Prison Board—which essentially just served the purpose of trading riders in mid-race. The gravy train rolled on. (If early prison board members believed in rehabilitation, they did so in secrecy, except for perhaps Thomas J. Goree. As prison superintendent from 1878 to 1891, Goree believed that the Lord would lead one rightly, even if one was a Texas convict. Accordingly , he established weekly worship classes with rudimentary training in basic subjects, and he set up a library with a few thousand volumes.) During the 1930s, Texas governors avoided prison issues and continued xvi A Short History of Texas Prisons to sell pardons at generous prices. A happy face was put on prison conditions , mostly through good public relations efforts. The Texas Prison Rodeo, a wild-West extravaganza featuring convict cowboys hurling their untrained bodies in front of wild bulls in exchange for applause and a few dollars, began its fifty-five-year run in Huntsville in 1931. An allconvict cast was featured on Fort Worth’s “Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls,” a radio program that put a positive spin on prison life. But little was in fact positive. Reports of unsanitary living conditions, of atrocities committed by employees and of mysterious deaths of convicts persisted and were just as persistently ignored. The system instead threw money, as it always has, at improving security and increasing its industrialization. Oscar B. Ellis, who in 1948 was appointed to head the system, talked the Legislature out of funds and promptly increased expenditures for fences, floodlights, and picket towers. George Beto, who succeeded Ellis, expanded the industrial scope of the then-Texas Department of Corrections, developing a dental laboratory, garment factories, a busrepair shop, a tire recapping facility, a coffee roasting plant, and other industries, all implemented to increase the cost effectiveness of what was supposedly the country’s most peaceful, well-run prison system. It had to be the best run, most peaceful system, because, after all, unlike New York’s Attica state prison and unlike the California system, the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) did not erupt in violence in the 1960s. Texas convicts were all gainfully employed in meaningful trades; all were serving out their sentences brimming with health and repenting willingly while under the benevolent eyes of the fair but firm TDC. But it was untrue, and by the early 1970s a determined band of prison writ-writers, assisted by a wisp of an Eastern interloper and a crusty East Texas judge, filed an extraordinary series of lawsuits that exposed the brutalities in TDC and forced massive, structural changes. These changes didn’t come easy. Until 1964, United States courts had adopted a hands-off attitude toward prisons, showing total deference to administrators whenever prisoners complained about conditions. Inmates trying to get into the federal courts...

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