DEATH ROW UNDER "COMPASSIONATE" GOV. BUSH
All of Texas Death Row has been moved from the Ellis Unit in Huntsville to a control-unit type isolation unit near Livingston, Texas.
The move itself was an ordeal. We were taken out on a huge concrete slab at the back of the Ellis Unit, naked. They had taken all of our property the day before, and that included eyeglasses. All they left us with was a pair of boxer shorts. After we got a pair of cut-off coveralls on the slab, we had to sit down after sadistic Texas Rangers had handcuffed us and put on the "black box" to keep our arms twisted. They short-chained us, locking the chain tight around our ankles, then letting out about six inches and locking it to our cuffs. We were doubled over as if we were holding our ankles with our arms twisted. We couldn't straighten our legs. By the time we arrived, most of us had wrists swelled up around the handcuffs. We had to hobble to the chain buses, get on them (packed in), make the forty-or-so-mile trip to the Terrell Unit in Livingston, then get off the buses with our wrists still chained to our ankles.
I had a hernia on one side of my abdomen from a botched operation a year or so ago at the prison hospital in Galveston. Being short-chained and pushed around caused the abdominal wall to tear the rest of the way across, and now the hernia is about the size of a loaf of bread. The pain is extreme.
I also have bleeding ulcers and Hepatitis C that has progressed to Cirrhosis. Of the more than 150,000 prisoners in the Texas prison system, more than 50,000 have the Hepatitis C virus. The Texas medical service (contracted to the University of Texas Medical Branch) refuses to treat the Hepatitis virus because the drugs (Interferon and Ribaviran) are too expensive. This will create a medical disaster. The only medical treatment has been the prison "doctor" at Terrell stopping two of my medications from Ellis and dropping the most important Hepatitis medication from 4 tablets a day to 1.
There are no hot food trays. All of the vegetables are literally boiled into mush. We get the stems of "greens" and the stalks of broccoli, and the meat has been processed into something unimaginable. The only meat we have been given that hasn't been ground up or "processed," was a small chicken thigh. The one on my tray was cold and raw, the skin white, the meat pink, sitting in a little puddle of chicken blood.
But no matter how bad they make it, conditions in here will only keep getting worse, especially with the prison director appointed by George W. Bush.
--Carl F. Napier, #000880, Terrell Unit, (D.R.), 12002 F.M. 350 South, Livingston, TX 77351