REPORT FROM TEXAS
ON MARCH 1, 1999, US federal judge William Wayne Justice ruled in a 167-page Opinion that Texas state prisons have failed to rehabilitate themselves in that they still run a brutal and inhumane prison system where prisoners are gang-raped, beaten, and extorted by other prisoners while their pleas for help and protection are met with indifference by guards and prison officials.
Donna Brorby and her staff of lawyers presented 80 witnesses, including experts and prisoners who told of abuses so horrifying that several observers could not bear to hear some of the testimony. Judge Justice ruled that the Court will maintain oversight of the prison system and gave the state three months to come up with a plan to remedy unconstitutional conditions and practices.
Judge Justice first took control of Texas prisons in 1979 following a year-long trial brought about by a civil-rights complaint filed in 1972 by prisoner David Ruiz. 349 witnesses testified at the 1978-79 trial, telling of unspeakable atrocities committed by "building tenders" (prisoners who had been appointed as guards) and aided by guards and prison officials. Murder and torture were common punishments for such rule infractions as not picking enough cotton to satisfy the field major. Prisoners who wrote complaints to the federal court describing these barbaric terms of confinement were targeted for retaliation by wardens, with building tenders carrying out the beatings and rapes, and on occasion murders of jailhouse lawyers and others with no fear of punishment of any kind.
Back in 1980, Judge Justice ruled that confinement in the Texas prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment, citing overcrowding, understaffing, brutality by guards and building tenders, substandard medical care, and uncontrolled physical abuse among prisoners. Under court orders, Texas cured overcrowding by getting voters to approve $1,200,000,000 in bonds to be used to build more prisons. Thus, they turned a prison system which consisted of 15 prisons housing 18,000 prisoners into the mammoth it is today: 110 prisons housing 150,000 prisoners. Build them, and they will come. They were also forced to eliminate building tenders, but have since trained their guards to take over building-tender duties.
Texas Attorney General John Cornyn immediately said Texas will appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He said he has no plans to negotiate a plan that will satisfy the federal court ruling. He is newly elected and has promised voters that he will end federal oversight of Texas prisons. He believes that Texans don't want their prisons to be constitutional. I suppose that, like many Texans, he believes that constitutional prisons would reflect a softness on crime, a label that no Texas politician could survive.
Kudos to attorneys Donna Brorby, co-counsel Ginny Morrison, all their helpers, expert witnesses, and the prisoners who, with great courage, testified to the shame and humiliations, personal horrors, and abuses that they have been subjected to at the hands of the correctional criminals and their willing prisoner accomplices. To all those who worked on behalf of the prisoners, it is good to know that there are good people in this country who still see us as human beings rather than the despised trash that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would like for us to be in order to promote the recidivism that is the breath of life to perpetuate power and their license to steal from the $1.2 billion annual prison budget.
Judge William Wayne Justice, the Honorable, best sums up this cesspool of criminality that Texas prisoners must try to survive:
"The evidence before the court revealed a prison underworld in which rapes, beatings and servitude are the currency of power. Inmates who refuse to join race-based gangs may be physically or sexually assaulted. To preserve their physical safety, some vulnerable inmates simply subject to being bought and sold among groups of prison predators, providing their oppressors with commissary goods, domestic services, or sexual favors. . . . To expect such a world to rehabilitate wrong-doers is absurd. To allow such a world to exist is unconstitutional."