TEXAS PRISONS: BETTER, BUT STILL A BAD MESS

AUSTIN -- The Texas prison system is not the kind of thing you should
read about at the breakfast table.

Whenever I hear people get huffy about something they've read in the
paper or seen on TV that strikes them as offensive, I wonder how they
expect us to report on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It's
easy to ignore, of course, and that's precisely what most of us do.
Boy, is that ever a subject we'd rather not think about. On the other
hand, it `is' being run with our money, in our names and under our
ultimate supervision.

Well, actually, it's not under our supervision right now, and hasn't
been since 1980. The TDCJ was such a horrifying, barbaric, sadistic
mess that a federal judge ruled the whole thing unconstitutional under
the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. The federal court just took
it over -- lock, stock and barrel -- and put it in the hands of a
special master. But that was all long ago. And ever since, the TDCJ
has been struggling to reform itself under federal
supervision.

Periodically some politician rises to condemn the federal courts for
unwarranted interference, and in particular Judge William Wayne
Justice, who had the temerity to bring the writ of the U.S.
Constitution to Texas. But the truth is, no one wanted the hot potato
back again.

However, now the potato is not so hot. The mind-boggling overcrowding
that afflicted the prison system about 18 years ago has been
alleviated; we have spent billions of dollars building prison after
prison after prison to house the inmates incarcerated for ever-longer
stretches by the Legislature's determination to git-tuff-on-crime.
We've got three strikes; we've got mandatory minimums; we've got
people in prison whose crime is drug or alcohol addiction; we've got
people in prison for being mentally ill . . . well, you know all that.

The state of Texas now argues that improvements in the TDCJ put the
state in compliance with federal law, so the federal courts should no
longer have jurisdiction. The case was heard earlier this year in a
three-week trial with more than 50 hours of testimony. It was a
remarkable portrait of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as of
1999.

Judge Justice issued his decision in March; the state lost, although
the judge said that all could proud of how much the system has
changed. Incredibly enough, the judge did `not' find the system's
medical or mental health systems sufficiently bad to be held
unconstitutional despite the testimony.

Some samples:

* "Inmate Collins Gentry showed obvious symptoms of an acute heart
attack, but was sent back to his cell [by the medical unit]. Inmate
Ophelia Rangel spent five days not eating and suffering from psychotic
episodes and severe diarrhea, but she was not treated. She died.
Michael Bias, who fell into a coma after a suicide attempt, was left
to lie in one position, so that he developed infected pressure sores
that led to massive loss of skin, breakdown of muscle and kidney
failure. Presenting what Dr. Robertson considered to be obvious
symptoms of metastatic prostate cancer, inmate Robert Lee was treated
by a physician assistant as malingering. The inmate finally became
paralyzed. . . . Another female inmate was sent back to her cell after
reporting significant weight loss and coughing up blood. . . . Rather
than treat her, a nurse documented that she was `refusing to work' and
she was made to return to work. She died with five months. . . .

* "Dr. Metzner found a significant over-diagnosis of malingering [in
the mental health care units]. . . . Inmate Garza entered the system
with a history of suicide attempts and self-mutilations,
hallucinations and hospitalizations. His medications were discontinued
and he was diagnosed as having no Axis I illness. After a brief visit
to Skyview, he was discharged with Dr. Tchokoev recommending no
medication and heavy work in the field. The same day he returned to
Beto, he cut himself and then attempted to hang himself. He is now in
a vegetative state."

So what `did' the judge deem unconstitutional?

"The evidence before this 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 themselves to being bought and sold among groups of
prison predators, providing their oppressors with commissary goods,
domestic service or sexual favors. The lucky are those who are allowed
to pay money for their protection. Other abused inmates find that
violating prison rules, so that they may be locked away in single
cells in administrative segregation [the most notorious hell-holes in
the system -- Molly], is a rational means of self-protection, despite
the loss of good time that comes with their `punishment.' To expect
such a world to rehabilitate wrong-doers is absurd. To allow such a
world to exist is unconstitutional.

"It is notable that in almost every prison and civil jail action to
which Breed [one of the expert witnesses in the case] was appointed by
state and federal courts, he was responsible for monitoring excessive
use of force. This makes all the more alarming the fact that Breed
found in Texas more excessive force, in quantity and degree, than in
any other state system he has seen."

And so on, and so forth.