THE WAY THINGS ARE IN PRISON

TEMPLE -- At age 11 Roger Pirkle entered his first state-run
institution. At 46 he emerged from his last one.

Pirkle stepped forth from prison as a parolee in 1996. A graduate of
youth homes, jails and penitentiaries, he had accumulated a
criss-cross of homemade knife scars on his arms and chest from fights
and little else.

"About the only thing I could put down on a resume form was `armed
robber,' " he said. "That's the only gainful occupation I'd ever had."

Today he works at an unlicensed home for the mentally
ill.

Since his first conviction as an adult in 1967, Pirkle had become an
expert of sorts on the Texas prison system. He had lived through the
infamous period of "building tenders" (inmate-guards who brutalized
and maintained a kind of order), the upheaval when he and others filed
the complaints that became the basis of the 1972 prison reform suit,
and the ensuing years of change.

As a "writ writer," he had helped other prisoners in filing complaints
and appeals. As a disciplinary problem he had spent the last nine
years before his release in administrative segregation -- 23 hours a
day alone in his cell.

"I can tell you one thing," said Pirkle. "Every step I took through
(Texas prisons) was another progressive move toward becoming a more
hardened criminal."

Pirkle took the first steps on his own. As a child he was so violent
that he was taken out of the Dallas school system at age 9.

"My mother enrolled me in a Catholic school then," said Pirkle. "I
wasn't there very long before one of the nuns slapped me and I hit her
back. After that I stole the priest's Cadillac and wrecked it. Then, I
tried to set fire to the building in two or three places, but it
wouldn't take.

"Then, they threw me out."

Pirkle then went through a succession of state-operated boys homes
before he wound up in Gatesville, at that time the state reformatory
for boys.

"The thing was, there wasn't any `reform' to it," he said. "They made
you physically hard. We did calisthenics off and on all day, but they
didn't do much for your mind. You had to fight. If you didn't fight,
you got stomped. I came out of there meaner than I was before."

Pirkle made his first trip to prison at age 17 for car theft. He was
released three years later and was free for only a few months before
he killed a man.

He drew 35 years for murder and returned to prison. There, he moved
from one unit to another, serving in Wynne, Beto and Eastham.

During those years he met the late Lawrence Pope, a former bank
president-turned-bank robber. Pope was known as a "writ writer" and he
interested Pirkle in doing his own legal research.

"I barely had a grade school education," said Pirkle. "But I'd never
met anybody like Lawrence. He taught me to do research.

"I taught myself to read with a dictionary. You can do that when you
have a lot of time."

He also watched the environment in prison both during and after the
class-action lawsuit that grew out of complaints filed by him and David Ruiz.

Pirkle and others who testified during the suit were marked for death
by the building tenders, and Pirkle drew an additional 10 years on his
sentence for assault to commit murder after he fought with one.

"By that time I could kill someone and not blink an
eye."

That conviction left Pirkle in prison to watch during the mid-1980s as
the building tender system was dismantled. He was out for a brief
period in the early 1980s, but quickly returned after a string of robberies.

What he found then was a proliferation of gangs.

"The trouble was, they didn't do anything to fill the void" created by
the breaking up of the building tenders, he said. "The gangs sprang up
in 1984 and '85 -- the Mexican Mafia, Texas Syndicate, Aryan
Brotherhood, Mandingo Warriors -- and, at first, (prison officials)
didn't seem to mind. It helped show that the old building tender
system was needed.

"Guards told me that. Gang members told me and I saw it for myself.
The guards allowed them to form because, without the building tenders,
they couldn't stop them. When you have one guard with no sidearm in a
tank with 50 or 60 men, he's vulnerable.

"They let us gamble. They let us smoke marijuana. They'd tell us to
burn a newspaper to mask the smell. They did all that because they had
to to keep order by themselves.

"Then, the gangs started as cliques and the guards were co-opted into
them. Then it got out of hand and they couldn't stop it.

"Now, when a kid comes into prison, he's going to be recruited. If he
doesn't join, he better be able to fight or he's going to be raped and
turned out by somebody."

When Pirkle left in 1996, he said, gangs were rampant.

"They prey on the weak," he said. "They control the drugs, sex. They
control.

"The mentally ill are the most vulnerable, and I'd say at least 15
percent of the prisoners I saw had some mental disorder."

Immediately after his release Pirkle was assigned to a halfway house
in Dallas. There, he said, he was planning his next robbery when Al
Slaton, a former convict and founder of the Rose Garden, called and
offered him a job.

"I had a .357-magnum lined up and I was ready to start another robbery
spree when Al called," said Pirkle. For 18 years, the Rose Garden,
with its 15 ramshackle houses and trailers, has attempted to provide a
place to stay -- for mentally ill people who could find no other home.

"There just didn't seem to be anything else I could do. Nobody was
going to hire a guy with my record.

"But, since I started here, I've changed. This is the longest I've
been out of some institution since I was 9 years old. I've put that
behind me and all I want to do is help Al."

Pirkle, said Slaton, is "the perfect example of a home-grown Texas
convict."

"He may have gone into prison mean, but they made him meaner," said
Slaton. "They institutionalized him and that's all.

"Now, he has responsibility and he lives up to it. But he only changed
after he got out of prison."