The American Penal System

Transparency as a Pathway to Correctional Reform

Helen Clarke Molanphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000585445
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This thoughtful examination of incarceration in the United States from the 1980s to the current time offers for consideration a transparent and humane correctional model for the future. Author Helen Clarke Molanphy employs an interdisciplinary approach encompassing sociology, penology, memoir, philosophy, and history.

Featuring the work of researchers as well as penal theorists of the Enlightenment era, literati who have written about crime and punishment, inmates, social justice activists, and journalists, the author incorporates first-hand interviews with participants in the landmark Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit, which found incarceration in the Texas Department of Corrections to be cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Synthesizing lessons learned from years of studying the American prison system through contact with inmates, correctional authorities, legislators, and prisoner advocates, Molanphy offers a narrative of crime and punishment, degradation, and dehumanization, but with hope pointing to future correctional reforms. The book not only catalogs human rights abuses and the pain inflicted by corrupt penal systems, but also provides a roadmap for an enlightened society to conceive of ways to reduce mass incarceration and provide humane treatment of inmates.

This reflective survey of the pervasive issues that afflict the prison industrial complex offers a compelling analysis of the past and possible future of the US penal system for students of criminal justice, corrections, penology, and the sociology of punishment.

PART ITHE TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS

1Texas Control Model

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003280279-2

Well before the 1971 uprising at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility, Texas male inmates, living in what was known as “the prison crescent,” acted out their discontent. The men resented the harsh supervision of wardens who ran the prison units as a source of cheap labor, as well as the contemptuous and distrustful attitude of most of the guards. As a result, inmates in the prison farm units developed a culture that gave the appearance of conformity, alongside an underground pattern of nonconformity.

The men improvised by brewing “pruno” or “raisin jack” and making “glim boxes,” substitutes for lighters. Their homemade “stingers” were used to heat water and, for weapons, they fashioned “shivs.” The problem of inadequate cash was solved by counterfeiting. As no rehabilitation existed, the men merely hoped to survive, while they dreamed of escape.

An older Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) inmate said, “There was no such thing as filing a writ in those years. The prisoners had no rights so they rioted.”¹

Prison riots are usually set off by a single event. Wardens dread them, fearing loss of their jobs. Uprisings indicate the system is breaking down and this frightens the public and the politicians. While state governors worry about the loss of their reputations for good management, riots point to prison problems, but they don’t hold public interest for long.

In the 1930s, riots in the Texas prisons, referred to as “bucks,” were derived from the expression, “bucking the system.” These prison “bucks” centered around the scarcity and low quality of the food, the overcrowded conditions in the prison dormitories, and the mistreatment by guards. While TDC Warden Lee Simmons’ explanation for “bucks” was inmate idleness and lack of discipline, the official history of the Texas Department of Corrections, TDC: 30 Years of Progress, indicated that prisoners were involved in “bucks” due to poor living conditions, along with beatings in the fields.²

At that time, many states, especially in the North, did not allow prison industries in order to protect free world workers, but Texas and other southern states did. The TDC daily scheduling of harsh work in the fields and shops, while motivating “bucks,” may have limited the opportunity for more widespread protests to take place. In addition, the architectural design of TDC, with its far-flung farm units, acted as a preventative to major uprisings.³

During the first half of the twentieth century, other groups besides the prisoners shone a light on the dysfunctional TDC system. Progressive reform entities, such as the 1924 Joint Committee on Prison Reform, urged rehabilitation and, to a limited extent, the Texas legislature backed that agenda. These politicians affirmed that brutality should be abolished and that new programs, such as classification, industrial training, and education, needed to be introduced. While the TDC authorities publicly agreed with the Commission’s proposals, they did little to prevent brutality or to lobby for the funds needed to develop these programs.

The Joint Committee went even further by urging the relocation of some Texas prison units to more populated areas and they advocated the construction of a hospital for prisoners suffering from mental illness. The Committee members recommended that, after subtracting the cost of their maintenance, prisoners should be paid for their labor and they urged parole board members to secure work for inmates before their discharge. None of these reforms were adopted by the Texas legislature, but calls for similar changes would be heard in the ensuing decades.⁴

The Texas Joint Committee’s progressive proposals were in keeping with the ideas of penologists throughout the country. Rehabilitation, or the reshaping of the criminal into a noncriminal, was being touted as the proper function of a prison system and national reformers critiqued the Texas prison system as a stark example of the “control and punish” style.

In 1931, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, appointed by President Herbert Hoover and popularly known as the Wickersham Commission, did a study of penal conditions throughout our country. The Commission called the American penitentiary system antiquated and inefficient, and said that these institutions contributed to crime, thus indicating that Texas prisons were not the only ones in need of reform.⁵

In addition to the official reform groups, investigative reporters were extremely important in exposing the poor conditions at TDC. George Waverly Briggs of the San Antonio Express-News wrote about the convict leasing and chain-gain system in the South, with the result that this form of slave labor was ended in 1912. One of the places that Briggs described was Sugar Land, an area of mosquito-infested swampland that lies southwest of Houston, Texas, in which barelegged inmates labored in the wet sugarcane fields of the Imperial Prison Farm Camp and often died from disease. Their diet was the same every day: moldy biscuits for breakfast and cold, hard corn bread and black-eyed peas for both lunch and dinner.

Nearly a century later, when the Fort Bend Independent School district near Sugar Land began construction of a vocational center, workmen found the remains of 95 African Americans who labored at the camp; examination of their bodies indicated that these inmates had been tortured in the fields in which their blood ran deep.⁶

In 1931, the same year that the Wickersham Commission wrote its report, the Houston Press ran an article, entitled “Ghostwriters,” written by an anonymous reporter who stressed how diligent TDC was in prohibiting the flow of news from inside the farm units. This journalist revealed stories of convicts who prepared glowing reports about the prison administration, while brutality was covered up and the availability of marijuana, morphine, denatured alcohol, and homemade prune wine was never mentioned.⁷

Police reporter Harry McCormick of the Houston Press was responsible for a large body of work that provided a close look at the horrendous conditions at TDC; from 1931 to 1937, McCormick exposed the brutality by the guards and by some prisoners, this, despite the fact that prison officials worked to suppress all news of killings, torture, and escapes. McCormick challenged the prison administration’s daily operations and he was more effective than official governmental bodies, concerned politicians, or civil rights groups because his writing reached more of the public and led to some improvements at the Texas farm units. The basis for McCormick’s first story was “kited” out by another Houston Press reporter who had gone to prison on a hot-check charge.⁸

Next, McCormick wrote an article, based on information from the prison grapevine, about an inmate who, after leading 30 men in a run for liberty, was shot down in cold blood. Because of McCormick’s revelation, Warden Lee Simmons was censored by the TDC prison board for not reporting the death.⁹

Harry McCormick went on to write about John Bailey, a prisoner who was beaten by a sadistic guard after he fell and broke his ankle; the county health officer reported that even if half of what Bailey said was true, the brutality was outrageous. Another McCormick story concerned W. E. Leonard, a burglar who contracted tuberculosis and was forced to work in the fields, despite suffering from a high fever.¹⁰

One of McCormick’s feature articles covered the plight of Charles Johnson, a World War I veteran and a drug addict. Sent to prison for the burglary of a drugstore, Johnson was placed in solitary confinement due to complaints from guards that he refused to work.

An official from the Armed Services found Johnson and wrote:

Visitors go through the prison for twenty-five cents. But here was a sight that would have been worth an extra fee. It was a ghastly horror. The cell from which Johnston rarely emerged was no larger than a pantry without facilities for bathing…He had a wild stare in his eyes and sat, like a scared thing about to bolt with fear.¹¹

Warden Lee Simmons denied McCormick’s story and blamed Charles Johnson’s condition on his use of drugs. However, when Johnson was examined at the Veterans Administration hospital, doctors found him poorly nourished, emaciated, hallucinating, and suffering from tuberculosis and bronchitis, conditions not induced by drug abuse. After Charles Johnson was declared insane and pardoned by the governor of Texas, Lee Simmons declared, “I’m glad to get rid of prisoners as hard to handle as he was. Johnson was a bad influence on the other prisoners here.”¹²

Harry McCormick’s story about inmate Clarence Williams followed. When this man attempted to escape from Retrieve Farm and guards discovered him in a tree, they surrounded him with bloodhounds and ordered him to either jump down among the dogs or be shot.

In his news report about Williams, McCormick wrote:

The boy was covered with a mass of bites. His clothing was nearly stripped from his body. He was forced to march ahead of the horses back to camp. Even old-time convicts shuddered at the sight of the boy. A new man who attempted to cleanse Williams’ wounds was whipped. Williams died shouting, “keep them off me, keep them off me.”¹³

Later, one of Harry McCormick’s sources sent him a copy of Clarence Williams’ death certificate in which the attending doctor lied, saying that he did not know what caused the lacerations. More shocking was a report revealing that a guard, who had actually prevented Williams’ escape, was discharged from his duties that day. Rather than returning Clarence Williams to his cell, other guards threw the escapee out into the field and set the 25 dogs, housed at Retrieve Farm, against him.

McCormick’s source wrote, “They’re killing men on these damned farms. They kill them, bury them, and then make out an escape report and the world moves on.”¹⁴

In 1933, M. E. Foster, Harry McCormick’s editor at the Houston Press, addressing the suppression of news by TDC authorities, wrote,

Prison officials have not denied the truth of any statement printed by the Press, but some of those in charge have put forth statements that were either evasive or incorrect, as proven by autopsies and prison records.¹⁵

M. E. Foster reminded Warden Lee Simmons that the prison system belonged to Texans and that Simmons’ duty was to keep the taxpayers informed of events, including riots and escapes. The editor told Simmons that he should allow photographers into the prison for executions as a concrete way to show others that crime did not pay.

Near the end of Lee Simmons’ tenure, he openly defended his policies and opposed a bill ending corporal punishment at TDC. When the “bat,” a three-inch by two-foot leather instrument with a wooden handle and a rawhide thong, was forbidden, Simmons remarked, “Most employees hated to see the “bat” go. The guards are afraid it will lead to loss of control.”¹⁶

In his book, Assignment Huntsville, self-published 20 years after his retirement, Lee Simmons spoke of the overcrowding and of the unsafe, unsanitary conditions that he found at TDC and he blamed these on the Texas legislature’s fixation on saving money.¹⁷

Meanwhile, Harry McCormick’s personal contact with prisoners at TDC provided him with insights that other journalists did not enjoy. While some of his peers often viewed penological methods, such as indeterminate sentences, probation, and parole, as examples of being soft on criminals, McCormick did not agree. His investigative stories were groundbreaking, leading to needed changes at TDC. In this respect, he resembled nineteenth-century reformers, John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, and early twentieth-century muckrakers, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair.

Texas prisoners appreciated what an advocate they had in Harry McCormick and, at his death in 1968, they established a cancer fund in his memory. TDC Director George Beto eulogized McCormick, saying he had done more for Texas prisoners than any other single individual. In another eulogy, one of McCormick’s press colleagues cited convict Raymond Hamilton’s praise of the reporter’s search for the truth, even after Warden Lee Simmons had barred him from the prison. McCormick’s colleague added that Texas Governor James Allred allowed Harry to attend Ray Hamilton’s execution because this was the condemned inmate’s last request.¹⁸

From 1962 to 1972, Director O. B. Ellis, who had managed a prison farm in Tennessee, was in charge of TDC. Ellis advocated rehabilitation goals, but he focused on making the prison units cleaner and safer, and he obtained funds for a major building program. The Ellis unit was named for him and became the most tightly run facility in TDC, housing many lifers, recidivists, and those who made trouble. This was a form of poetic justice as O. B. Ellis was always bent on segregating the troublemakers from the rest of the population. The Ellis unit was known to be disciplined and orderly, with few disturbances or gang activity, unlike other units in San Quentin, California, or Joliet, Illinois. However, former inmates at the Ellis unit told of a high level of depression, resulting from anxiety and boredom.¹⁹

The Texas control principle that O. B. Ellis perfected spread to other state prisons, mainly in the South, but later in the North. This concern for security accounts for many restrictions that continue to mortify American prisoners; examples include infrequent visitation; limited amounts of money spent on inmates for food, housing and clothing; loss of personal property; inadequate medical care; and the insistence on uniforms and serial numbers. The discipline of hard work and daily existence in dark, crowded cells enforces the control principle, while wardens back discipline with threats of more punishment.

Despite the amount of control, over the years, some Texas inmates attempted to escape. As an example, in July of 1974, powerful South Texas heroin kingpin Fred Gomez Carrasco and two other inmates at the Walls Unit in Huntsville seized 11 prison workers and 4 inmates as hostages. The three men, who had permission to work in the prison library, had obtained smuggled pistols and ammunition. Under orders from Director Jim Estelle, TDC officials began negotiations with the convicts, supplying them with their requests of food, clothing, sanitary products, walkie-talkies, and bulletproof helmets; Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe even approved the men’s request for an armored getaway car. After 11 days, the convicts made an attempt at escape, moving from the prison library to the waiting vehicle. When prison guards and Texas Rangers blasted them with fire hoses, the three escapees fatally shot two female hostages. Receiving gunfire from the Rangers, Fred Carrasco committed suicide and one of his accomplices was killed. The third man was placed on death row and executed in 1991, 17 years after the hostage-taking.²⁰

During this same period, several Texas prisoners, frustrated by the lack of facilitation of 1960s national calls for humane treatment and rehabilitation, decided to take another route. They became jailhouse lawyers and confronted the injustice and unconstitutional conditions in the TDC, making a resounding impact on corrections in America.

Notes

1. Molanphy, Helen Clarke, Idea of Punishment: Texas Prison System as a Case Study
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. “Kiting” was a practice used by many of the prisoners and involved stringing information out secretly.
9. Molanphy, Helen Clarke, Idea of Punishment: Texas Prison System as a Case Study
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, texasranger.org

2Jailhouse Lawyers

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003280279-3

In 1980, my doctoral research involved interviewing Lawrence Pope, one of the eight plaintiffs in Ruiz v. Estelle and a major contributor to the lawsuit. At the time, Pope was a parolee being assisted by Charles and Pauline Sullivan, founders of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE), based in Austin, Texas.

Pope was a bank official in Waco, Texas when his partners secretly sold their stock shares to a Dallas swind...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I The Texas Department of Corrections
• PART II Demographics of American Prisons
• PART III Major Problems in Corrections
• PART IV Toward Ending Mass Incarceration
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index