Download or read book Texas Prisons written by Steve J. Martin and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Behind the Walls written by Jorge Antonio Renaud and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a Texas inmate trained as a reporter, this book gives practical advice on how inmates live, eat, play, work, and die in the Texas prison system. It spotlights the day-to-day workings of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice--what's good, what's bad, which programs work and which ones do not, and examines if practice really follows official policy. "While the book is meant to be a primer for those with loved ones in prison, it should be required reading for any attorney involved in criminal law."--Texas Lawyer de Novo Magazine
Download or read book An Appeal to Justice written by Ben M. Crouch and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a prison achieve institutional order while safeguarding prisoners' rights? Since the early 1960s, prison reform advocates have aggressively used the courts to extend rights and improve life for inmates, while prison administrators have been slow to alter the status quo. Litigated reform has been the most significant force in obtaining change. An Appeal to Justice is a critical tudy of how the Texas Department of Corrections was transformed by Ruiz v. Estelle, the most sweeping class-action suit in correctional law history. Orders from federal judge William W. Justice rapidly moved the Texas system from one of the most autonomous, isolated, and paternalistic system to a more constitutional bureaucracy. In many respects the Texas experience is a microcosm of the transformation of American corrections over the past twenty-five years. This is a careful account of TDC's fearful past as a plantation system, its tumultuous litigated reform, and its subsequent efforts to balance prisoner rights and prison order. Of major importance is the detailed examination of the broad stages of the reform process (and its costs and benefits) and an intimate look at prison brutality and humanity. The authors examine the terror tactics of the inmate guards, the development of prisoner gangs and widespread violence during the reforms, and the stability that eventually emerged. They also detail the change of the guard force from a relatively small, cohesive cadre dependent on discretion, personal loyalty, and physical dominance to a larger and more fragmented security staff controlled by formal procedures. Drawing on years of research in archival sources and on hundreds of interviews with prisoners, administrators, and staff, An Appeal to Justice is a unique basis for assessing the course and consequences of prison litigation and will be valuable reading for legislators, lawyers, judges, prison administrators, and concerned citizens, as well as prison and public policy scholars.
Download or read book Walking George written by David M. Horton and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation George John Beto (1916-1991) is best known for his contributions to criminal justice. This book, authored by two of his former students, examines the entire life of Beto and his many achievements in the fields of both education and criminal justice.
Download or read book First Available Cell written by Chad R. Trulson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades after the U.S. Supreme Court and certain governmental actions struck down racial segregation in the larger society, American prison administrators still boldly adhered to discriminatory practices. Not until 1975 did legislation prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in Texas prisons. However, vestiges of this practice endured behind prison walls. Charting the transformation from segregation to desegregation in Texas prisons—which resulted in Texas prisons becoming one of the most desegregated places in America—First Available Cell chronicles the pivotal steps in the process, including prison director George J. Beto's 1965 decision to allow inmates of different races to co-exist in the same prison setting, defying Southern norms. The authors also clarify the significant impetus for change that emerged in 1972, when a Texas inmate filed a lawsuit alleging racial segregation and discrimination in the Texas Department of Corrections. Perhaps surprisingly, a multiracial group of prisoners sided with the TDC, fearing that desegregated housing would unleash racial violence. Members of the security staff also feared and predicted severe racial violence. Nearly two decades after the 1972 lawsuit, one vestige of segregation remained in place: the double cell. Revealing the aftermath of racial desegregation within that 9 x 5 foot space, First Available Cell tells the story of one of the greatest social experiments with racial desegregation in American history.
Download or read book The Trials of Eroy Brown written by Michael Berryhill and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense. In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed. The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.
Download or read book Texas Tough written by Robert Perkinson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-03-11 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.
Download or read book Eleven Days in Hell written by William T. Harper and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation "The 1974 Fred Gomez Carrasco prison siege at Huntsville, TX.".
Download or read book Government Code written by Texas and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book We Are Not Slaves written by Robert T. Chase and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hank Lacayo Best Labor Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards Best Book Award, Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as "slaves of the state" and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.
Download or read book Texas Prisons written by Lon Bennett Glenn and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retired warden Lon Bennett Glenn recounts the results of the changes that were forced upon the prison system in Texas over a thirty-year period at taxpayer expense.
Download or read book Real Prison Real Freedom written by Rosser McDonald and published by Elm Hill. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisons, an integral part of society, generally are not familiar to most people. Length of sentence and treatment by others in the prisons vary widely. The immediate “Man-in-charge” of each prison unit is the warden, who has some flexibility within TDCJ guidelines. Warden Dr. Keith Price gained a reputation for turning around some chaotic prison units. He knows from experience that at best, prisons are very difficult places for people, whether they are behind the bars or in front of them. “People that wind up in prison, inmates, generally are society’s rejects,” Price said. “They’ve been unable to do the things other people do to make life a success, whether it’s because of an abusive parent, addiction to some substance, stupidity, being unable to read or write, they’ve been failures and have chosen alternate means, that is crime.” Price also knows officers have a challenging life, “The correctional officer, has to deal with people so maladjusted that society says they can’t live amongst them anymore. It’s conflict day after day, hour after hour and it really takes a toll, from broken marriages to financial problems to substance abuse. It’s continual.” The Texas Prison System was named “one of the best” in the country by a leading penology expert. However, shortly after that, a Federal Judge took control of the entire Texas Department of Corrections for “unconstitutional treatment” of inmates. TDC denied and resisted many of the reforms the judge ordered. The result was chaos. Too few guards, rampant gangs, gang wars and overcrowding were the norm for several years. The court kept control 20 years and finally the prison system adapted to the new (and constitutional) ways of operating. At the same time Texas prison population doubled, and more than doubled, again. During that time, 19-year-old Rickie Smith began a 10-year sentence in TDC on a drug charge. He joined the gang wars, in the Aryan Brotherhood and then made his own personal war with prison officers. He could have been released in a few short years, but, in 3 separate trials juries added 3 ninety-nine-year sentences for him to serve. Trial transcripts have many references in testimonies to how dangerous Rickie Smith is--even calling him “the most violent inmate” in TDC. REAL PRISON / REAL FREEDOM is a biography of Rickie Smith and how his life intersects with the woes of the prison system and with Warden Keith Price. Naturally, he wanted out, knowing that realistically it will never happen. Officials told him he’ll never get out. Then came the impossible that shocked everyone, especially Rickie.
Download or read book The Rope The Chair and the Needle written by James W. Marquart and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late summer 1923, legal hangings in Texas came to an end, and the electric chair replaced the gallows. Of 520 convicted capital offenders sentenced to die between 1923 and 1972, 361 were actually executed, thus maintaining Texas’ traditional reputation as a staunch supporter of capital punishment. This book is the single most comprehensive examination to date of capital punishment in any one state, drawing on data for legal executions from 1819 to 1990. The authors show persuasively how slavery and the racially biased practice of lynching in Texas led to the institutionalization and public approval of executions skewed according to race, class, and gender, and they also track long-term changes in public opinion up to the present. The stories of the condemned are masterfully interwoven with fact and interpretation to provide compelling reading for scholars of law, criminal justice, race relations, history, and sociology, as well as partisans on both sides of the debate.
Download or read book Convict Cowboys written by Mitchel P. Roth and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-08-15 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Convict Cowboys is the first book on the nation’s first prison rodeo, which ran from 1931 to 1986. At its apogee the Texas Prison Rodeo drew 30,000 spectators on October Sundays. Mitchel P. Roth portrays the Texas Prison Rodeo against a backdrop of Texas history, covering the history of rodeo, the prison system, and convict leasing, as well as important figures in Texas penology including Marshall Lee Simmons, O.B. Ellis, and George J. Beto, and the changing prison demimonde. Over the years the rodeo arena not only boasted death-defying entertainment that would make professional cowboys think twice, but featured a virtual who’s who of American popular culture. Readers will be treated to stories about numerous American and Texas folk heroes, including Western film stars ranging from Tom Mix to John Wayne, and music legends such as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Through extensive archival research Roth introduces readers to the convict cowboys in both the rodeo arena and behind prison walls, giving voice to a legion of previously forgotten inmate cowboys who risked life and limb for a few dollars and the applause of free-world crowds.
Download or read book Texas Department of Criminal Justice written by and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2004 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hate Crime written by Joyce King and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2002 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the brutal 1998 death of James Byrd, Jr., a black man dragged to his death behind a pick-up truck driven by three young white men, discussing the men convicted of the crime and the racism that pervades American society.
Download or read book In This Timeless Time written by Bruce Jackson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this stark and powerful book, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. They document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official "nonperiod" between sentencing and execution. In the first section, "Pictures," ninety-two photographs taken during their fieldwork for the book and documentary film Death Row illustrate life on cell block J in Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. The second section, "Words," further reveals the world of Death Row prisoners and offers an unflinching commentary on the judicial system and the fates of the men they met on the Row. The third section, "Working," addresses profound moral and ethical issues the authors have encountered throughout their careers documenting the Row. Included is a DVD of Jackson and Christian's 1979 documentary film, Death Row.
