Texas: ALL State Prisons on Lock down in search for contraband

At approximately 7 p.m. on Monday October 20, 2008 Governor Rick Perry made public his order for a system wide lock-down of all prisons in the state of Texas. The lock-down was ordered after a prisoner on Texas death row (the most active death machine in the industrialized world) made a reportedly threatening cell phone call to a state representative. At approximately 7 p.m. on Monday October 20, 2008 Governor Rick Perry made public his order for a system wide lock-down of all prisons in the state of Texas. The lock-down was ordered after a prisoner on Texas death row (the most active death machine in the industrialized world) made a reportedly threatening cell phone call to a state representative.

The consequences for those of us within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice have been quick and extreme. All movement has ceased. All work, school, rehab programs, recreation and family visits have come to a screeching halt. We are being subjected to excessive and humiliating searches. Our meager personal possessions are being broken or confiscated, our bed linen and clothes trampled under the boots of guards and returned unwashed. We are having to listen to listen as staff insults our families, as it is insinuated that they are the root of the problem.

It has been reported that multiple cell phones have been discovered on death row with upwards of 2,000 calls being made from those phones. There is no contact visitation for prisoners on death row. They have no physical contact with anyone who is not an employee of TDCJ. Like the vast majority of all contraband, in the Texas prison system, cell phones are brought in by the guards and sold to prisoners who are desperate to maintain contact with the outside world. It is not prisoners or their families smuggling these things in, but the prison staff; and yet, it is the prisoners and their families who are easy targets for retribution and increasingly repressive measures.

If the prison administration and Governor Rick Perry are truly interested in stopping cell phones and other contraband from entering the prisons, they ought to begin by subjecting all of their employees to the same degree of scrutiny that our families suffer when they come to visit.

Out of an estimated 2,000 cell phone calls from death row, only one was threatening. It would stand to reason that the other 1,999 calls made were to the family and friends of men who sit behind tons of steel and concrete waiting to be executed. Who in a similar situation would not want to call a friend, a grandmother, a sibling or parent? Texas is the only state in the U.S. that does not provide telephone access for prisoners and their families. How much of this might be avoided if Texas prisons would step out of this violent, archaic plantation past and join the rest of the country in the 21st century?

As of October 22nd, two women, each with a loved one on death row, have been named publicly, arrested and charged with felonies for purchasing the phone and the minutes in attempt to maintain some form of human contact with their condemned family members. Meanwhile, we are left to wonder if anything has happened to the guards who actually brought the phones into the prison.

If the facts have changed by the time you read this, you will have to forgive me. I am one of over 150,000 people imprisoned in Texas, I have no access to phone or a computer, and since we are currently locked down, my access to outside information has virtually ceased.

Doc

Mutual Aid Texas
Mad Tricycles Brigade
First Published: http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2008/10/65440.php