A Huge Mess
Speak Up!
Texas prisons are a huge mess. Actually, they are worse than that. They destroy and blot countless generations of lives, squander millions and millions of dollars and make our communities more, not less, dangerous.
This condition exists because decent people—and most of us are decent—are not aware of what underlies prisons—fear, greed and no accountability and what happens in prison.
None of us are immune from fear. We need fear, but not the kind that draws on our prejudices and fails to provide the safety it promises.
We incarcerate men and women who have broken our criminal laws, imprison them for years and years (often 10 years or more), treat them as dangerous animals while incarcerated and release them back into society with $100 and severely limited job opportunities.
Not only are the incarcerated men and women outlawed, families are decimated. Families struggle to manage while the incarcerated are gone and children grow up without a mother or father in the house. All bear the mark of SHAME.
Despite what Texas Department of Criminal Justice may say, prisons are operated with the sole devastating purpose of not letting an inmate escape. Inmates are body searched when moving from one building within the prison to another, all activities are placed on immediate hold multiple times a day while the location of every person in prison is confirmed, friendly relationships between guards and inmates and between inmates and inmates are discouraged.
Visitors are treated as if their purpose for visiting is to assist an escape. All are patted down, even very young children.
I ask, “How many people have escaped from Texas prisons in the last ten years?” I suspect fewer than 10 have escaped during that time even though several hundred thousand persons have been incarcerated. And yet, precious lives continue to be devastated by an inhuman and unnecessary policy that decimates rather than builds.
Will Texas Department of Criminal Justice ever be held accountable? The state of affairs in Texas prisons and the lives impacted thereby will not improve until Texas Department of Criminal Justice changes its ways.
With the present political climate, only cosmetic changes will be made to our existing system of incarceration. Our heartless, archaic, intolerable treatment of the incarcerated and their families will continue until good people like you and me open our eyes and make our voices heard.
We really must speak up!