1PRISON HEARTLAND
There’s tough. And then there’s Texas tough.
—LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR DAVID DEWHURST
If we are to fully understand the causes and consequences of America’s prison buildup, a good place to start is Huntsville, Texas. Although dozens of prison-dominated communities now dot the American landscape from Florence, Arizona, to Wallens Ridge, Virginia, Huntsville stands above the rest: It is the most locked-down town in the most prison-friendly state in the most incarcerated country in the world. Although America’s sprawling penal system—a collection of some five thousand federal and state prisons, not to mention local jails—is highly decentralized, Huntsville, perhaps even more than Washington, D.C., could stake a claim to serve as its capital city. For 160 years, it has coordinated criminal punishment for the Lone Star State and in the last half century, it has stood at the forefront of a carceral revolution that has remade American society and governance.
A sleepy town surrounded by pine forests and tumbledown farms, seventy miles north of Houston, Huntsville was selected in 1848 to build the state’s first residential institution, a penitentiary. Ever since, the community’s fortunes have depended on crime and punishment; as Texas’s prison system grew, so did Huntsville. “We sort of live within the shadows of the Walls,“ comments Jim Willett, a longtime resident and former warden. “Three times a day we hear the ‘all clear’ count whistle. When you think about it, it marks the passing of our days.”
Today more than ever, imprisonment is Huntsville’s lifeblood. Nearly half of the town’s residents (16,227 out of 35,567) live behind bars. Some 7,500 adults earn their paychecks keeping them there. Each morning, thousands of guards in ill-fitting gray uniforms pile into pickups and head to one of the area’s nine prisons, while starched administrators drive to one of the offices that make up the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) headquarters. From their cubicles they oversee the largest state prison system in the United States, one that incarcerates more people than Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined. “We’ve grown so massive, we need a building like the Pentagon,“ remarks a harried TDCJ bureaucrat.
At first glance, Huntsville looks like any other small southern city. National chains dominate the two main highway exits. In prosperous neighborhoods, spacious homes line up behind tidy lawns along wide, oak-draped streets. In the poorest sections, weather-worn shotgun houses share overgrown lots with rusting trailers. Although Huntsville has a college, Sam Houston State University, churches outnumber bars and hunting shops outnumber cinemas. A well-kept central plaza features a new limestone court house, but downtown merchants have fallen on hard times since Wal-Mart began siphoning retail dollars to the outskirts. Roger’s Shoes and Ernst Jewelers cling to life behind historic storefronts, but out of habit more than profit. Like most American towns, Hunts-ville is increasingly governed by the economics of scale and the geography of parking.
What sets Huntsville apart is the prison business. Just a stone’s throw from the plaza rises the town’s most impressive and imposing building, a redbrick fortress known as “the Walls,“ Texas’s flagship penitentiary. Surrounded by twenty-five-foot fortifications, the Walls complex contains a small town in its own right: office space, kitchen facilities, an auto shop, massive classrooms, a chapel, an infirmary, and, most famously, the busiest death house in the nation. Some of the structures are twenty-first-century vintage, others nineteenth. “Working at the Walls you have a special sense of history,“ says Willett, a heavyset man with droopy eyes who served as warden for four years. Some longtime residents claim the prison has been locking up and executing offenders for so long that restless ghosts prowl its dusty tiers.
The Walls is Huntsville’s icon, but rival landmarks abound. Just beyond the prison’s eastern gun towers, a crumbling stadium recalls the “world’s toughest rodeo,“ a gladiatorial convict spectacular that served as one of Texas’s main tourist attractions between 1931 and 1986. A short walk down the road sits an army surplus store, formerly named Bustin’ Loose Mens Wear, the first stop for roughly two hundred prisoners released daily. Adjacent to the Greyhound station, where ex-cons exchange vouchers for one-way tickets to Dallas or Houston, the shop buys used prison-issue boots for two dollars and proudly announces, “TDCJ discharge checks cashed for free.” Many prisoners spend their entire fifty-dollar allotment before they leave town.
For less fortunate inmates who are discharged in boxes rather than boots, the final destination is often a somber expanse of lawn spread out behind the prison’s back gate: Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. With spare concrete crosses forming gridlines across the grass—like Arlington without the honor—the graveyard has marked the end of the line for forsaken convicts for as long as anyone can remember. In the older sections, weather-beaten headstones are sinking into the soil, many of them identified only by a prison number, some marked with an X for execution. Along the edge, a row of fresh pits covered by metal plates await another round of indigents. Resting against one headstone, a faded display of blue plastic flowers spells out “DAD.”
Drive in any direction from the Walls and you will soon run into other TDCJ institutions: a massive transfer facility that brings new inmates into the system, a gleaming supermax that points toward Texas’s high-tech future, or an expansive prison plantation that gestures toward its past.
Residents of Huntsville are conscious, even proud of their prison history. In 1989, a local foundation opened the Texas Prison Museum, a squat redbrick building made to resemble a prison, wedged between two real prisons on the north side of town. Jim Willett, whose gentle manner and nasal voice are hard to reconcile with his long career as a warden, serves as the museum’s director. Four days a week, he works the front desk, hawking bobble-head convict dolls and sharing escape and riot stories with oldtimers who drop by in the afternoons. Although the museum’s exhibit room features humdrum poster-board displays, visitors take their time. They inspect faded striped uniforms, rusted cane knives, and a thick leather strap known as “the Bat.” Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame, the state’s most notorious escapee, and Fred Carrasco, its most infamous hostage taker, have special prominence, as does the prison system’s epic civil rights lawsuit, Ruiz v. Estelle, in which Texas prisons were declared “cruel and unusual” by a federal judge in 1980. What holds visitors’ gaze the longest, however, is a sturdy, stiff-backed, generously proportioned oak armchair with leather restraints and a metal headband. This is Old Sparky, the electric chair that Texas officials used to cut short 361 lives between 1924 and 1964.
Most visitors don’t realize that Willett himself supervised eighty-nine executions—albeit standing over a gurney rather than a chair—more than any other living American. If they stop to ask, he’ll say that executions were the most unpleasant part of his job. “I guess I haven’t fully made up my mind about the death penalty,“ he said shortly after we first met, an honest but jarring remark from a man who used to carry it out, sometimes two or three times a week. Having read through grisly case briefings prepared by the Texas attorney general, Willett is convinced that most of the men and women he watched die earned their fate. But as a Christian, he isn’t sure it was his due to seal it.
Huntsville packs its prison memories, both flattering and unsettling, into this modest, sun-baked museum, but history spills beyond it. To outsiders, the town can feel like a living theme park, a grittier version of Colonial Williamsburg. The stately homes of top TDCJ administrators are tended by convict “yard boys” with outdoor trusty status. When I stopped to ask for directions on one of my first visits, a portly African American trusty quickly reminded me that deferential etiquette still rules. Dropping his rake, he hoofed it over to my rental, hat in hand, and asked, “Yes sir, what can I do for you, boss?” Up the road at the gate to the Wynne Farm, Texas’s oldest prison plantation, I watched as a squad of convict cotton pickers, almost all of them black, marched out to the fields, their duck-cloth coveralls gleaming in the early morning light. Trailing them on horse back was a white overseer, a 30-30 jostling in his scabbard.
Southern justice brings southern history close to the surface in Huntsville, lending credence to William Faulkner’s oft-cited observation that in the South, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Yet Huntsville isn’t trapped looking backward. Thanks overwhelmingly to the state’s breakneck prison buildup, it’s racing into the future. Since 1980, the local prison workforce has more than qua drupled, and although prison jobs are low paying, new strip malls, highway interchanges, and pre-fab apartment complexes all attest to economic growth. As Forbes magazine observes, Huntsville is a “town where crime pays.”
To a remarkable extent, this unassuming backwoods community has become a crossroads. Thousands of law enforcement and corrections officers cycle through each year for training, while inmates, by the tens of thousands, arrive for intake or discharge. From TDCJ’s headquarters across the street from the Walls, administrators manage a $2.4 billion annual corrections bud get. They supervise a free-wo...
