Texas Prisons Were Hell On Earth

After a guided tour of the Texas Prison System on July 16, 1931, a county sheriff with a sick sense of humor or very poor eyesight expressed the opinion that “some men really enjoy themselves here.”

The Lone Star lockup was a barbaric embarrassment from the beginning. Gov. Richard Coke remarked in 1873, “A personal visit to the penitentiary has impressed upon me the conviction that a serious defect exists in our prison system,” and added he was particularly appalled by “the promiscuous mingling of children from nine years old upwards with old, depraved, and hardened criminals.”

Following the example of other southern states, Texas already was “leasing” inmates to private businesses. This controversial practice thrived for the rest of the nineteenth century because the income from convict rentals covered the entire cost of the penal operation. Law-abiding citizens were sickened by the horror stories of inmate mistreatment but generally felt criminals got what was coming to them even when it meant a death sentence for a petty offense.

Sanitation and medical care were strangers to the private work camps, and conditions were not much better in the penitentiary at Huntsville. Just over 2,000 prisoners perished from disease, neglect and abuse between 1876 and 1899, while another 3,000 chose not to stick around. Breakouts were so common that in a single year one out of six inmates successfully escaped.

Leasing was phased out in the early 1900s in favor of state-owned plantations. By World War I, there were 10 prison farms in Brazoria County, two in Fort Bend County, and one in Houston County. Contrary to popular myth, however, agriculture did not achieve the penologist dream of self-sufficiency, and the TPS invariably ended the year in the red.

Only “The Walls,” the central unit in Huntsville, had cells. On the farms inmates lived like sardines in 40-x-100 foot black holes of Calcutta called “tanks.” Designed for a maximum occupancy of 60 convicts, the overcrowded cubicles often contained 150.

Prisoners were segregated by race but not according to age, crime and sexual appetite. Young first offenders were at the mercy of psychopaths, perverts, and career criminals.

Guards rarely set foot in the inmate quarters leaving it up to “building tenders” to keep fellow convicts in line. These bullies with a blank check terrorized the tanks with sawed-off baseball bats, knives, and an arsenal of improvised weapons.

The guards were no angels either. A prison board member on a visit to the Darrington farm spoke to “a youngster whose ankle had been smashed by a .38-caliber slug fired into the tank by a guard to frighten another prisoner who had called him a dirty name. I also saw a prisoner ruthlessly shot by a guard because he forgot to shout