California Ends Solitary for Gang Validation, Texas Prisons Persist in the Abusive Practice

About 80% of the prisoners housed in my solitary cellblock are indefinitely segregated because of alleged ‘confirmed’ gang affiliation. My neighbor, Matthew Salazar #1052313, has been held in solitary for this reason for thirteen of his fifteen years imprisoned in Texas.

Their only hope of eventual release is to apply to participate in the GRAD (Gang Renunciation and Disassociation) program. Texas prison officials emphasize that participation in this program is a privilege. Just to get enrolled, a prisoner must jump through a series of hurdles and weather repeated harassments and meticulous property searches (including having all papers and correspondents’ addresses, etc. scrutinized and often recorded) by GI (Gang Investigation) officials who operate inside the prisons with the greatest impunity. Another condition for enrollment is – just like in California – that the ‘confirmed’ prisoners identify other prisoners as gang affiliates. Participation in GRAD therefore places one in danger, since any participant or graduate of the program is instantly tagged by others as a snitch. One must therefore either endure the permanent torture and mental damage inherent in Texas’ solitary confinement (often upon a false ‘confirmation’), or become a known snitch.

Texas Prisoners Need Help!

Upon my transfer to Texas, I immediately set about working to expose those around me to the California prison-based struggle and the growing movement on the outside against solitary, which they needed to tap into. Getting them involved has proven a difficult undertaking, largely because Texas prisoners are deeply apolitical and pessimistic about possibilities for change or gaining broad outside support.

They’ve been left isolated and led astray all too long and often, living under the most arbitrarily abusive conditions, and face severe reprisals for the smallest shows of united resistance against abuse.

Texas prison officials work consciously to keep its segregated prisoners politically backward, divided and isolated from public support. Texas courts – since the death of its one favorable federal judges, William Wayne Justice – are extremely hostile towards Texas prisoners, and there exists virtually no willing outside legal or organized public support for them that understands the nature and workings of the prison system.

Very little consciousness-raising literature is allowed into the prisons and illiteracy is high. There are no Texas-based prisoner-oriented media like California has long had, such as California Prison Focus and San Francisco Bay View newspapers, or former political prisoner Ed Mead’s self-published newsletters like Prison Art, Rock!, Hunger Strike Support, etc. which played decisive roles in raising California prisoners’ consciousness, and getting their voices and views shared across the broader prisoner body and out to the public, and ultimately overcoming the divisive prisoner culture that California officials cultivated and kept embroiled in violent conflicts.

In fact, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) [sic!], is the only prison system I know of that publishes its own monthly newspaper, called The Echo, that uses prisoner “staff writers” to proselytize prisoners with the administration’s happy slave and pro-pig indoctrinations. The paper, which has been in publication since 1928, is dutifully delivered ‘free’ to every prisoner in Texas.

I’ve encountered many Texas prisoners who see the need for and want change; there is just so little faith in the possibility, or even in themselves as potential agents of change. Most who I’ve struggled to inspire feel that ‘other’ places are different. That what happened in California for example, could never happen in Texas. But I know different. I witnessed that it took decades of struggle, by folks like Ed Mead via media he’s published or edited, to finally open the eyes of many of California’s prisoners to how they were being divided, used, manipulated and exploited by prison officials to their own collective disadvantage. This prompted a series of early attempts at unity, which grew until it converged in the epic hunger strikes and finally on agreement by all the previously warring prisoners (except those most deeply in pawn to prison officials) to end all hostilities across the entire California prison system and jails.

I’ve seen that sort of pessimism here in Texas before. I experienced, struggled with and to some degree overcame it while I was confined in Virginia, and then in Oregon. It’s actually typical of those, who by nature of oppressive conditions such as imprisonment, are conditioned to think individualistically and see themselves as absolutely powerless, unable to overcome cultural and other long-standing divisions, publicly abandoned and despised, and subject to the absolute impunity of officials who are perceived as sole ‘legitimate’ power-holders. But it’s been this way for so long in Texas that prisoners can see it no other way. Many are actually afraid to, like slaves cowed by generations of incessant brutality. Actually, this is their condition – literally.

California, however, has a long history and tradition of prisoner activism. In fact it was a center of the 1960s-1970s prison movement that served as a catalyst and inspiration to the broader outside social movements of that period. Not so in Texas. During and well after the 1960s-1970s, prisoners across Texas were actually running the prisons for officials with terror and wanton violence as a formal policy of the TDCJ. ((For an extensive analysis of the operations and uses of inmate guards (aka “building tenders” or “turnkeys”), and it’s being outlawed by the federal courts, see, Ruiz v. Estelle, 503 F. Supp. 1265 (S.D. Tex. 1980). [↩]