Mike Ward
Austin American-Statesman
AUSTIN, Texas — Fifteen years after seven convicts escaped from Texas’ death row in the largest such breakout in the nation, prison officials are reviewing whether to change a policy that has kept the condemned in solitary confinement ever since.
And while officials say privately there is little chance of a major change, a coalition of criminal-justice groups and corrections and mental health professionals are pushing to ease the restrictions, arguing that allowing death row inmates out of their cells for more than just one hour each day will improve the dismal working conditions for guards and lessen the chances the inmates will go crazy.
“The correctional officers and taxpayers would benefit from an easing of the current policies,” said correctional officer Lance Lowry, president of the Huntsville union local that represents prison employees. “Most death row offenders could be housed two to a cell. Some of them could be given work privileges and allowed to watch TV. An inmate who has nothing to lose is a dangerous inmate.”
For their part, Texas officials insist the review is routine. “No significant changes are expected,” said Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the state’s death row that on Wednesday housed 250 condemned men. The eight women facing execution are housed under similar restrictions at the department’s Gatesville prison.
For most Texans, the thought of giving any privileges to the most heinous convicts might be unthinkable. But as courts have been raising increasing questions about the legality of long-term solitary confinement, and as the related costs of security and medical and psychiatric treatment for prisoners kept on permanent lockdown have been increasingly scrutinized, prison officials in other states likewise are examining possible changes to their policies.
A federal court decision this month prohibited officials from automatically housing death row prisoners in solitary confinement — the policy in Texas and many other states — unless a particular need to do so is proven. A Virginia convict had challenged the policy as a violation of his constitutional right to due process.
Virginia officials have said they plan to appeal the decision.
In the past two years, criminal-justice advocates nationally have rallied to lower the number of convicts who are kept in solitary confinement — some kept alone for years — amid assertions that the isolation is driving some prisoners crazy, including those on death row, and might make those prisons more dangerous places.
“Allowing inmates privileges based on good behavior enhances security because it creates incentives for inmates to comply with prison regulations,” Jeanne Woodford, California’s former corrections director, wrote in a letter to Texas officials supporting lessening the current mandatory-solitary policy.
Woodford, a 30-year corrections veteran, was at one time a warden at the famed San Quentin prison in California where the nation’s largest death row is located.
“When inmates are permanently and automatically housed in highly restrictive environments — as they are in Texas — it is more difficult to control their behavior. To make matters worse, complete idleness breeds mental illness, causing inmates to act out and putting correctional officers at risk,” Woodford said.
A dozen advocacy groups — among them, the Texas Defender Service that represents death row convicts, the guards’ union, the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, the National Alliance on Mental Illness-Texas, the Texas Civil Rights Project, American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, Texas Inmate Family Association and various Catholic and interfaith religious groups — are asking for Texas prison officials to allow contact visits with family members, communal recreation activities between death row prisoners, work assignments, participation in group religious services, TV viewing, arts and crafts, and phone calls to family and attorneys.
Attorneys who have filed letters for the policy change are also asking that attorneys be allowed to meet in private with their clients, not with guards present as is policy.
Texas’ solitary confinement policy for death row convicts was imposed after seven condemned murderers launched an escape from the Ellis Unit north of Huntsville in a headline-grabbing breakout in November 1998. Six surrendered before they could get outside the perimeter fences, but the ringleader, Martin Gurule, was able to get away after scaling two 10-foot-high perimeter fences topped with razor wire.
Gurule, 29, sentenced to death for the deaths of two Corpus Christi residents during a restaurant robbery, was found dead several days later after he drowned in a nearby river.
The daring escape, the first from Texas’ death row since a Bonnie-and-Clyde henchman fled in 1934, embarrassed prison officials, who moved death row to a more secure prison outside Livingston, in East Texas, and imposed the solitary-confinement rules that allow convicts out of their cell only up to one hour per day for recreation and, on some days, showers.
Review of the death row housing policy comes as prison officials in the past year have faced increasing criticism over similar confinement rules for thousands of so-called “administrative segregation” convicts who are kept isolated in regular prisons for misbehavior, gang membership or other reasons. Some have been isolated there for years.
“Security experts, correctional officers, religious leaders, mental-health professionals, civil-rights advocates and lawyers understand the import of maintaining security in all TDCJ facilities,” according to a letter sent Tuesday from the groups to prison officials.
The letter insists that the suggested changes “will make things safer and in no way compromise security, reduce the filing of grievances, and even improve the lives of correctional staff, who currently must work in the most hostile and tense of environments.”