Subject: Prisons

• Caged Heat

  November 3, 2006

• Flooded-Prison Lawsuit Moved Back to Texas

  July 17, 2008

• TDCJ Death Sparks A Lawsuit

  September 24, 2008

• ACLU Wants Galveston Jail Evacuated Next Time

  September 30, 2008

• Prisoners of Love

  Romance for these ex-fugitives hits hard times -- behind bars

  December 28, 2000

• Face To Face

  The murder of their loved one haunted Amy and Linda White until a Texas prison mediation program brought them together with the killer. Now they've all got their answers -- and unique justice.

  September 27, 2001

• This Guy Gets Cell Phone Service On Death Row

  October 20, 2008

• The Prison Experience Just Isn't The Same Without Cigarettes, Lawmaker Says

  After sticking another inmate with a shiv in the showers, there’s nothing better than a tepid cup of apple wine and a smoke. Unfortunately, TDCJ banned all tobacco products in 1994, making it that much more difficult for a prisoner to relax after a hard day of rec-yard baseball or gang rape. But all that’s done is create a black market, says State Rep. Terri Hodge (D-Dallas), when lifting the ban could actually benefit more than just the prisoners. With a shortage of correctional office

  November 20, 2008

• Prisoners In Beaumont Federal Pen Sue Over Work Conditions

  Earlier this year, we brought you the story of the hundreds of inmates at the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Beaumont who sued the U.S. government claiming officials did not evacuate them during Hurricane Rita and thereby forced them to endure inhumane, medieval conditions. While that legal battle wages on, Norman Sirak, the same Ohio attorney fighting for those inmates, has now filed a separate lawsuit aimed once again at prison officials in Beaumont. But this time, it's not just abou

  December 2, 2008

• TDCJ Comes Up Against The Cell Phone Companies

  A lot of people who read about the epidemic of cell phones in Texas prisons had a basic question -- if you can't discover and confiscate the things, why not just block them? Set it up to jam transmissions in the prison?It turns out TDCJ has thought about that, but it's easier said than done.The prison system found that out Monday when a test of a long-planned test of a jamming system was canceled.We had talked to a retired guard who had predicted the test would be aborted because giant cell phon

  December 16, 2008

• Groups Protest The "Lock Up the Immigrants" Facility

  Photo courtesy Houston Independent Media CenterJust before noon on Saturday some 50 protesters, including members of Houston's Students for a Democratic Society, gathered at the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center outside Taylor, Texas, a holding facility for families of undocumented immigrants that are waiting for immigration-court dates. Opposed to Hutto's policy of detaining families with children, the group included a group of children protesters -- the A-Scouts.   "The A-Scouts a

  March 9, 2009

• Kindness and Courage on Death Row

  March 12, 2009

• Living and Dying with Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor Over Sundance

  How I turned some newspaper stories into a book which became a movie that caused those two guys to kiss

  February 19, 2009

• Mexican-American Culture

  June 14, 2007

• Rock the Lockup: 2008 Prison Reform Film Festival

  Tales from the big house get on the big screen

  August 14, 2008

• On the Defense

  Internal feuds and investigations cripple the agency representing accused convicts

  January 23, 2003

• Former Death-Row Inmate Sent Back to Prison

  Martin Draughon returns to the clink after becoming a test case for alleged flaws in GPS monitoring devices

  March 27, 2008

• Prison Cover-Up

  Prison Breakdown

  March 20, 2008

• A Prison Cover-up During Hurricane Rita

  March 6, 2008

• Gang Lite?

  A new kind of gang in Texas and Houston promises protection but no lifelong commitment

  August 16, 2007

• Mail Sacked

  The state says Texas prison inmates can't write to one another

  April 24, 2003

• "Julie Green: The Last Supper"

  Julie Green's "Last Supper" will take away your appetite

  June 14, 2007

• Penal Violations

  September 21, 2006

• Suspended Sentence

  After Innocence probes life following a wrongful conviction

  February 23, 2006

• The Fix Is In

  UTMB is under fire in Dallas for its jail health care. So why is Houston ready to install it here?

  June 9, 2005

• No Pain, No Gain

  Our solution for saving Texas's claim to capital punishment fame

  May 26, 2005

• The Unlikely Lambs

  Carandiru reveals the human side of Brazilian prisoners, then leads us to their slaughter

  May 27, 2004

• Captive Market

  Companies complain that they can't compete against convict labor

  May 13, 2004

• Writer's Block

  Texas prisons start barring book authors from inmate interviews

  December 18, 2003

• Doing Time

  With JC in the TDCJ

  September 18, 2003

• Prison Break?

  Critics wonder if massive TDCJ cuts will be a prelude to privatization

  July 17, 2003

• A Guarded Past

  Texas's impressive new prison museum engages in a little escapism of its own

  January 9, 2003

• Tattle Tales

  The use of jailhouse snitches has been debated for ages, especially since they don't always tell the truth

  December 5, 2002

• The Devil You Say

  Was Jeffery Prible the cold-blooded murderer of an entire family? Or the gullible target of an opportunistic jailhouse informant?

  December 5, 2002

• Lethal Legacy

  Yates isn't dying to prove the equity of Harris County executions

  March 21, 2002

• Hanging Up

  TDCJ finally halts monitoring of attorney-client phone calls -- sort of

  January 17, 2002

• Angola Bound

  The Neville Brothers have toiled long and hard to win freedom from prisons of the body and mind.

  October 11, 2001

• Drug Resistant

  Harris County jailers are in no hurry to hand out meds to inmates with AIDS. Inmates claim this and other lockup practices endanger their lives.

  September 13, 2001

• Prose and Cons

  Crusading convicts turned the docile Echo newspaper into a voice for prison reform. Fellow inmates cheered, but alarmed TDCJ officials preferred silence.

  August 23, 2001

• Lost Boys

  Judy Walker saw one son die in prison and his twin sentenced to life for shooting a cop. The prison autopsy says Reginald died of natural causes. But his mother says it was retaliation for Robert's actions that got his brother killed.

  August 9, 2001

• Rejected

  Thousands of inmates rely annually on a capricious parole board for their freedom. Most, like George Dismukes, return to their cells without ever knowing why they were denied.

  May 24, 2001

• Injecting Fun into Death Row

  If your condemned convicts survive, you thrive in this game

  April 26, 2001

• Captive Emotions

  Reagan Hamilton goes into Texas jails and tells inmates they better stay in touch with their kids. Her sadly powerful message has sparked some successes. Too bad they don't include her own father.

  March 29, 2001

• Letters

  No Muckraker; Chopper Alert!; Isle of Man

  March 8, 2001

• Super Vision

  By keeping a constant eye on its mentally ill clients, an ACT team heads off all sorts of troubles

  February 22, 2001

• Hard Knox

  In an ACLU test case on brutality, jurors side with state prison guards

  February 8, 2001

• For Their Own Good

  May 28, 2009

• TDCJ Guard Gets Two Years For Lying About Kicking Inmate In The Head

  ​A TDCJ guard who had been found guilty of filing a false "use of force" report was sentenced today to what no doubt will be two very uncomfortable years in a federal prison. (Or maybe guards take care of their own? We don't wanna know.)Eugene Morris, 41, had kicked an inmate in the head repeatedly after the prisoner used a racial slur against a guard; Morris then reported he had simply used a bear-hug on the inmate and forced him to the floor after getting head-butted.The details are a little

  August 26, 2009

• ISO A Femme Fatale? Jail Babes Has The Hook-Up

  ​Can't find a match on Match.com? Can't get it in tune on eHarmony? Desperate for a young hottie, but not exactly a catch yourself and unable to fly to Russia for a mail order bride? We've got a dating sight for you: Jailbabes.Jailbabes is just like any other dating site, except all of the women on there are incarcerated. And there might be a few more disclaimers than usual, such as this one: "These ads are written by unique individuals expressing their desires. They may or may not be compl

  October 7, 2009

• Not The Usual Kind Of Prison Business

  ​Last year we wrote about how the Texas prison system was a bit haphazard in deciding which books to ban inmates from receiving (for instance, all S/M-related activity is strictly verboten, yet The Pleasure's All Mine, The Memoir of a Professional Submissive was approved).An editor at Sailing magazine ran across our items while researching the TDCJ policy (or, perhaps, researching S/M activity; we don't judge). Why? She had tried to send two books to an inmate and the TDCJ nixed them.Manning U

  November 3, 2009