The prison system sees me as worthless. I’ve known this since my first day inside.
Due to my sentence and security level, I was rushed to solitary confinement within an hour of arriving. There I have remained for the last 10 years, across four different facilities, each somehow worse than the last.
At one of my facilities, the entire building flooded when it rained. Water trickled into my cell from the window, door, ceiling and both neighboring cells. At night, the light was so dim, I could hardly read — and the electricity went out multiple times a day anyhow. The prison was infested with rats, roaches, ants, spiders and crickets. Holes in the cell walls prevented any privacy. Both of my neighbors could see and hear what I was doing at all times. One nearby prisoner had a hole in his ceiling big enough to pass through a 20-ounce Gatorade bottle.
The conditions we live in are a sign of how the system feels about us. In dilapidated, creature-infested confines, it is impossible to feel like anyone values my life. But it isn’t just me. The prison system sees all incarcerated people as worthless.
The reasons are complex and varied, historical as well as social. But one major culprit is more concrete, and that’s chronic short-staffing. Keeping prisons staffed is a problem in Texas and across the country. In the Lone Star State, the crisis reached an all-time high in 2022 when a third of all jobs inside the state correctional system were vacant.
This is certainly a problem for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and its staff who have harder and more dangerous jobs as a result. But for those of us whose lives depend on this system functioning, the staffing shortage is not only dangerous, it’s profoundly dehumanizing.
From 180 to 112 pounds
After two weeks at my first intake facility, I was transferred to the Barry B. Telford Unit, which sits about 13 miles from the Arkansas state line. For years, Telford had a serious staffing problem.
This helped explain why they fed us so poorly. From my cell, I could see the facility parking lot. Based on the numbers of cars in the lot, I could guess what kind of meal we’d receive that day. When there were only a few cars, I knew we could expect small, paper bag lunches delivered to our cells. Without enough staff, the administration would reduce movement as much as possible, including to chow hall, where we typically ate our warm meals. The paper bag service could be managed by just a few incarcerated workers, or sometimes a few guards. That meant a lot of sandwich days in our cells. On my first day of prison, I weighed 180 pounds. At Telford, I dropped to 112 pounds.
The staffing crisis continued to deteriorate during my time there. In 2016, the entire solitary confinement building was shut down and everyone sent elsewhere. They transferred me to the death row building at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, north of Houston near Livingston.
Over time, conditions at the death row building grew worse and worse. At first we got showers every day. Those of us in solitary would get handcuffed and escorted a few feet to the shower stall. This required a sufficient number of guards. But, when staffing declined, showers did too — down to three times a week. Once, we went 10 days without showers. The same thing happened with recreation time, and with clean laundry.
Erratic food service
In February 2022, I was sent to a new prison about two hours away. The Mark W. Michael Unit was a mess in every aspect. The field minister, a fellow incarcerated man, told me there were 11 suicides at Michael in 2021 alone. Another one of my peers told me they didn’t allow shaving razors in our building because so many people intentionally cut themselves.
I once heard an official say our building needed 37 guards to be fully staffed. Most days there were seven. We spent most of our time stuck in our cells and only saw them at meal times. The food was actually decent sometimes — Michael was home to a pork slaughterhouse — but the portion sizes varied wildly.
And with so few guards, meals were served at erratic times. In a typical week, the food service looked something like this: At 1 a.m., we received two slices of bread and two ounces of grits. This was called breakfast. Lunch was at 3 p.m., and something occasionally to be desired. We might receive huge chunks of ham with pasta, or big chunks of beef in barbecue sauce. But one day we might receive 16 ounces of barbecue, and another day only 2 ounces. At 9 p.m., we were served dinner, which could be sliced bologna or a hot dog.
All the residents at Michael were new transfers. We didn’t know how things were usually run, but right away we lost a lot of privileges. For example, there were no showers during my entire first month. There was no laundry or recreation time that month either. I didn’t even try to come out of my cell for the first 38 days I was there. When I finally tried, my door wouldn’t open. Because there was so much work for so few staff, it took two days for maintenance to show up to fix it and let me out.
A slow, monotonous life
I’m now housed at the O.B. Ellis Unit at Huntsville, and things are not much different. I can’t see the parking lot anymore, but I imagine it’s pretty empty. Overall, things get done, but slowly. Since there are so few guards, they don’t want too many people walking around at one time. So it takes a long time for them to oversee showers and distribute meals. Yesterday, it took almost two hours for them to pass out dinner. The prison is especially short-staffed on the weekends. Those days, everybody is locked in their cells from the morning until 3 p.m.
As long as I’m incarcerated in Texas, I expect life to be like this. I have a life sentence, so I may never be out. Because of the nature of my sentence, I can only be in maximum security prisons. There are many jobs I can never hold. My sentence even prevents me from getting an education.
If someone sees this page of my life’s book, I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw me as worthless. The system that has incarcerated me clearly sees me that way. But if they cracked the book open a bit more, they may see there’s more to me than this. They might even understand why I am the person I am. But for now, it feels like I’m just another problem the Texas prison system can’t keep staff on long enough to deal with.