Visiting a Texas Prison
It's exhausting, emotionally. It's not necessarily the emotions of why he is in prison and what he experiences in prison -- that's another discussion and I separate those emotions from the visit itself.
The gates open for visitors at 7:00 a.m., but that means I need to get there at 6:30 to get in line; I arrived in Beeville the previous evening and just captured a hotel. The town has limited food selections (and poor beer selection), so I have no reason to get outdoors except to appreciate a nice spring day of south Texas. That morning, the moon was near full and brilliantly shined on the flat fields around the prison, a mix of brush oaks, and the grasses for hundreds of acres on the unit property. The chilled air made the morning even more pleasant and while I waited for the gate to open, I thought about camping down here.
Ultimately, the gate guards permitted visitors to approach the gate, the first of the all-grey officers: turn off the engine, open the trunk and hood; step out of the car and permit the guards to inspect the cabin, hook, and engine block. Track the car model, color, and year; sign in my car license number, my driver's license, my name, the inmate's TDCJ number and name. Each inspection takes about three minutes, so the 7:00 a.m. open hours means I'm already delayed to 7:20 a.m. The sun is fully risen. A small drive to the parking lot, and I stash my phone and wallet. I simplify my body as I approach the body check -- nothing but clothing, ID, and up to $15 in quarters in a clear plastic bag. No phone means no pictures, of course, so I write based on memory, no visual aids.
The earlier visitors have already lined up, outside. In previous visits, the temperature hovered around freezing and the visitors were shivering as they waited. This morning, the temperature is chilly but not unpleasant. Still, the line is slow. The four guards in the small inspection room are ineffective, slow, and uninterested. They wave one or two people together (or with additional children), not smiling, not welcoming. Enter the doors. Remove shoes, any jewelry, belts, car keys, quarters, and place everything in small buckets for x-ray inspection. It's similar to a TSA check, but much more slowly, more ineffective. I walk through a body x-ray machine. Body frisk -- arms outreached, spread the legs. A stranger touches me around my neck and collar; my shoulders and arms; my lats, by chest and belly, my back and buttocks; down my legs, and between my crotch. Lift one foot to inspect the soles of one sock; switch feet and the other sock. At last, I am permitted to retrieve the shoes, belts, and personals. All this takes another three minutes for each visitor -- much more slowly than the TSA check. I know that they're concerned about contraband and elsewhere they will post the mug shots of other visitors caught with contraband. But the whole experience is dehumanizing, slow, anxious-driven for everyone. Behind, I watch each father and mother, children or grandchildren being frisked, wondering how this could be more human, less inefficient.
I enter Foucault's panopticon.
Ultimately, after I've been inspected, x-rayed, frisked, I retrieve my ID and present my ID to another all-grey guard behind a thick glass wall. She inspects my ID to ensure that I have already been pre-approved by the TDCJ to visit. Unlike TV shows, not everyone can just show up to the prison and visit inmates. She checks the availability of the inmate's status (this update in on the TDCJ website but the unit updates the inmates only once a day, so elsewhere, some visitor have been turned back because the inmate cannot receive visitors for various reasons). She gives me a half-sheet of paper with the inmate's access record, my name, and I remember that the TDCJ is tracking my visitor record, too. I am part of the TDCJ's bureaucracy and I wonder how many years these will be kept and if my visits are shared with how many departments, including the Department of Public Safety, even the Rangers, even the FBI. I go through the first heavy steel door, locked behind me. I can't turn back, now on my own volition. I'm now possessed by the TDCJ and they control everything about me for the next two hours. Their rules. Their space. Their words. Their policies. My body and my mind is now monitored and watched consistently.
I go through the inspection room and to the outside, waiting to entering a capturing fence area: another locked gate that permits who can or cannot move. If I turn around, I can read the sign behind me: "No Hostages Past This Mark" and the nearby tower has a shotgun to shoot anyone. I am permitted to through this locked fence gate and I walk along the odd well-manicured lawn, odd painted "core values" of the TDCJ painted along: Perseverance, Integrity, Courage and Commitment. These are messages for the correction officers but their words are merely labels painted on metal, oddly hallow words and I wonder how these words affect the COs on a daily routine before and after their shifts.
Behind the counter, the only pictures of who is in control: the Governor. The Texas Board of Criminal Justice [sic]. I wondered when any of the board members had been inside this unit or any unit in Texas.
Along those 70 or 100 meters, I walk in the unit building itself and present myself with my ID, again. Once I surrender my ID, I have no other identifier who I am. Like the inmates, I lack a name. I only have that half sheet of paper, created by the TDCJ, to control what I can do, who I am. I am merely a record, without my past, without my opinions, without my liberty. The paper showed that the time was 7:27. I had been on property for an hour.
Along that hallway, I saw a dozen-so certificates and awards, all reflecting the success of the unit in multiple bureaucracies who award themselves to reproduce their bureaucracies. I had to slow down to see an award to the unit for commissary sales: $1.3 million in inmate purchase in the commissary. They were proud of $1.3 million in one year, proving that the TDC cannot provide sufficient food for their inmates; proving that the TDC cannot provide sufficient hygiene for their inmates; proving that the TDC cannot provide writing supplies for their inmates. They're proud of themselves. Nowhere did I see any awards about low recidivism rates or high GED rates or of inmate or CO writing awards.
The commissary, of course, is a scam. The TDCJ website presents (very small) images to show "a representative sample" but many of those samples are actually not provided in the unit commissary. Even if the commissary inventory included those items, they show a) sugar and carbs and almost no protein, and b) demonstrate that hygiene is the most demanded items by the inmates but are not provided as minimum needs. In fact, the only hygiene product in the unit is a small 1/4" x 1" x 1" chip of soap (smaller than a hotel soap bar) that evaporates with one wash and used for cleaning hair. The food selection is meager, unhealthy, and yet the only variety of tastes in the other bland, overcooked, overprocessed food for the inmates. Thus the carnival-like air of the vending machine game, described below.
I waited too long for another heavy steel door and it closes behind me. I wait another heavy steel door to open me to the visiting area. That's where the mayhem starts. I am assigned to sit at a Plexiglas booth where I'll use the telephone to talk to. I'm a "regular" visitor, contrasted with family visitors who can meet around a table, shake hands and hug and hear each other. "Regular" visitors include non-families but also families with inmates under G-5 status: those inmates in most security. Those inmates are shackled when they are brought to a cage for their telephone conversation.
I immediate approach one of the eight or ten vending machines, feeding all those quarters I had been bringing but all the products are junk within junk. I tried to find any edible protein because I know the TDC frowns on protein with inmates, but the only protein was a small chunk of processed meat paired with processed cheese food. Some chips. More chips. Some glazed pastry. Chocolate. A cola. All high carb, all sugar, no fiber, no protein. No fresh fruit, of course. The machine ate the last dollar refusing the drop a plastic package . After purchasing $10 in junk food, I walked to a table of unsmiling COs where one gave a plastic plate to me and I opened each package and dumped all the food on the plate. I wrestled with the plastic packages, needed to use my fingers along the slimy processed meat and slimy processed cheese food, but the CO didn't offer to share paper towels to clean my fingers.
I rushed to the men's room to wash my hands, but no paper towels were available. I walked past half a dozen all-grey COs, never engaging with me and I'm fine with that. I wasn't there to befriend anyone. I waited and within ten more minutes, the inmate arrived on the other side of the Plexiglas, wearing his all-white jumpsuit, like all inmates wear. He smiled and I smiled and we took up the old telephones and we talked. Or, we tried to talk because the phones are old and the technology was poor even on a good day. Or, we tried because the noise of families behind were increasingly loud while more visitors arrive. Or, we tried because the COs were increasingly noisy, too, even shaking malfunctioning vending machines. Bang, bang, bang. Or, we tried because the COs themselves were yelling while they walked across the room with each other with instructions, instead of just walking and talking to each other with normal voice. Within 30 minutes, I was plugging my left ear with my fingers to try to hear the inmate. Within 60 minutes, I was plugging my left ear but it was only a polite gesture, unable to hear the inmate at all. But I didn't want to just quit and walk away because this is the only time for the inmate to talk to someone not wearing all-white or all-grey. A sign on the wall says all conversations may be observed and audio or video recorded. I wondered what topics would be interesting for the Foucaulian watchmen. I wouldn't joke, of course, like no joking around TSA.
He has lost weight. Over the years, I see at least 20 pounds of muscle lost because of the food. His hair is getting thinner. Because of his security level, he doesn't have privilege to go outside for exercise, so his brown skin is whiter than normally. The clothes loosely fall over his body, while they had been filled his shoulders. Throughout, his voice is less confident than I remember, more tired. On his side of the window, his stool is bolted to the floor while I sit in an old cheap plastic seat, actually two or three inches too low for the counter for my elbows, I have to look up to him, though we are the same height, and I feel like a child. I wonder if the unit purposely make me insecure and this is some childish power play.
His immediate conversation was about his health. Apparently he had been bitten by a spider four times recently, and the bites haven't been healed, so he is consistently scratching. He pulled up his cotton blouse to show one bite on his side, another on his back, the others we below the waist we don't need to share. His body is largely tattooed, and mostly representative of his religious faith and past women in his life. He doesn't have money to go to the medical clinic to address his spider bites; TDCJ doesn't provide free clinic services except for emergencies, and his family don't have the funds to help him out. He avers that he cleans his cell (his "house") routinely and didn't see the spider, but those bites are evident. He'll continue scratching, hoping that the poison will be cleared out naturally.
He talked about his family: two boys and a sister. His ex-wife apparently has unexpected demands (she's demanding child support ... but he has no employment?) and the mother is less supportive for the children to call him in the prison. He loves his children and his gifts are the only he can offer: his drawings, but without family support, he doesn't have the funds to purchase drawing materials, so the drawings have dwindled to rare. He must have talked about his children -- how they are in school, the sports they play, the 11 year boy with his girlfriend and wants to drive the family car to pick up his girlfriend -- for at least half an hour. Some CO eventually delivered the vending machine food I had purchased. Years ago, he seemed enthusiastic about the food. Now, he seems ambivalent. I'm not offended: I can't imagine any adult being enthusiastic about the junk.
He is appealing his sentence, 11 years in the system. He should have appealed years ago but I don't mention that. He has been worked with another inmate in the small legal library to work on his appeal and I feel like my own students who listen to a discourse not really knowing what is happening. I'm legally illiterate and when he talks about the cases he's using for his appeal, I am impressed with the deep reading and writing needed for a man from the Texas Valley, one who didn't complete high school, but who is more literate than me and several of my colleagues in my college. On his second gambit, he will appeal his incarceration in the U.S., arguing that since he is a dual citizen, he could be transferred to Mexico, closer to his family. His legal library has no resources on those topics.
By this time, the noise behind was so loud that the next hour was a farce. I pretended to hear but I couldn't. He mouthed his words and I focused my eyes on his eyes and occasionally nod my head but my frustration was rising. He would nibble from the I would turn around to see some young COs standing together obliviously not concerned with monitoring but just socializing; other COs watching families dumping junk food, unsmiling, silent. I see another says that any visitors could complain with Assistant Ward ... and no name is included. If I wanted to complain about the lack of towels in the men's room or about the nonworking vending machines or about the nonworking phones, I couldn't have a name to start a conversation. No one minds themselves; no one pays attention; except that everyone is being attended, supposedly.
I wish I had heard that second hour. I wish I had heard more about his health, more about his family, more about his art, more about his appeal, more about his cellmate, more about his exercise routine, more questions to me about what I'm doing in the outside. But the second hour was something like the theater of the absurd: two people holding a telephone, pretending that we could use technology to communicate. I can talk across the globe but in here, I can't talk two feet away. I wanted to drop the earpiece, stand up and yell at the COs to stop banging on the vending machines, but I suppose that would not be approved behavior. I excused myself and told him that this wasn't working, promised him to write a letter that same day and that letter-writing was more effective than this. He is patient and smiled and asked to provide a published document I had previous sent, but the typeface is too small (normal) for his eye damage, so I promised to reprint it with larger type.
He stood up and I stood up and as part of our ritual, we press our hands against the glass as a futile of humanizing our friendship. I feel the cold Plexiglas on my fingertips, an immediate recoil, artificial, more plastic in my life. He turned away towards his life. He will be stripped and searched (even though we haven't been in contact with each other) and return to his wing. I walked through the chaos of the other visitors and I returned through the first steel door, another steel door, retrieve my ID, through the sun-lit yard with odd well-manicured lawn and empty motto words, approach the razor wire fence under the gaze of the tower CO with his rifle, go through the fence, two more steel doors. I get to my car, gather my wallet and phone and I drive to the front gate and let them check my trunk (how could anyone smuggle an inmate through four steel doors and under the gaze of the tower guards?) and I took deep breaths.
The time is near 10:00. I had been on property and under observation for nearly three hours. I purposely turned on music to hear something sensible. I kept the windows down to smell morning air. I'm hungry and I find a taqueria for breakfast, guilty knowing that the thousands of men inside the unit won't eat anything that healthy or hot or fresh or tasty as I would. I felt guilty about the poor conversation, though it wasn't my fault. I felt guilty wearing a collared blue shirt while all inmate wore the cheap all-white ill-fitting jumpers. I felt guilty having a real shower that early morning, knowing that the inmate will never have a really good hot shower with real soap and shampoo. I felt guilty having cash in my wallet knowing that I could get some coffee for the drive back to Houston. I felt feeling the warming air surrounded beautiful south Texas fields and the oak trees, knowing that the men would only see a few inches of windows through their cells and then only to see a steel fence and a guard tower.
I got back on the asphalt highway, driving fast enough that I should get a ticket. I needed to get away.
Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
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