This October the entire Texas prison system went on lockdown. Nearly each of 156,000 inmates is now confined to a cell for 24 hours a day after a multiple murderer on death row allegedly logged 2,800 calls on a contraband cell phone, including a threatening call to a state senator who is chairman of the legislative committee on criminal justice. At least nine other death row inmates were making calls.

Until all 112 facilities are thoroughly searched, which could take three weeks according to Jason Clark, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), the lockdown grinds on. Because inmates prepare all meals – a job coveted for its extra food privileges since, as the TDCJ Web site points out, many inmates are indigent and can’t afford commissary junk food – the entire cooking staff is behind bars. Prisoners receive "Johnny Sacks,” bagged cold meals served during times of power outages or emergencies such as lockdowns. Mark Stroman, a death row inmate with a regular blog on this site, complains of being fed "pancake sandwiches,” three pancakes and two pieces of bread with nothing in between. (“Pancakes are served quite frequently,” reads the TDCJ Web site. “Most offenders who are released find humor in remembering how many times they ate pancakes.” Stroman, at least, isn’t laughing.)

Although the prison spokesman didn’t believe in the accuracy of Stroman’s description of the “pancake sandwich,” Clark did say peanut butter sandwiches could be served exclusively three times a day for the duration of the lockdown. A nurse who had worked in the Texas penal system said inmates would also receive fruit. But a former corrections officer, Debbie Bone, now a secretary in the Texas criminal defense law firm Habern, O'Neil and Pagan, recalls fruit being rare, typically limited to holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas. “In general, fresh fruit like an apple or orange is not on the menu because prisoners make wine out of it,” Bone explains. Online, TDCJ says offenders may receive raisins or prunes.

In the short term the peanut butter sandwich Johnny Sack is an excellent alternative, according to Arlene Spark, author of Nutrition in Public Health and associate professor and Coordinator of Nutrition at Hunter College in New York. “It provides calories, protein, vitamin and minerals. It lacks Vitamin C but they can get that in a vitamin mineral supplement.” Spark, who has researched prison fare, says there’s no health risk in such a diet for three weeks. “Peanut butter sandwiches may be boring as hell, and people could lose weight by refusing to keep eating them, but if they get two or three sandwiches per meal, it can meet the 2,400-2,700 calorie requirement. And unless you’re very physically fit or huge, you don’t need a lot more.”

Texas has suffered far worse food problems in the past. Back in 2003, the Dallas chapter of the ACLU brought public attention to salmonella poisoning that broke out among inmates but not corrections officers, even though both groups are required to eat the same meals. Often the state has cut calories to save money. Experts on prisons say, however, that food is only a very small part of the overall expense of running a prison system so that any saving achieved by reducing inmates' food will be minimal and comes at a risk.

The extreme stress that a lockdown places on both staff and prisoners is understandable. Few prisons respond well in a crisis. Amidst the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, terrified staff in New Orleans vacated the city jail, abandoning inmates without food or safe drinking water. In the recent documentary, “Trouble the Waters,” a young man jailed on a misdemeanor recalls frantic inmates trapped in cells tearing at walls and eating paper and toothpaste.

In a country that incarcerates one out of every 100 adults, even the regular, everyday operations of many prisons can go haywire. Consider the conditions that triggered the Texas lockdown. Some guards reportedly were accepting money from prisoners to smuggle in cell phones. So far this year some 700 phones have been confiscated, including a phone and charger found by X-ray inside a prisoner's body. There’s a reason for this black market: Until last August when the Texas Board of Criminal Justice reversed a traditional no-phone policy, Texas was only state in the U.S. to still forbid telephones. In recent years, collect calls were occasionally allowed from wardens' offices as a reward for good behavior.

Common sense dictates that men and women unable to touch or see their families and loved ones for years, would go to great lengths to hear their voices. To think otherwise is to fail to understand human nature. Likewise, guards who work in a system woefully understaffed by some 3,000 corrections officers and yet are paid only $26,000 a year might be tempted to market in contraband for cash bribes.

Not that long ago, Texas prisons were so dismal as to be found in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution – the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. In 1980 Federal Judge William Wayne Justice, presiding over the Ruiz class-action lawsuit wrote, “It is impossible for a written opinion to convey the pernicious conditions and the pain and degradation which ordinary inmates suffer within TDC prison walls.” Judge Justice placed the state’s prison system under federal court supervision.

Texas spent the next 20 years trying to wrestle out from under the control of federal courts. A prison-building boom in the 1990s to alleviate overcrowding made little difference. In 1999 Judge Justice ruled the state had failed to alter “a prison underworld in which rapes, beatings and servitude are the currency of power…to preserve their physical safety, some vulnerable inmates simply subject to being bought and sold among groups of prison predators...To expect such a world to rehabilitate wrong-doers is absurd. To allow such a world to exist is unconstitutional."

Since regaining authority over its correctional institutions in 2001, Texas has made some inroads into improving prison conditions. Pay phones will soon be installed. In his 2010-11 budget, TDCJ executive director Brad Livingston asked the Texas Legislature for a 20-percent wage increase and more beds for staff. Livingston has also requested funds to expand substance-abuse treatment, improve mental health services and invigorate diversion programs to keep the prison population from growing – this after receiving a polity letter from the governor requesting a 10-percent cut in the base.

The challenge facing Texas prisons is to reject cost-cutting measures that come with too high of price tag.

Past In Depth Articles

Death Row Cell Phone Discovery Prompts Texas Prison Lockdown
A Dangerous Game of Words
Hate Versus Hope
Hate Groups' New Target: McCain