Texas prisons are hell on Earth (2024)

I have friends in hell. They send me pain-soaked letters every month that feel like a punch to the gut. They are some of the rawest and truest letters in the world because they come from a place devoid of hope.

This veritable inferno is solitary confinement in Texas — bathroom-sized cells of isolation where the condemned spend 22 to 24 hours a day.

More people spend three years or longer in solitary in Texas than in every other state and the federal prison system combined, according to a 2022 report from the Correctional Leaders Association and the Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School.

More than 500 people have endured this torture for a decade or longer in the Lone Star State, despite the fact that the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture has called for an end to the practice worldwide, and that many European countries are moving away from it. In Norway, solitary confinement is almost never used, or else tightly restricted to eight hours. Unsurprisingly, violence is rare.

The dehumanizing impact of such treatment has long been known stateside, dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s tour of a New York prison that practiced an early experiment in isolation. The French statesman and author remarked, “this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man. ... It does not reform, it kills.”

Solitary confinement has never been shown to decrease prison violence, and researchers have found that it leads to higher recidivism rates while also being the setting for a disproportionate number of prison suicides.

But Texas takes pride in being tough on crime. As the state with the largest prison system in America (the most incarcerated country in the world) and the capital of death row where executions have far outnumbered every other state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, it’s a place that perpetuates the belief that prisons are a bulwark of public safety and perhaps justice.

Having now written to, visited and befriended dozens of people in solitary confinement for nearly half a decade, including those on death row, long-held assumptions about public safety and supposed justice have been actively dismantled for me, unhinged from the braggadocious brand of muscular authoritarian government which Texas runs red hot on.

This dismantling began in 2020, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. I had started writing to and visiting numerous incarcerated people in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison system, spurred by an interest in people on the periphery — in communities that are hidden away, far removed from society. I wanted to get to know what life was like for them, who they were, where they’d come from, and where they hoped to go.

That desire became Texas Letters — an ongoing anthology and book series comprising the unedited writings of a diverse and growing ensemble of people who have spent months, years and sometimes decades in extreme isolation.

These include my friend Roger Uvalle, who has forsworn food numerous times in an effort to end three decades of solitude, including last year when solitarily confined individuals at 11 facilities across the state went on a hunger strike, beginning, quite intentionally, on the same day the 88th Legislature convened in Austin.

After the hunger strike, several bills were introduced to limit the amount of time people can be placed in isolation, as well as study the effect that it has on mental health. None of the bills were voted into law. And so hell rages on.

For Roger, this means “conditions are making us worse and making [it] more unlikely for our recovery of our illnesses — suicides and attempts are regular.”

My friend Kiera Henderson has attempted to end her life numerous times over the course of nearly five years in solitary confinement after enduring countless forms of assault including sexual assault, she alleges, something she fears will happen again. That seems a valid fear given Texas’ reputation as the “prison rape capital of the world.” At just 25 years old, Henderson has witnessed “at least 5 suicides and at least 50 suicide attempts,” she wrote. But this isn’t abnormal in Texas prisons. Remember, this is hell.

Then there’s my friend Kwaneta Harris, or Mama Detroit to her younger solitary neighbors: a 51-year-old former nurse and mother, and a prolific prison writer who puts pen to paper to share about how TDCJ uses menstruation as a form of punishment, or about females dying and suicide attempts rising as the increasingly hot summers take their toll at the “Miserable Murray” unit in Gatesville.

Unfortunately for Kwaneta and those locked away at Lane Murray Unit, the Texas Legislature decided not to prioritize prison air conditioning, despite having a record $32 billion state budget surplus. A longstanding issue embroiled in lawsuits and civil rights cases, TDCJ has made its position clear for years, even opting to pay for climate-controlled barns for its pig farming program while incarcerated humans sweltered.

More than just a massive prison system that normalizes brutality, Texas’ punitive ecology has mutated into a time-tested torture machine: an apparatus that guarantees the steady decline of sanity and humanity. It is a ruthless world sponsored by a complicit state.

But what if Texas wasn’t this way? What if Texas decided to be a leader in something other than torture by eliminating this archaic practice in its prisons?

Through Texas Letters, my friends and I are demanding an end to solitary confinement in Texas.

Damascus James is publisher of texasletters.org.

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