Updated, Tuesday, April 22, at 3:29 p.m.: 

Prison officials and advocacy groups told lawmakers on Tuesday that when it comes to ensuring that inmates with substance abuse and mental illness issues don’t commit more crimes, they should focus on providing services outside of prisons. 

Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said those issues, some of the most troubling for the criminal justice system, precede the inmates' incarceration. For instance, if drug abusers commit crimes while on a drug binge, they will be admitted into local jails often without medical attention or an adequate mental health assessment.

“From the big picture standpoint, some of the challenges are more significant upstream, in the jail and pretrial setting,” Livingston said. 

Of the more than 150,000 inmates currently incarcerated in the 109 Texas facilities, about 25,000 are diagnosed with a mental illness, and 62 percent have chemical dependency issues. In 2012 and 2013, TDCJ expenditures on offender mental health services totaled $60 million, while substance abuse treatment spending was about $172 million.

“We still have a lot of work to do,” Livingston said. “But I believe we have a blueprint for targeting mental health issues and resources, as well as for substance abuse.”

Livingston urged lawmakers to continue investment in the Texas Correctional Office on Offenders with Mental or Medical Impairments, a program within the department of criminal justice that provides additional treatment for offenders on probation and parole.

Advocates agreed with Livingston that mental health and substance abuse issues should be identified and treated prior to incarceration and after inmates are released.

“Forty percent of people booked into Texas county jails have already touched the public mental health system,” said Lynda Frost, the director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to address the underlying illnesses and to reduce the burden on the criminal justice system.”

Original story:

Two House committees on Tuesday will consider one of the hardest groups of prisoners to rehabilitate: inmates with mental illness who also have substance abuse problems.

Overall, Texas inmate recidivism is down by 5 percent since 2005. The most recent numbers, from 2009, show that about 22 percent of prison inmates who came back to prison had been released within the previous three years. But there are no clear statistics on how many among the dual-diagnosed reoffend, because recidivism statistics kept by the Texas Legislative Budget Board are based on the type of the facility, not the type of inmate.

No matter the rate, though, recidivism in any form is costly to the state, said Tony Fabelo, director of research for the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, a policy research organization. That’s why it pays to look at any group whose recidivism could be reduced with better treatment.

“One population to clearly target is the dual-diagnosed, because they are more likely to reoffend,” Fabelo said. 

At more than $50 a day per inmate, the overall number of inmates who returned to prison – more than 9,000 according to the budget board, in 2009 — can cost more than $165 million a year, Fabelo said. 

Any way to reduce the number of returning inmates is a savings, both to society as a whole and to the taxpayers, he said.

A study in 2010 by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston that examined a sample of Texas parolees with a dual diagnosis of a major psychiatric disorder and a substance abuse disorder found that the group had a “substantially increased risk of having their parole revoked” because of either a technical violation or the commission of a new criminal offense. 

The Texas correctional system has poured millions into mental health programs and substance abuse treatment for offenders in an attempt to keep inmates from re-offending and returning to prison.

“We are dialed into the issue of re-entry and rehabilitation,” said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. 

But the scope of just how many inmates with substance abuse problems and mental illness reoffend is unclear.

TDCJ tracks only the number of inmates with substance abuse problems who served time in a state Substance Abuse Felony Punishment Facility, which officials call a SAFE-P facility. In 2009, the number of parolees from those facilities who reoffended within three years fell only 1 percent from 2005.

The prison system does not track inmates with mental illness, or the dually diagnosed. If better tracking and services were available from the time the inmate arrived to serve his or her sentence, it could help rehabilitate this hard-to-reach group, Fabelo said.

“You want to concentrate your more expansive resources on the population who is higher risk and higher need,” he said.

Disclosure: The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston was a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune in 2012. (You can also review the full list of Tribune donors and sponsors below $1,000.) 

At least 14 Texas prisoners have died from overheating since 2007, according to a report released Tuesday by the University of Texas School of Law Human Rights Clinic, which argues that extreme conditions in state lockups violate the basic human rights of inmates.

Findings in the 40-page report echo claims made in lawsuits over eight inmate deaths that the Texas Civil Rights Project filed against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on behalf of the deceased inmates and their families. The UT report said that prison workers are exposed to the same extreme conditions and recommended that state officials install air conditioning units and keep temperatures at the facilities below 85 degrees. But TDCJ officials argue that adding equipment would be too costly and that the agency takes adequate measures to ensure the safety of both inmates and employees in its prisons.

“In a way, prisons are a forgotten sector of society,” said Ariel Dulitzky, the director of the Human Rights Clinic. “We believe it’s important to give visibility to some of the problems they face.”

The temperature in some Texas prisons can soar above 149 degrees, according to the report, conditions that the authors said violate international human rights standards and the U.S. Constitution's prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.” 

Heat exposure is especially dangerous for older inmates and people on certain diuretic and psychotropic medications, which hinder the body's ability to cool itself. It could also exacerbate other illnesses or health conditions, such as high blood pressure.

TDCJ employees also attest to the trying conditions, the report said. In 2012, 92 correctional officers suffered heat-related injuries, according to the report, and in 2013, the prison workers’ union publicly supported the wrongful death lawsuits against TDCJ. 

Lance Lowry, president of Texas correctional officers' union, said prison workers have been filing grievances about the heat since the late 90s “with no avail.”

“We applaud this report,” Lowry said. “It’s going to be a losing battle for the state.”

Both Lowry and the clinic's report recommend that TDCJ install air conditioning to ensure temperatures don't exceed 85 degrees. Currently, county jails, which are under the oversight of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, are required to maintain temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees. But the state prison system has not adopted heat-related policies. Other states with climates similar to Texas, such as Arkansas and New Mexico, have temperature standards in prisons, the report found. 

But retrofitting state prisons with air conditioning would be "extremely expensive," TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark said in a statement, adding that medical, psychiatric, and geriatric units are air conditioned.

The prison system does have protocols regarding heat, including providing additional water and ice, restricting outside activity, using fans that draw outside air, allowing additional showers for inmates and training employees and inmates to be aware of the signs of heat-related illnesses.

Clark declined to comment on the previous deaths of inmates because of ongoing litigation.

Amid controversy over the placement of dangerous sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences, the presiding member of a board that oversees a little-known agency that manages civilly committed violent sex offenders resigned on Tuesday.

In a resignation letter to Gov. Rick Perry, Dan Powers wrote that the three-member governing body's small size made it less effective and that in recent weeks, the workload at the embattled agency has become too much. The agency is responsible for overseeing the treatment and housing of sex offenders who have been civilly committed, deemed too dangerous to live at liberty in society.

"With only a three-member board it is impossible to provide the appropriate oversight required for such an important agency," Powers wrote. "Although I have been proud to serve the State of Texas, in recent months the time commitment has gone way beyond the expectations of a volunteer and my job and [redacted] has suffered."

The agency has been in search of a long-term home for some of its sex offenders since the private operators of a halfway house for parolees on the Beaumont Highway in Houston said they could no longer live there.

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, has called for an investigation into the Office of Violent Sex Offender Management and for the firing of its executive director, Allison Taylor, after the Houston Chroniclereported that the agency had a secret plan to build a center for violent sex offenders in Liberty County. The move to build a facility in Liberty County came after Whitmire and state Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, expressed outrage that the agency had moved offenders to a Houston neighborhood without informing local officials or neighbors.

"I just have lost confidence in the agency and its director to do what's in the public interest," Whitmire said in an interview Tuesday.

Rich Parsons, a spokesman for Perry, said that Taylor remained in her job on Wednesday.

Turner said lawmakers must take action to find suitable housing for the offenders who the state has decided must remain under supervision. He said he would ask state leaders to convene a special meeting of legislative budget writers to seek a solution.

The agency, Turner said, should not become a scapegoat for state lawmakers' inability to find suitable housing for the sex offenders.

"The state has not lived up to its responsibility," Turner said. "As a result, they are like a group of people that no one wants." 

_{*Clarification appended}

The solution to saving money on the state prison system may be more spending on technology, experts and lawmakers mused at a Tuesday panel on criminal justice policy. 

In light of Georgia's success using new technologies in parole and probation, experts at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative Austin-based think tank, are urging Texas lawmakers to follow suit. Reforming the methods of community supervision for nonviolent offenders, they said in a report published in conjunction with the panel, could reduce incarceration costs and recidivism. 

Georgia uses a voice recognition technology that allows low-risk offenders to check in with their parole officers through self-reporting. The state also eliminated parole offices in favor of virtual workspaces. With the technology, along with GPS monitoring and increasing the amount of time officers spent with their cases because they no longer have physical offices, parolees were much less likely to be revoked to prison or arrested for a new offense, the report said. Ninety-seven percent of offenders supervised under voice recognition successfully completed parole and those under cell phone-based GPS electronic monitoring were 89 to 95 percent less likely to be revoked. 

“The offenders are one of the biggest advocates of our system,” said Michael Nail, the executive director of the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles. “They feel that they now have a stronger relationship with their parole officers.”

Nail, a panelist, said that in the three years since implementing the reforms, which also included conducting parole hearings via teleconference, parole officers increased contact with offenders by 22 percent.

The report by Marc Levin and Vikrant Reddy, policy analysts at the TPPF's Center for Effective Justice, recommended that Texas lawmakers consider not only Georgia’s efforts but also new methods of risk assessment and alcohol detection aimed to stop substance abuse. 

Aside from following Georgia's lead, the report recommended developing risk assessments that would help officials determine what kind of monitoring would work best for individual parolees. Such a screening would predict the likelihood of recidivism and assign the appropriate level of supervision for each offender. 

The report also suggests using additional tools to help parole officers detect alcohol over a telephone or through the sweat on an offender's ankle. Texas parole officers already use an ignition interlock device that prevents a car from starting if a second-time DWI offender's breath indicates a higher-than-allowed alcohol content after the parolee blows into a machine attached to the dashboard. 

“If Texas can move more low-level, nonviolent offenders from incarceration into community supervision, the benefits to taxpayers would therefore be considerable,” the report said. “Technology may provide that opportunity.”

But Carey Welebob, a panelist who runs the community justice assistance division at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the standardization of technologies at the state level might not be feasible or appropriate for Texas.

“It’d be challenging because we’re such a diverse state,” Welebob said. “It’s really going to depend on the local department and what their needs are.”

Welebob said that whereas Georgia's parole system is centralized, Texas is the opposite. Some counties, she said, may be paperless, while others rely on older technologies.

Texas already has made progress in terms of using technologies like using video conferencing for parole hearings, Welebob said. And the state, she said, uses a constantly evolving assessment process to sort offenders on parole as low, medium or high risk for revocation. 

Still, Welebob and the other panelists agreed that there is much to be done to improve parolees' success. Sixty-two percent of all discharged state jail inmates are arrested again within three years of their release. In 2012, incarcerating one offender cost the state $50.04 per day — and that’s a low estimate, according to the report. 

Spending on criminal justice totals more than 6 percent of the state’s general revenue budget, said state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, the final speaker on the panel.

Rodríguez highlighted recently approved legislation relating to community supervision, including Senate Bill 2340, passed in the 81^st legislative session, which authorized counties to use an electronic monitoring system that saves money and preserves jail cells for dangerous offenders. He also discussed a bill that has failed in the last two sessions that would allow certain nonviolent offenders to be released under electronic monitoring or house arrest. 

“We have a lot of work to fix in this field,” Rodriguez said. 

_{Editor's Note: This story has been updated to clarify that 62 percent of all discharged state jail inmates are arrested again - not necessarily returned to prison — within three years of their release.}

Armed with shovels, correctional officers at a prison in East Texas last summer unearthed a cache filled with hundreds of smuggled items, including 45 cellphones and 52 chargers. Nearly a year later, no arrests have been made in the elaborate trafficking attempt.

The discovery of buried items at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Ferguson Unit in Midway was unusual for its scale and its subterranean location, but the fact that no one was prosecuted is not.

A Texas Tribune investigation has found that few inmates or correctional officers face legal consequences for smuggling cellphones even as prison officials have intensified efforts to keep the devices out of prisons. Just 5 percent of cellphone smuggling cases investigated by the Criminal Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General from 2009 to 2013 resulted in a criminal sentence, according to documents obtained from the office through a public information request. 

Prison officials said one challenge was linking the smuggled phones to prisoners or correctional officers for prosecution, because the devices were secreted away in spots that were hard to find, or found in common areas. And it falls to prosecutors in the rural, cash-strapped regions where prisons are typically located to decide whether to spend resources on criminals who are already in prison or on local law enforcement officers. Critics say that without serious consequences, there is little to stanch the flow of illicit cellphones — and the cash that goes with them — into Texas prisons.

“Phones can be hard to find, and there’s a lot of money in introducing contraband,” said Terry Pelz, a prison consultant and former warden who advocates tougher punishments for guards caught with contraband.

Texas’ criminal justice system, the nation’s largest, has invested heavily in efforts to keep cellphones out of prisons, where they have enabled inmates to coordinate escapes and maintain contact with gangs. In 2003, legislators made smuggling the devices into prisons a felony. Since 2009, the state has allocated $10 million every two years for “security enhancements for contraband interdiction,” said Robert Hurst, a Criminal Justice Department spokesman.

The enhancements include a special K-9 unit responsible for sniffing out cellphones, increased video surveillance of guards and the addition of “managed access systems” at two prisons that intercept all but a few specified outgoing cellular signals.

The increased emphasis, corrections officials and state legislators say, has had an effect. Cellphone confiscations by the Criminal Justice Department fell to 594 in 2013 — a five-year low — from 738 the previous year.

The buried loot at the Ferguson Unit was the largest of several “significant” contraband discoveries last year at the prison, which accounted for 34 percent of all cellphone confiscations among the state’s more than 100 prisons.

Records obtained by the Tribune show that cellphones accounted for the greatest number of contraband cases investigated by the Criminal Justice Department’s inspector general from 2009 to 2013. Yet cases involving other contraband — like alcohol and tobacco — are prosecuted at a higher rate.

Of the 3,687 cellphone cases the inspector general’s office examined during that time, prosecutors secured sentences in only 190 cases; 2,142 resulted in no charge. Criminal Justice Department officials said cellphones like those discovered in the pit at Ferguson often cannot be traced to a specific offender.

When an inmate is caught with contraband, the department can issue an “administrative” punishment or the case may be “informally resolved,” said Jason Clark, a department spokesman. The department’s inspector general investigates each case and presents the findings to a local prosecutor, who must decide whether to press charges.

Some criminal justice observers say leaving that decision to local prosecutors benefits the guards because prisons are typically in rural counties with small prosecution budgets.

“Local prosecutors don’t put the full force of their office up against cases involving officers,” said Brian McGiverin, a prisoners’ rights attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Pelz added, “These smaller counties don’t necessarily have the money for the wholesale prosecution of these officers, so that’s not much of a deterrent for those who get caught.”

Inmates have devised “ingenious” ways to sneak phones into prison, said William Stephens, director of the criminal justice department’s correctional institutions division, including hiding them in tractor tires, printers and various body cavities. In 2008, a death row inmate used a contraband cellphone to make a threatening call to state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, prompting a statewide prison lockdown to search for cellphones.

Another appeal of contraband cellphones, criminal justice observers said, is that they allow inmates to circumvent the state’s expensive offender telephone service to call friends and family. In the 2013 fiscal year, the state received $13.1 million from the telephone service contract, Clark said. The vendor that provides the phone service, Century Link, also provided the criminal justice department with its two managed access systems.

The costs of the offender telephone service are “so high, that’s one of the reasons why inmates turn to cellphones,” said Michele Deitch, a prisons expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “They really need the phone access, which promotes healthier families, but at those rates it becomes an incredible burden on the families.” A phone call with the service costs up to 26 cents per minute.

For guards, who risk their jobs and felony charges by dealing in contraband, the financial reward can be much larger than their salaries.

“The temptation is there, if there’s not a strong deterrent to misbehavior,” said Pelz, the former warden, adding that a smuggled cellphone can fetch up to $3,000. “Your weakest link is the employees bringing the contraband in.”

Lance Lowry, president of the Texas correctional employees local of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Emlpoyees union, said many who resort to smuggling were trying to supplement low wages. Entry-level correctional officers make about $29,000 a year. At that rate, one cellphone could amount to 10 percent of an officer’s annual salary.

Though few cases end in prosecution, prison officials continue their efforts to intercept contraband phones. Reductions in confiscations at three prisons with historically high contraband rates accounted for much of the statewide decline in 2013.

Last year, the state shuttered a privately operated pre-parole facility in Mineral Wells. The unit was responsible for 17 percent of the state prison system’s total cellphone confiscations in 2012. At the Stiles and McConnell prison units, two of the state’s largest and most contraband-ridden, confiscations dropped nearly 90 percent and 40 percent, respectively, from 2012 to 2013.

Stephens said Texas’ prison system was doing better at curbing contraband than those in other states. In California last year, prison staff discovered more than 12,000 contraband cellphones. Still, he said, Texas could do more, because “one cellphone is too many.”

State Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said the state’s lawyers must make tough decisions about which cases to pursue. But the former prosecutor said cellphones “are a very serious charge,” and he added that “the reason lawmakers focused on it at such a high level is because that kind of contraband can be very dangerous.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Texas Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

Less than 1 percent of  the Texas prison population needs dialysis, a treatment that removes waste and water from the bloodstream.

But they are an expensive group — and their ranks are growing. Today, 228 inmates need dialysis three times a week. Their drug treatment costs taxpayers $1.25 million a year, accounting for about 3 percent of the prison system’s pharmaceutical budget.

By comparison, the pharmaceutical bill for the 1,800 inmates treated for HIV is about $17.8 million a year.

But with an additional 99 inmates expected to be placed on dialysis within the next year, the trend shows no signs of slowing, particularly among young and middle-age African-American men. And because inmates with liver failure are also being treated for other health problems — hypertension, diabetes, hepatitis C, for example — it is difficult for prison officials to calculate their total costs.

“They’ve got elevated blood pressure and have gone so long without treatment, they’ve made their kidneys work harder, to the point of needing dialysis,” said Dr. Owen Murray, the chief physician for the University of Texas Medical Branch’s correctional managed care program, the primary health care provider for inmates at 109 state prisons. Nearly one in three kidney failure patients in the United States is African-American. 

Several factors contribute to the high concentration of kidney disease in African-Americans, medical researchers say, including a higher rate of high blood pressure and hypertension, which tax the kidneys. About 35 percent of the 150,340 inmates in Texas are African-American.

“They’re more complicated to care for,” said Murray of prisoners with kidney disease. This week, he told lawmakers about the increasing costs of chronic kidney disease in prison.

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, said dialysis, along with expensive treatment for hepatitis C and HIV, are reasons to look to federal programs to help with the cost.

“We cannot ignore these cost drivers, and we also cannot ignore opportunities, like expanding Medicaid, which may offset these costs,” Turner said.

In 2013, there were 624 more inmates diagnosed with chronic kidney disease than there were in 2011. A total of 1,800 have the disease, and if treatment is not managed aggressively, could be on dialysis at some point.

Murray’s office on Texas’ Gulf Coast directs the management of dialysis machines at two prisons: the Carole Young Unit in Galveston County and the Estelle Unit in Huntsville, 120 miles away.

“We have three shifts a day to get everybody through,” Murray said.

State Rep. Tan Parker, the chairman of the Texas House Committee on Corrections, said more emphasis on preventive measures was needed.

Parker, R-Flower Mound, complained that inmates, who are locked in cells, are not much better than people outside of prison at taking their medication and that the lack of compliance is costing Texas taxpayers.

Murray and other state prison officials told Parker’s committee on Thursday that about 50 percent of people outside of prison take their medication as prescribed. In Texas prisons, that compliance is 55 percent.

“That’s very frustrating,” Parker said. “There’s a lot of money being left on the table.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas Medical Branch was a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune in 2012. A complete list of Texas Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

When Terry Pelz, a former warden with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, testified against a prison gang leader, Mark Fronckiewicz, in the 1993 capital murder trial of a fellow inmate, he had choice words for him.

At his best, Pelz said, Fronckiewicz was a “true convict.” At his worst, he was a “little turd.”

Decades later, after an appeals court overturned Fronckiewicz’s death sentence and he was paroled, the men became friends. The former inmate, who had found work as a paralegal and become a fierce advocate for prisoner rehabilitation, had started the Hand Up, a for-profit halfway house for former convicts. “It was really a turnaround,” Pelz said.

Fronckiewicz died last month at a time when the transition program in southeast Houston is facing eviction after missing a rent payment.

While demand for transitional housing is high, few former offenders can afford the $550 a month they must pay for rent, meals and utilities, said Sheila Jarboe-Lickteig, who co-founded the program last year with Fronckiewicz, her husband. Advocates for prisoner rights say the conundrum is typical. Few of the thousands of offenders released by the Texas prison system each year are able to find steady jobs or stable housing, both of which help prevent recidivism. Roughly a quarter of them are back in prison within three years, according to criminal justice department data.

The state has contracts with seven halfway houses to offer subsidized housing to about 1,800 former inmates upon their release. Last year alone, about 72,000 people were released from state prisons.

"It's a problem," said Jorge Renaud, a policy analyst for the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. “There is nowhere near the amount of transitional housing that we need.” 

Jason Clark, a spokesman with the criminal justice department, said the agency “is working to secure additional halfway house beds, but demand remains higher than the beds that are available.” Priority is given to those who “need closer supervision and special services or who lack family and community resources,” he said.

For many inmates, the private market is not an easy option.

At the Hand Up, roughly half of the 32 available beds are empty despite dozens of applicants, because “you’ve got to be able to pay the rent,” Jarboe-Lickteig said. "You've got the people that are coming out of prison that can pay," she added, "and you've got those that cannot pay. There are a lot more who cannot pay."

Even with the high vacancy rate, she said, the house is full of success stories.

Enlargephoto by: Michael Stravato

Sheila Jarboe-Lickteig, the owner of the Hand Up, checks in on former inmates in the dining room.

The atmosphere is in some ways reminiscent of a college dormitory. On a recent visit, pairs of roommates traded gossip and smoked cigarettes in front of a television in the dining room. Others trickled in after work at maintenance or construction jobs. Several praised the skills of the man on cooking duty that week, a convicted murderer who identified himself as “Wild Bill.”

Residents at the Hand Up are afforded more freedom of movement than at state facilities, which they say makes it easier for them to find work and transition into life outside prison.

Monitoring parolees can be thorny. After reports in April that hundreds of residents had fled the state’s largest contracted halfway house, State Senator John Whitmire, Democrat of Houston and chairman of the Senate's Criminal Justice Committee, called for more security there.

Jason Gehm, a 32-year-old at the Hand Up who spent 18 months in prison on a burglary charge, was discharged to a state-chartered halfway house in Fort Worth, but he said restrictions there made it “basically impossible” to find a job. When he came to the Hand Up, Fronckiewicz helped him prepare a résumé that landed him a construction job.

Friends of Fronckiewicz said he viewed his work at the Hand Up as a way to make a case against the death penalty.

“These are compelling examples of people who really try to change their lives around and do good for society,” said David Atwood, founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Jarboe-Lickteig said the work was emotionally transformative, if financially uncertain.

“I’ve found a lot more compassion for people that I thought I didn’t have,” she said.

Texas A&M University’s decision a few years ago to leave the Big 12 and cast its lot with the Southeastern Conference was widely criticized and mocked — by everyone but Aggies, who saw the move as transformational. Now, both a documentary and a book are in the works about A&M’s fresh start, so we start this week’s old-school R&B-themed Playlist with James Brown’s “Get On the Good Foot.”

The easiest way to enjoy the playlist is to download Spotify, which is a free program. But even without it, you can still follow along. Here are this week's other selections:

The University of Texas System Regent Wallace Hall has been locked in a contentious battle with UT officials and, more recently, state lawmakers, some of whom believe he may have committed impeachable offenses. Among other things, the embattled regent has questioned lawmakers’ influence on admissions, which raises the question: What good is clout if you can’t use it? Jean Knight has some ideas about that, so we went with her R&B classic “Mr. Big Stuff.”

New laws attempting to decriminalize student behavior have resulted in a sharp decline in tickets written to children by law enforcement officials, which reminded us of Frankie Lymon’s “I'm Not a Juvenile Delinquent.”

A small population of prisoners needing dialysis hits the prison system's pharmaceutical budget hard. The expensive medical procedure removes waste and excess water from blood, so we chose the Neville Brothers singing “Brother Blood.” And many former inmates can't afford the rent at halfway houses meant to transition them back into society, which brought to mind Ray Charles’ “Busted.” 

TribTalk, the Tribune’s new op-ed site, is using “Respect” in place of the traditional “Like” button as a way of promoting civil discourse. That could only go one place — Otis Redding’s “Respect,” performed here by Aretha Franklin. 

The ongoing dispute in North Texas between landowners and the Bureau of Land Management took another turn this week as a BLM report invited comments from the public about that land around the Red River, so Reverend Al Green’s “Take Me to the River” seemed like the right choice. And water turned up in another story later in the week, when a pair of scientists said data released by TCEQ indicates a link between fracking and methane contamination of groundwater, bringing to mind “You Left the Water Running” by Wilson Pickett.

Legal and ethical questions hover over Republican nominee for attorney general Ken Paxton, which could in turn cut off lines of attack for gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott at the top of his ticket. That could put some distance between the two, so it's The Temptations with “Can’t Get Next to You.”

Finally, a story and accompanying slideshow on Friday traced the history of Texas’ shift from red to blue. Those changes brought to mind “Them Changes,” performed here by the Band of Gypsies.

Enjoy!

Updated, 5 p.m., June 25:

The family of Marjorie Nugent filed an amicus brief with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Tuesday afternoon protesting the early release of Nugent's killer, Bernie Tiede. 

Tiede, whose crime and conviction were the subject of the 2011 film "Bernie," was released last month, 17 years into a life sentence, after his defense team uncovered evidence that he was sexually abused as a teenager. The Nugent family's amicus brief argues that because Tiede knew about his own abuse at the time of his trial, the evidence isn't "new" and shouldn't be used to reduce Tiede's sentence.  

Original story, June 18:

The family of Marjorie Nugent — the widow whose murder was the focus of the 2011 film "Bernie" — filed a petition with the state's highest criminal court on Wednesday asking to submit a brief opposing the release of the man who killed her.

Last month, a state district judge freed Bernie Tiede, who had served 17 years of a life sentence for murdering Nugent in 1996. Tiede's lawyers discovered new evidence that he had been sexually abused as a young man. Psychiatrists hired by his defense team and by the office of Panola County District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson agreed that the psychological damage of the abuse lessened Tiede’s culpability for the crime. Davidson, who prosecuted Tiede in 1999, agreed that he should be released.  

The petition filed by the Nugents objects to the decision to free Tiede and argues that Davidson failed to notify them about the court hearing to determine whether he would be released, preventing them from expressing their opposition.

“At minimum, the Court should have the benefit of hearing both sides of the argument,” the Nugent petition says. “No one can be harmed by permitting the presentation of countervailing arguments.”

Niether Davidson nor Tiede's lawyer could be immediately reached for comment.

Tiede was released on bond last month under strict conditions, including that he live with Richard Linklater, the director who made the dark comedy about the bizarre murder case. The court of criminal appeals must still approve a reduced sentence for Tiede.

Gov. Rick Perry has issued at least 221 pardon proclamations since taking office in December 2000. We've made our existing searchable database easier to navigate by name, issuance year, crime type and/or pardon type.

They served their country, then ended up on the wrong side of the law. But many of Texas' veterans serving time behind bars are getting the guidance to stay out of the legal system upon their release, thanks to a new Texas Department of Criminal Justice program.

_{Editor's note: This story has been updated after Lisa Ann Coleman's execution.}

Texas death row inmate Lisa Ann Coleman was executed Wednesday night, the sixth woman put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in Texas.

Coleman, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2004 starvation death of her girlfriend's son, Davontae Marcel Williams.

Before the lethal drug pentobarbital was injected into her inside the execution chamber at the state's Huntsville Unit, Coleman expressed love for her family and thanked her lawyers.

“I just want to tell my family I love them, my son, I love him," Coleman said, according to a statement released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "God is good … I’m done.”

She died 12 minutes after the drug was administered. Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said Coleman's time of death was 6:24 p.m.

Coleman was the 517th person to be executed in the state since 1982, the year Texas reinstated the death penalty following a 1976 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to resume capital punishment. She is the ninth person executed in Texas this year.

She was living with her girlfriend, Marcella Williams, in an Arlington apartment complex when paramedics discovered the starved corpse of a 9-year-old boy on July 26, 2004. He had been beaten, bore 250 scars and weighed 35 pounds at the time of his death, about half the typical weight for a child his age.

At the time of his death, Davontae was suffering from pneumonia. His cause of death was malnutrition with pneumonia as a contributing factor, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office.

Both Coleman and the boy’s mother were charged with capital murder. But Williams pleaded guilty in 2006 to avoid facing the death penalty at trial. Child Protective Services records showed Williams and her son had been the subject of at least six child abuse investigations.

Coleman’s attorney, John Stickels of Arlington, appealed her death sentence based on how his client was initially charged.

In Texas, there has to be an underlying felony or second crime committed for a defendant to be charged with capital murder. Before 2011, those underlying crimes were murder, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, obstruction or terroristic threat. But in 2011, lawmakers added the killing of a child under the age of 10 to those underlying crimes.

In the Davontae Williams case, prosecutors used kidnapping as the underlying crime. Prosecutors presented evidence that Davontae had been locked in a pantry and kept from leaving his own home.

But Stickels says there was no kidnapping, at least not according to Texas law. His appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans based on that claim was rejected late Tuesday, and the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to intervene. 

“It is wrong, it is child abuse, but it’s not kidnapping,” Stickels said. “I’m not saying she’s innocent and did not do something wrong. But it’s just not kidnapping.”

At Coleman’s 2006 trial, it was revealed that the two women bound Davontae’s wrists and sometimes locked him in a pantry. Stickels said that even though the law defines kidnapping as placing someone in an area with the intention of hiding them, it is not kidnapping if a parent places a child in a room to punish him.

“Lisa is absolutely innocent of capital murder,” Stickels insisted. “And if they execute her, they will be executing someone who is innocent of capital murder.”

Reports from those prior CPS investigations detailed how Davontae was found to be hungry. In 1999, he and his sister, Destinee, were placed into foster care after Davontae was found to have been beaten with an extension cord. Coleman denied beating him with a cord, and Williams told CPS that they had bound him with one. Davontae, born four months premature, had developmental disabilities, according to a clinical psychologist who examined the boy after he was placed in foster care. 

The two children were eventually returned when Williams promised to stay away from Coleman.

In 2004, Davontae’s case was part of a state review of 1,103 child abuse cases in North Texas that was ordered by Gov. Rick Perry. The state's Health and Human Services Commission Office of Inspector General found that CPS caseworkers failed 70 percent of the time to act quickly to protect a child in danger.

"It appears that CPS Region 3 [Dallas/Fort Worth] was performing at a minimum standard and often below standards," Brian Flood, the commission's inspector general at the time, said in his report to the governor. "When abuse or neglect was indicated in the file, only 30 percent of the time did CPS caseworkers implement the appropriate safety steps for the short term protection of the child."

The justice track at the 2014 Texas Tribune Festival featured panel discussions on criminal justice reform, the Texas Supreme Court, same-sex marriage and the death penalty. Listen to audio of each session here:

The "What's Next for Criminal Justice Reform?" panel, moderated by Marshall Project Editor-in-Chief Bill Keller, kicked things off for the track. Panelists included state Rep. Abel Herrero, exoneree and author Michael Morton, Texas Public Policy Foundation analyst Vikrant Reddy, state Rep. James White and Texas Criminal Justice Coalition Executive Director Ana Yáñez-Correa. 

Up next was the "Inside the Texas Supreme Court" panel, moderated by Texas Lawyer Editor-in-Chief Heather Nevitt. Panelists included Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and Justices Jeff Boyd, Jeff Brown, Paul Green, Eva Guzman, Debra Lehrman and Don Willett.

The "Texas vs. Same-Sex Marriage" panel was moderated by Tribune Editor Emily Ramshaw. The panel featured state Reps. Mary González and Matt Krause, Akin, Gump, Straus, Hauer & Feld Partner Daniel McNeel Lane Jr., Freedom to Marry Co-chairman Mark McKinnon and Texas Values President Jonathan Saenz.

The track's final panel, "The State of the Death Penalty," was moderated by Tribune Reporter Terri Langford. Featured panelists included Texas Innocence Network founder David R. Dow, state Sen. Rodney Ellis, Texas Defender Service Executive Director Kathryn Kase, Lubbock County District Attorney Matt Powell and Texas Prison Museum Director Jim Willett.

The Texas Tribune's prison inmate database, containing more than 146,000 offenders, is now updated with the latest data available from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It is now current as of September 2014.

This story is part of our Shale Life project. Watch this slideshow to see how prisons are working to hang onto corrections officers.

BEEVILLE — Seventeen soon-to-be corrections officers in blue and gray uniforms listened attentively as Major Robert Lopez explained the importance of their professional appearance and warned them of the corrupting influences they will face every day on the job.

“Corrupt employees may try to compromise the integrity of professionals,” the Texas Department of Criminal Justice trainer told his mostly young recruits — nine men and eight women — during a training session here in South Texas in October 2013.

What Lopez probably knows that these budding prison guards do not is that most of them won’t be employed in the criminal justice system long enough to be corrupted. Turnover among corrections officers has been on the rise statewide since 2006, according to department data. And in South Texas and other oil-rich regions in the state, where the energy boom has sparked an explosion of high-wage job growth, finding and keeping prison employees has become difficult.

The desperation to retain employees has prompted an unusual approach at one South Texas prison unit, which is offering dirt-cheap on-campus housing — as low as $25 a month — to make the cost of living in such nouveau riche communities manageable for its employees. And Department of Criminal Justice officials plan to offer similar options at prison units across the state in oil-rich regions.  

Such recruiting tools are fast becoming a necessity. At the William G. McConnell Unit in Beeville, the turnover rate skyrocketed from 28 percent in 2006 to 62 percent in 2012, according to Department of Criminal Justice data. As turnover spiked, so did the rate of violent incidents in the prison, growing from about 12 incidents per 100 inmates in 2006 to more than 30 incidents per 100 inmates five years later. It’s a trend mirrored at other prison units across the state that are near shale deposits and the refineries that process the oil harvested from them.

“We can’t compete with the private sector in these critical areas,” said Bill Stevens, the director of the department’s correctional institutions division.

Despite lawmakers’ approval in 2013 of a 5 percent pay bump for corrections officers and the department’s efforts to increase recruiting with bonuses and housing perks, agency officials and the officers’ union say the state just can’t compete with what energy companies can pay.

It’s not only about the money; officers and prison condition experts say that the difficult working environment guards face contributes to their high turnover rate. That high turnover rate creates a domino effect that makes it even more difficult to retain prison staff: The remaining officers must put in longer hours, and the lower guard-to-inmate ratio means violence among offenders grows.

“All of these factors feed on each other,” said Michele Deitch, a prison conditions expert and professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.

The Department of Criminal Justice currently has 3,304 corrections officer vacancies throughout its 109 prison units, even after the closure in 2013 of two privately run facilities. Statewide, the agency has left roughly 1,400 prison beds empty since 2012 because of staff shortages.

As he walked across the campus of the Garza East prison facility in Beeville, Cody Ginsel, who earlier this year served as the director of institutions for the department’s Region 4, listed off the staffing numbers at the South Texas units he oversees. More than 20 percent of the positions are vacant at the Garza East, Garza West and Connally units. At the McConnell Unit, the vacancy rate is 35 percent.

Ginsel stands next to 40 freshly graded RV lots on the edge of the prison campus, where khaki-colored boxes that hook up water and electricity stick out of the ground. It’s here, in the shadows of concertina wire and watchtowers staffed by armed guards, that the department is building a small RV park — where for $25 a month, officers will be able to pull up their trailers and live on-site.

There’s already a waiting list for the 188 “bachelor officers quarters” on the prison campus, a converted naval base. Up to four officers share the small, dorm-style rooms that the department rents to them for the same $25 monthly fee.

Unglamorous though the living quarters may be, Ginsel said they are much more affordable than the rent in nearby towns, which has doubled in some areas because of the increased demand for well-paid oilfield workers. Having the housing available on-site, he said, allows the department to recruit workers from far away. They work four days, staying on campus, and then take four days off, returning to their homes and families in San Antonio — more than an hour away — or other South Texas cities.

“It’s definitely going to be a recruiting tool,” Ginsel said of the RV park. Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said the agency has plans to build similar sites in other South Texas locations and in West Texas.

Clark said the department has also more than doubled its recruiting bonus, offering new officers up to $4,000 if they stay on the job for a year. Since 2012, the department has awarded 1,173 of those bonuses as of January. And prison officials have intensified their recruiting efforts, seeking out military veterans and former department employees, and targeting communities where companies have laid off large numbers of workers.

“Recruitment is a top priority for the agency,” Clark said.

But even after a 5 percent pay raise from lawmakers, the top salary for a corrections officer is just under $39,000 per year. An entry-level officer makes $29,220.

“Back in the '80s and '90s, that would have been a good salary,” said Lance Lowry, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of State County Municipal Employees. “But the state Legislature has failed to keep up.”

By comparison, a truck driver hauling water to the disposal wells used in the fracking process can earn $1,500 per week or more, about $78,000 per year, according to the Bee County Chamber of Commerce.

The working conditions can make matters worse, Lowry said. Most prison units are not air conditioned, and temperatures inside can soar above 100 degrees during the summer. The union recently joined inmates’ rights advocates in a lawsuit against the Louisiana prison system that argues the conditions amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Lowry said his group plans to file a similar action against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

“Officers I have talked with, the sense is they’re not safe,” he said. “You can’t run a facility at 50 percent staff and be safe.”

State Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said part of the problem is that the prisons are located in remote parts of the state where there are few qualified workers to come by.

Among Whitmire’s primary concerns is that the low pay and the agency’s desperation to hire staff could lead to the kind of officer corruption that Lopez warned his recruits about.

“There are fine corrections officers, families who have done it two and three generations,” Whitmire said. “But you’ve got some who I would strongly suggest shouldn’t be there.”

In November, 14 former officers at the McConnell Unit were sent to federal prison after they were convicted in a racketeering case. The four-year investigation uncovered officers smuggling cellphones and drugs into the prison, where they were sold to inmates. Inmates then used the phones to coordinate crimes outside of prison.

While increased pay would help to retain some prison staff, Whitmire said, the long-term solution is one Texas is already working toward: significantly reducing the prison population, which currently stands at about 150,400. 

Ensuring that prostitutes, the mentally ill, drug addicts and alcoholics find their way to community-based treatment programs instead of prisons, Whitmire said, would save taxpayer dollars and reduce the need for corrections officers.

“Compensation would help, but it’s a bigger picture than that,” he said.

Despite the reduced staff, Ginsel said, the agency’s main focus is safety for officers, inmates and the small communities where the prisons are located.

“The wardens here are passionate about making sure we have safe facilities,” Ginsel said.

Terri Langford contributed reporting.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

-->

Hoping to weave stronger social safety nets for inmates after they are released, the Texas prison system is making it easier for family members to visit loved ones behind bars.  

"We took a closer look and we understand that it's incredibly important to continue those relationships that they had in the free world into prison," said Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The changes took effect in March, and prison board members received an update Friday.

Visitors can now check online to see if the prisoner they want to see is eligible for visits before they drive, sometimes hundreds of miles, to one of the state's more than 100 prisons. If they travel 250 miles or more, visitors will be given more time, and they can visit every weekend instead of three times a month.

Accommodations for visitors are also improving, Clark said.

Visitors are not allowed to bring in food, so they're restricted to vending machines. After conducting a survey of about 3,000 inmate relatives, TDCJ has moved to provide healthier options in the vending machines, and is now allowing visitors to bring in a total of $25 in coins to purchase vending machine drinks and food.

Other changes include relaxing the dress code for visitors. Modest attire is still required, but visitors can wear shorts.

The 17 prison units that receive the most visitors have extended visitation hours. And the prison system is trying to make the visitation area better for children and younger family members by providing books to read and coloring pages with crayons.

"The vast major of these offenders are going to get out someday, so it's important to continue those relationships," Clark said. 

-->

-->

Scott Louis Panetti entered Texas prison with a well-documented psychiatric history, including two involuntary commitments at Kerrville State Hospital, and lengthy inpatient stays at Veterans Administration hospitals in Waco, Kerrville and his home state of Wisconsin.

He had buried furniture in the yard. He represented himself at his capital murder trial for the murders of his in-laws wearing a "Tom Mix"-like cowboy outfit, and at times slept through it. His lawyers have claimed he is too incompetent to be executed because his schizophrenia, first diagnosed in 1978, has been left untreated, and his mental health deteriorated.

In 1992, Panetti gunned down his in-laws, Joe and Amanda Alvarado of Kerr County. The murders came two years after he was involuntarily committed at Kerrville State Hospital following threats to his wife and daughter. 

But in the nearly two decades Panetti has been behind bars, information about what specific medical treatment he's received at taxpayer expense for his diagnosed schizophrenia has been hard to obtain, because even inmates have a right to medical privacy.

"He’s not medicated at this time and hasn’t been for much of the past 20 years," is all that Kathryn Kase, of the Texas Defender Service in Houston, will say. Kase and lawyer Gregory Wiercioch of the University of Wisconsin Law School, successfully obtained an execution stay last Wednesday for Panetti, seven hours before he was to be put to death for the 1992 fatal shooting of his in-laws.

Court filings reference how Panetti was treated in 1995, shortly after his conviction, at one of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's two psychiatric units, the Jester IV unit in Sugar Land. But other than that, public information about his treatment has been spotty.

Until last week.

As the state and Panetti's defense team battled over whether his execution should be halted, a four-page affidavit provided a tantalizing peek into the mental health care he has received. The affidavit from Dr. Joseph Penn, director of mental health services for the Correctional Managed Care division of the University of Texas Medical Branch, shows that Panetti is allergic to the most common drugs used to treat schizophrenia, has been seen mental health professionals at least 14 times, and has never been found to have a serious mental health condition.

"From the mental health notes in the chart, it appears that he has always been described as hyper-religious, but that it did not appear to be affecting his daily functioning," Penn's statement reads. "Mr. Panetti may have had some baseline or chronic residual psychosis or alternatively over-valued religious beliefs all these years, but nothing severe enough to warrant treatment with medications."

Penn's assessment of Panetti, equally revealing and puzzling, was based not on direct examination of the 56-year-old inmate but on mental health staff notes made since 2004. Panetti's medical records before 2004, which are not digitized and in storage, were not consulted.

The only record of note carried from the pre-2004, written medical records is Panetti's allergies to three psychiatric drugs used to treat schizophrenia: Mellaril, Thorazine and Haldol. It is believed that Panetti told TDCJ heath staff of the allergies when he arrived in 1995.

Although Panetti has not been receiving treatment for mental illness, 14 members of the UTMB mental health staff have seen him. What prompted those visits and when those visits occurred is not made clear in Dr. Penn's statement.

"The medical records reflect that none of the 14 UTMB CMC mental health staff who have met with Mr. Panetti in person and evaluated him have identified any clinical signs and symptoms indicating a psychiatric diagnosis or required the need for additional mental health or psychiatric treatment such as psychotropic medications," Penn said in his statement.

The state of Texas has insisted for years that Panetti is not mentally ill, and this week Attorney General Greg Abbott emphasized that view during an interview with Mark Davis, host of a Dallas-Fort Worth radio talk show.

“Anyone can do strange things, and if strange things were good enough to get criminals off of death row, believe me, they’d be doing strange things all the time, every day,” Abbott, said last week. “Based upon the conclusions of many judges in this case, this guy is not insane, and at some point in time, that decision just needs to be put to rest.”

Questions to Penn about the affidavit were referred to UTMB's vice president of offender health services, Dr. Owen Murray.

While he declined to speak about Panetti's case, Murray said all inmates are screened for mental health problems when they first come to TDCJ, and can seek help if they wish.

Of the 273 inmates currently on death row in Texas, 62 — or 22 percent — receive mental health services, he said. He would not say how many of the 62 are treated with medication.

Most of the 109 prison units have mental health teams, and inmates can ask to see a mental health professional, or a correctional officer can refer them if their behavior warrants it.

Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs, said inmates are entitled to mental health services.

"It doesn’t matter at all if they are coming in with it or they develop the problems while they are in these institutions. They are still entitled, under the Constitution, to that standard of care," she said.

Christine Ayala contributed to this story. 

Disclosure: The University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs and the University of Texas Medical Branch are corporate sponsors of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.

-->

_{*Correction appended.}

_{*Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a comment from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.}

The name of the compounding pharmacy supplying lethal injection drugs for Texas executions must be released because it is public information, a judge ruled late Thursday.

State District Judge Darlene Byrne granted summary judgment in favor of three lawyers who often work for death row inmates in Texas — Maurie Levin, Naomi Terr and Hilary Sheard — in a little-watched lawsuit filed in Austin earlier this year.

"It’s a big deal," plaintiffs attorney Philip Durst said of Byrne's decision. "It goes to the topic of how we provide [public] information."

Since the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is expected to appeal the ruling, however, it may be a while before the name is revealed.

"If they appeal, then we don’t get the names until it’s over," Durst conceded. 

Jason Clark, a spokesman for TDCJ, confirmed to The Texas Tribune late Thursday that the agency would appeal.

On Friday, Clark elaborated. 

"As we have said before, disclosing the identity of the pharmacy would result in the harassment of the business and would raise serious safety concerns for the business and its employees. It would also have a significant impact on the agency’s ability to carry out executions mandated by state law," Clark said. "Protecting the identity of the compounding pharmacist has been previously litigated in both state and federal courts and the agency anticipates winning on appeal, as it has before, when the courts examine the case further."

 The three lawyer-plaintiffs sued TDCJ after the prison agency refused to release the name of the compounding pharmacy used to supply the prison system with the lethal injection drugs. The lawyers had filed a request for the information under the Texas Public Information Act and the agency refused to release it.

The lawyers' suit originally included two more plaintiffs, both Texas death row inmates. Both, Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, were executed last April.

In September 2013, TDCJ turned to compounding pharmacies, which are allowed to mix or "compound" drugs on site, for its lethal injection drugs after manufacturers stopped providing pentobarbital to U.S. prison systems. But since the identity of one of the compounding pharmacies was released to the public in 2013, the Texas prison system has worked to keep the names of the current provider or providers secret.

The names of the pharmaceutical companies providing lethal injection drugs were long made public in Texas, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has issued rulings confirming that drug supplier names are public information. That changed, however, when TDCJ was forced to turn to compounding pharmacies.

Last May, Abbott, in the midst of his own campaign for governor, sided with TDCJ after the agency secured a "threat assessment" from the Texas Department of Public Safety stating that the pharmacies "by design are easily accessible to the public and present a soft target to violent attacks." If the agency names the pharmacy-supplier, DPS reasoned, it would present a "substantial" threat of physical harm to the pharmacy.

Levin and other attorneys for death row inmates have argued that compounded drugs subject condemned inmates to cruel and unusual punishment which is barred by the Eighth Amendment.

The drugs that compounding pharmacies mix are not approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Compounding pharmacies themselves are licensed not by the FDA, but by individual state boards of pharmacies.

In the past two years, executions have taken longer, raising questions about the purity of these "compounded" drugs, as states begin using never before used "execution" drugs like midazolam to replace older lethal cocktails now unavailable to them. Some are using compounded drug and questions are being raised about the purity and efficacy of these drugs.

Last April in Oklahoma, death row inmate Clayton Lockett had a heart attack 43 minutes after the sedative midazolam was used for the first time in that state's execution protocol. Before the execution, Oklahoma had said it was moving to compounded drugs, however, the drugs used in Lockett execution were manufactured. An official autopsy ruled he died from the lethal drugs, not the heart attack.

_{*Editor's note: In an earlier version of this story it was reported that Oklahoma used compounded drugs to execute Clayton Lockett. While Oklahoma officials had said they were going to purchase compounded lethal execution drugs, they used manufactured drugs in Lockett's execution.}

-->

Rick Perry will leave behind a criminal justice system in healthier shape than when he stepped in as governor. Terri Langford writes that how instrumental Perry was in improving it remains an open question.

Floyd Blackburn recently included the following anecdote in a letter from his cell at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville to the Prison Justice League, a prisoner rights group in Austin: “One sergeant stuck his hand through the bars of my cell and hit me on the head and said, ‘What are you going to do blind man? I will beat your blind ass.’”

Blackburn, who is 62 and legally blind, has served seven of his 15 years for burglary at Estelle — one of Texas’ biggest prisons, with a population of more than 3,000 — where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice sends most of its oldest, sickest and most impaired prisoners.

His allegations are included in a report, released Monday, that joins several lawsuits against the prison agency, contending that correctional staff at the Estelle Unit regularly neglect, abuse and even violently beat prisoners with disabilities, with little to no consequences.

For the last six months, Erica Gammill, director of the Prison Justice League, and Brian McGiverin, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, have been exchanging letters and talking to dozens of men at Estelle. “The letters describe violent physical assaults by staff against blind, deaf and elderly prisoners, with a consistency that is deeply disturbing,” Gammill writes in the report. “These unprovoked assaults have led to serious injuries, including missing teeth, busted skulls, broken bones, ruptured eyeballs and prolonged hospitalizations.” Many of the men told Gammill that they had faced violent retaliation for filing official grievances in the past, and that now they were too afraid to do so. The prison agency declined to comment on the report or the pending litigation.

The claims made in the report have been made before in other times and places, and they illuminate the issues of health and aging in prisons as longer sentences enacted in the 1980s and 1990s translate into a boom of older prisoners. Corrections officials are struggling to budget for medical care and geriatric services, while lawmakers have considered expanding parole for prisoners too old and sick to be dangerous in the outside world — and whose medical bills can be paid by family or federal programs.

The stories coming from the Estelle Unit suggest that cost is not the only problem; these men are particularly vulnerable to neglect and abuse from staff. The clearest examples concern blind inmates, as seen in McGiverin’s interviews:

“If you’re handicapped and they think they can get away with it, they’ll slam you on the wall … they just aren’t trained to be around anyone who is handicapped. They question your ability to see, question your ability to hear.” — John Wesley Provost, 63, aggravated robbery

“On holidays and weekend[s], inmates are not allowed to use the handicap showers. On those days the handicapped must shower with the general population and fend for themselves. I never understood how a handicap magically disappears on weekends and holidays. Mine never does.” — Burnice Wilson, 54, robbery

“Officers who have assaulted inmates can prevent them from filing grievances. You have to file a grievance within 14 days of the assault, but officers sometimes take an inmate to pre-hearing lockup for 13.5 days, so they only have half a day to file a grievance. Then they don’t get the chance.”— Daniel Webster Johnson, 56, possession of cocaine

According to McGiverin, the blind prisoners worry about bugs and spit in their food. They find their hygiene products confiscated with no explanation. Their canes are broken and hands get stuck when the guards don’t announce that doors are sliding open and shut. One man told McGiverin that the correctional officers “don’t understand human dignity.”

Some of the allegations go much further. Last June, a 54-year-old prisoner named Otis Talbert — who had been known for writing a lot of grievances and had assaulted officers in the past — was late to chow. An officer ordered Talbert back to his cell. Talbert jumped up in protest, and the officer punched him in the mouth with his keyring.

A month later, said Talbert’s sister Eva Gregory, five officers, including the one from the chow hall, entered his cell with a heavy motor they’d ripped out of an industrial fan and pounded him with it. “We got a call [saying] he was beaten to death,” she recalled. “They said an inmate did it.”

Talbert was transferred to a hospital and pronounced “brain dead,” McGiverin wrote in a lawsuit against the prison agency. “For months, the doctors urged his family to take him off life support, saying he had no chance to recover, but they refused.”

Last month, Talbert woke up. He can now speak and read, but cannot move his body. He named several of the officers he said beat him up with the motor. None of them have been penalized. McGiverin believes that stories like this are “inevitable” given the “pervasive culture” of violence at Estelle.  

Lance Lowry, head of the TDCJ employee union, said that while use-of-force rates tend to be higher and harder to track at big units like Estelle, the problems there are the product of poor training, out-of-date infrastructure, understaffing and weak oversight. “Texas requires correctional officers to only undergo 200 hours of training, while states such as California and Michigan have over 600 hours of training,” he said. “The union is pushing for Texas to increase the required training of correctional officers and set correctional officer licensing standards.”

For Lowry, the needed reforms are many, but they all have a common basis: money. “Prisons are not the most popular program to receive state funds, but are an essential part of keeping civilization civilized.”