The Cycle of State-Sponsored Censorship, Torture, and Repression in Texas Prisons

This essay mentions sexual violence 

INTRODUCTION

Prison activist David Ruiz filed a section 1983 civil rights lawsuit against the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) in 1972. This lawsuit was an effort to expose the unconstitutional prison conditions that ran rampant throughout the state of Texas. Little did he know,  Ruiz v. Estelle would end up being a class action complaint and become a landmark decision that ultimately changed Texas prisons by ruling that the state's prison conditions violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the civil rights violations Ruiz challenged was the state's use of the "building tenders" system, in which handpicked inmates were used to serve as auxiliary guards.

The purported mission was that the building tenders would help with an understaffed system and alleviate overcrowded prisons. The tender's actual function, however, was to control writers or prison rebels and anyone brave enough to report to the public what they saw guards do to prisoners.These rogues were allowed to roam the prisons with homemade weapons and baseball bats which they used to intimidate, rape, kill, and extort prisoners into compliance for the prison system. In exchange, they were rewarded with a ton of privileges.

The trial started in 1978 and concluded a year later. The reforms in the Ruiz decision would, over time, cost the state of Texas billions of dollars to comply with the court's order: Build more prisons to relieve the overcrowding problems, hire more staff to resolve the understaffing issues, and overhaul the medical, disciplinary and mental health departments.

What the courts couldn't order was for TDC to reverse the contradictions that organically grew from its own roughshod regime after the building tender system was abolished: The Hispanic nationalist and white supremacist gangs that prisoners formed to protect themselves from the building tenders, and the Black gangs that were created, in response, to protect themselves from the Aryan and Mexican nationalists.

This unconstitutional building tender system that TDC created was never abolished. It was, instead, reformed in the 2000s. The same gangs that formed to fight it were now using this work program to sell drugs, control the cellblocks through violence, and silence those who spoke out against it.

CENSORSHIP, TORTURE, AND REPRESSION THROUGH POLICY

The degrees in which one's free speech is repressed in prison and in society is one and the same. In Texas prisons, people have been killed, had bogus disciplinary cases put on them, and had property thrown away in retaliation for saying or doing something they had a constitutional right to say and do.

In society and under this repressive Donald Trump regime, people, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, have been killed by ICE agents while expressing free speech and defending their communities against Trump's unpopular mass deportation scheme.

What makes these two types of censorship programs similar is that they are both operated through a policy that is disguised to look like they are fulfilling a penological objective. The deaths and violence caused by prison repression and expansion, like ICE detainment and mass deportation, are considered collateral damage by the carceral state.

In 2024 the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) implemented a new digital mail program that was aimed at making it more difficult for prisoners to communicate with the public, while giving law enforcement agencies across the U.S. jurisdiction to access any content sent to us through the Securus e-messaging service.

What this did was deter a lot of anti-imperialists from communicating with prisoners altogether, as they are strictly against giving up their personal and private information just to communicate with a prisoner through a service that has given the police state absolute rights to monitor everyone using the service.

In the event they opt to send snail mail to the digital mail processing center, the net effect is still the same, as it is in the contract that any state or federal law enforcement agency can monitor and use any information sent or received through the Securus tablet at their will.

TDCJ poorly justified this sudden shift in policy as a measure to curtail the amount of drugs and contraband entering the prisons. But much of the contraband entering the prisons that may lead to instances of  violence (cellphones, weapons, methamphetamines) cannot be sprayed on paper and sent through the mail. It has to be funneled in by a TDCJ staffer.

Ironically, not even a year after this policy went into effect, the amount of contraband entering prisons and the violence that ensued, got so out of hand the executive director was forced to put the entire Texas prisons system on lockdown until each of the 80 or so prisons were combed for contraband.

The very next year TDCJ enforced another policy: Level 2 Offense 14.0, "use or possession of any intoxicating inhalants and/or unknown substances," that essentially censors free speech, but is veiled as a policy that targets drug users. As we see from the other policies that don't serve a penological objective, this policy has no guardrails that prevent staff from using it arbitrarily.

The wording in this new policy gives staff authority to charge a prisoner with being intoxicated simply based on their observation—and even if their urine doesn't test positive, as it states "This includes the use or possession of tobacco products, an unknown substance; and/or an unknown substance which results in altered behavior and or appearance, including the loss of the normal use of mental and physical faculties."

On September 10, 2024, former Powledge unit prisoner Ryan Patrick Coats fell victim to this scheme when a lieutenant wrote him a 14.0 disciplinary for having a leg cramp; toilet paper in his pocket; and watery, red eyes.

During Coates's disciplinary hearing, Crist claimed that the toilet paper tested positive for K2 (a known lie, as the paper is now dipped in PCP, meth and other narcotics). Upon getting the results she threw the toilet paper away.

With this kind of rule, it is obvious that it will almost always be enforced in bad faith and especially as a weapon against outspoken and drug-free prisoners.

On top of this, in 2026, TDCJ implemented a new policy which bans hardback books and prevents nonprofits from donating books directly to prisoners. Again, these changes are supposed to curtail "contraband" from entering the prisons, but they have yet to implement a policy that bans guards from bringing the contraband they are pretending to stop.

To give you a sense of how far reaching these policies are, throughout the state of Texas, here is an example involving me:

On December 21, 2016 at the Bill Clements unit, I witnessed guards with pepper spray and gas masks approach prison organizer Kevin Rashid Johnson's cell. The mission was simple: Guards were seeking to retaliate after he protested them taking his legal and personal property because of him publicly exposing the prison.

Every staffer involved was well aware that Rashid had been publishing articles about various guards and ranking staff for their role in prisoners dying and being beaten by the cell extraction teams.

After claiming that Rashid was refusing to give the handcuffs back (he and I were in solitary and had to be cuffed before being removed from the cell), an officer sprayed him, took the handcuffs, and they all walked away.

During this time, Rashid and I were members of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party prison chapter and had been organizing with other prisoners throughout the U.S. in regards to the previous September 9, 2016 work stoppages.

As a witness, I wrote and signed a sworn affidavit about what I saw, which made its way to an attorney and was eventually posted to Rashid's website. Rashid filed a complaint that was also posted to his website that provoked criminal justice reform advocate circles into starting a petition on rootsaction.org that rallied nearly 10,000 signatures.

In response to our efforts to publicly expose this vicious treatment on the inside, the prison administration made an effort to censor, repress, and punish us for reaching to the outside.

On January 5, 2017 Rashid received a disciplinary case for posting the complaint and was met with a cell extraction team in body armor, who whisked him away to a special cell. The very next day I was confronted by a ranking guard about my handwritten complaint and given a disciplinary case for doing the same.

We were found guilty on frivolous grounds and my parole and upgrade from solitary confinement were denied because of this bogus case, which would eventually get overturned after public backlash and media scrutiny.

Months later and over the course of nine years, Rashid would be moved to Florida, Ohio, Indiana and several other states that have Republican governors and a high presence of white supremacist leaning guards in its prisons. He would not quit rebelling. He would not settle for a more favorable place on the plantation like most in our class. He would be sold from one state prison to the next like untameable chattel.

As of this writing, he resides in a South Carolina prison, undeterred by the obvious efforts the carceral state has made to silence him.

In April 2016, TDCJ became one of several state prisons to enforce a rule banning prisoners from using or having social media accounts, which are usually managed by a friend or relative. Social media is one thing TDCJ nor its mailrooms have any control over.

This was merely a cloak and dagger for preventing the exposure of TDCJ.

This 45.0 disciplinary infraction, or Level 3 Offense, "Violation of written or  posted TDCJ rule not contained in these rules but is a rule," is not a rule, but a violation of the First Amendment. It was not created to tackle a prisoner's presence on social media, as prisoners are still allowed to use social media and post online ads soliciting pen pals. It was formed to disguise the state of Texas's interest in deterring and punishing those who utilize any interactive writing platforms to report validated abuse in their prisons.

The evidence in this is clear as the officer that filed the disciplinary report  on me stated in the hearing "This offender aided by another offender has a social media account. Offender Johnson wrote a statement to that social media account. The purpose was to notify and update people of [alleged] abuse."

What happened in 2017 is still happening now. TDCJ's efforts to silence those that buck against its wrath is an unhealed wound that was inflicted in the late 19th to early 20th centuries and has yet to heal.

A 50-YEAR-OLD DOCUMENTED CASE OF CENSORSHIP

Convict and Ellis unit work horse Eroy Brown was not the first to experience the consequences of speaking out against staff corruption. He was among the few that was able to survive it, as others before, and even after him, were killed. Many of their deaths were framed—then ruled—as suicides and the consequences of trying to escape.

In 1979, prison farm manager Billy Max Moore came to run the Ellis unit. Immediately he made it clear that he was boss and would be running things his way. Eroy was responsible for tasks such as filling ammonia tanks with fertilizer and fixing and changing flat tires on the farming equipment.Moore made sure to maximize his presence as he "came in stealing and hustling, getting oil changes and lube jobs for himself and his friends and stealing tires that he had [Eroy] mark down on the farm inventory."

In 1981, Eroy was frustrated that warden Wallace Pack would not give him a furlough though he was a hard worker, up for parole in three months, and felt like he deserved it.

One day he was loudly expressing this frustration to a co-worker and said, "After all I done for Billy Moore, I don't see why I can't get no furlough." What he meant by "all I done" was his complicity in forging the inventory so that Moore's crimes of theft weren't apparent.

Bill Adams, a tractor supervisor, didn't like what he happened to hear Eroy say and wanted to know what Eroy was doing running his mouth. He gathered up Eroy, put him in the tractor, and took him to warden Pack for punishment.

From there, warden Pack and Moore took a handcuffed Eroy to a remote location in the fields where they planned to kill him and make it look like anything other than coldblooded murder. Moore put the gun to Eroy's head, and in an action-packed movie-like effort, Eroy was able to free himself and drown warden Pack in a drainage ditch. In a struggle for the gun, Eroy was shot in the foot but managed to kill Moore.

After two separate trials, where his own coworkers tried to cover for the state, Eroy was found not guilty by self defense. In a civil suit settlement, the state agreed to send him to a federal prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. They also agreed that he would never serve time in a Texas prison again.

In a nutshell, this is the cycle of state-sponsored censorship, torture, and repression that prison organizers, legal eagles, and rebels have gone through for over 100 years.

A NEW PHASE OF CENSORSHIP

To put an end to the uncontrollable drug abuse in TDCJ would be the administration putting an end to their own censorship program. Without a pacifier like K2 and other dangerous drugs, prisoners will find something else to pass their time away. Drug-free zones are where organizers engage and where intellectual thoughts formulated.

The carceral state is well aware, just as many readers are, that as long as prisoners are drawn inward and focused on predatory endeavors and getting high, their frustrations—when they arise—will always be aimed at each other, not at the root cause of their imprisonment.

This is something I learned first hand in response to a widely circulated article I published in 2018 about the deadly K2 epidemic at the Telford unit. This article didn't just inform the public about an administration that was allowing prisoners to overdose. A Telford Unit Captain named Jessica Nichole Ricks, who was the main supplier of contraband—a fact I wasn't aware of—from the time of the publishing of the article until she was finally caught and arrested in 2025. 

In 2023, after a guard-assisted prisoner effort failed to kill me at the Connally Unit, I was returned to the Telford Unit, where this time, Ricks and several of her guard henchmen tried to set the stage for me to be finished off right where the article had been written three years prior. Had it not been for supporters on the outside and a rally by PEN America, I would surely have been finished there.

This is an evolving prison culture of criminality, exploitation, and violent predatory practices that has become entrenched into the minds and daily habits of prisoners and select antisocial guards. It is not something guards will shy away from, no matter how many staff get fired and how many prisoners are handed life sentences for murdering targets.

The glorification of corruption, system gaming, and prison violence is promoted endlessly in the entertainment industry among influential artists, who use it in their music for social media and/or to target "inner city" youth.

From this end, one's poverty status pulls them into a life of antisocial behavior, especially during incarceration. They are then arrested and handed over to the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) through "justified" means, according to the state. The PIC then uses this livestock to flip substantial profits for prison profiteer corporations and politicians.

A person with the nerve to expose or speak out about such a system that operates to profit off of the incarcerated will ostensibly always be censored, punished, or both.

Texas prisons history shows us it is not the carceral state that reforms prisons. It is the David Ruizes, the Eroy Browns, the work strikes, the hunger strikes, the collective rebelling, and the support group that won't settle for unredeemable tokens.

Eroy was found not guilty by a jury in a Texas court. Crooks like Warden Wallace Pack and Billy Moore, who brought this to be, would be immortalized and have prisons named after them.

It is a symbolic reminder that while men who created this vision for TDCJ might be dead, their practices will be condoned by the State of Texas and live on forever.