Escape and Retaliation Inside Texas Prisons

Keri Blakinger on a Texas prisoner’s account of incompetence and brutality after a high-profile escape.

A guest post from journalist Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project

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If nothing else, the main goal of imprisonment is to keep people locked in, well, in prison. That’s not to say that keeping people inside prison cells is a good thing, but just that – currently – that sort of containment is kind of the fucking point. The minimum standard, if you will. 

And yet, it is a standard that Texas somehow repeatedly fails to meet.

Two years ago, while investigating deteriorating conditions during the pandemic, I learned that a lot of Texas prisoners can pop the locks on their cell doors and stroll out whenever they want. All it really requires is a shoelace and a bar of soap – though sometimes a wadded up piece of paper works instead. It was something I’d never encountered in the other prison systems I’d reported on, but in the spring of 2020, men with contraband cell phones began sending me videos of other prisoners who’d broken out of their cells and begun fighting in the common areas, or popping into their friends’ cells to get high. In the midst of the pandemic, desperate prisoners were getting bolder, and covid-fearing guards less inclined to intervene.

Still, the bursts of chaos seemed contained and short-lived – at least until July 2020, when dozens of prisoners at a unit in South Texas slipped out of their cells and took a guard hostage. They stripped him naked in the shower before eventually releasing him, largely unharmed. Apparently, though, that wasn’t enough to prompt any system-wide fixes, because a few weeks ago a very similar situation unfolded at a different unit, hundreds of miles away. 

This time, the agency underplayed the extent of the chaos until one staffer leaked me an internal report detailing the day’s “serious incidents.” At the top of a laundry list of Funfortunate events – men throwing feces, guards pepper-spraying people for suicide attempts – was a long entry about a “disturbance” at the Jordan Unit in the Texas Pandhandle, where roughly 30 prisoners started fires and “manipulated cell doors” to slip out (in case you’re wondering, the fire alarms don’t work either).

But none of those disturbances and “serious incidents” came anywhere near the Texas prison system’s most serious security failure in recent years.

On a hot Thursday in May, two armed prison guards were transporting roughly two dozen men from lockups in North Texas south to Huntsville, a centralized stopover point for men headed to other units for medical appointments or court dates or new housing assignments. One of the prisoners on board that day – former Mexican Mafia member Gonzalo Lopez – slipped out of his hand cuffs and hijacked the bus on an empty rural road, ultimately stabbing one of the guards before vanishing into the woods. He spent three weeks on the run, then murdered five people before police killed him in a shoot-out south of San Antonio. The escape and killings made national news – but only briefly, sandwiched between coverage of Uvalde and the fall of Roe. 

Yet, even though public interest has largely moved on, the people inside Texas prisons haven’t. For them, the escape ushered in a series of lockdowns and restrictive new policies.

Some prisoners filed pro se lawsuits, and others reached out to me – occasionally through letters, but mostly through contraband cell phones, the only unmonitored means of communication where they can speak without fear of retaliation. 

Of the people I spoke to, one particularly stuck with me, so I’m sharing his reaction to the escape in his own words – lightly edited for space and clarity. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation if he were identified – and when you read his words, you’ll understand why.

When I woke up the morning after the escape, I looked at my phone and I saw I had a message with a link to a breaking news story. It said a guy at Hughes who was in the Mexican Mafia escaped off the bus.

That was the second time since I’ve been in that someone escaped while being transported to a medical facility. Some years back, a guy from Estelle Unit high-security had medical restrictions where he couldn’t walk, so he was in a wheelchair. One time, before he had to go to the prison hospital in Galveston, [an employee] helped him get a gun. In the van on the way there, he passed out – or pretended to. So the guards went to the back of the van, and the guy pulled out a gun and took the van and got away. 

He got apprehended pretty fast; they found him near Houston a few days later. Afterward, they sent him to Bill Clements high-security in Amarillo, and they said he had a heart attack and died – but we all suspected it was really from the malicious treatment.

His escape didn’t really change anything about security, though. There was still no metal detector before you got on the bus, and even after that escape people would still bring their cell phones. But when that guy escaped in the wheelchair, the reason it didn't really have any effect was because didn’t nobody get hurt. (NOTE: When I asked the prison system for comment, a spokesperson clarified that there were some policy changes made following the Estelle escape, but did not specify what they were).

This escape now was different because it was a bad ending  – there was that massive manhunt, and five people got killed. When I heard that he killed people, the first thing that came to my mind was that TDC is about to retaliate against us for one individual’s actions. 

First, they locked us all down – a statewide lockdown, before they found him. And they started feeding us terribly. The food was spoiled. The peanut butter [in the sandwiches] started coming watered down. I know they said they were understaffed because of the escape, but the thing about that is that the inmates are the ones that cook the food so you don’t really need that much manpower. My only conclusion was that they was just going to make us suffer.

On top of that, we wasn’t getting out for rec, and we wasn’t getting out for showers. In the beginning, we didn’t get showers for a week and a half. And then the cell searching came into effect. It was just straight harassment. First, they would strip you out. Then you have to lift up your testicles, show them the bottom of each foot, squeeze your buttcheeks apart and squat and cough and then they chain you and you go shower. And then they have two dogs come through. And they come tear up your cell and it looks like a hurricane hit. They literally trash the cell. 

While they searched us, they’d complain that our bodies stank, just ridiculing people. They’d say that your cell smells like ass, that it smells like fish. They was making fun of people. But they wasn’t letting us out for showers. 

Then they just stopped talking about the escape. Maybe three weeks passed by. And then one day I woke up and the officers said they had killed him in a shoot-out.

That got me to thinking about if I’d escaped, how I’d have been in the woods for days. I used to take crank when I was a kid and I’d stay up days, not sleeping or eating. So I can understand that state of mind. But to be in the state of mind to kill a family like that, that was just beyond my understanding. I don’t condone killing people like that but everything else was bound to happen because security was so lax you could basically bring anything on the bus you wanted to, and it wasn’t that difficult to defeat the hand restraints.

I’ve been in the system for 19 years, and I’ve seen the ins and outs of how people move things on the bus. One time, I stabbed a dude on the bus. So I can understand how he could bring contraband. 

Plus, they were short of staff. There’s supposed to be two in the front of the bus and one in the back – and that’s their fault. But they’re using this situation to retaliate against us now. (NOTE: The prison spokesperson clarified that several years ago the agency changed its policy due to a lack of staff, and began permitting transfer buses to run with two guards instead of three. They reverted to the three-guard policy following the Lopez escape).

We can’t even purchase boots no more; they took all the boots away from ad seg inmates. But if they’d actually stuck to the policy, none of this would have happened. If they’d sat him in the boss chair – that’s a metal detector chair –- they would have found he had a weapon. 

Here’s the thing: He was in ad seg so just based on the living conditions back here, it puts you in a state of mind where the only thing on your side is hope – and that chain bus gave him hope. Because outside of that, you just basically dead man walking because of the lack of opportunities, the lack of programs, the living conditions. They treat you inhumane, you’re in a small concrete box 24 hours a day because they’re short on officers. So there’s no rec and no showers for day, or weeks. The air conditioning isn’t working, dudes are hollering and screaming and banging on their doors – that puts you in a bad state of mind. (NOTE: The prison spokesperson conceded that showers and recreation were “limited” following the escape).

And freedom is something that’s by any and all means necessary. So if the opportunity presents itself, who wouldn’t have took that chance? When you’re in a state of mind like that, it’s like you don’t have nothing to lose but a lot to gain. And I actually wished the guy the best - I hoped he would get away. And when it got into like three weeks of him not being apprehended, I thought he might be over in Mexico now and he could go start his second life. 

If I was in his situation, the only thing I wouldn’t have done is I wouldn’t have killed innocent people.