Huntsville’s Prison Economy Reveals the Complexity of Incarceration Business
Melinda was the “Prison Town Queen” of Huntsville until she was let go due to her mother’s criminal brawl, from The Marshall Project
We go to The Marshall Project for this week's long read by Keri Blakinger, read the whole article “The Rise and Fall of a Prison Town Queen” We include key excerpts below to convince you it’s worth your time.
There too, are people struggling with poverty and crime on the other side of the prison business
For most people, prisons are a place of loss and heartache. But for Melinda they were a place to start over, to build a life outside the long shadow of her outlaw family. When she worked there, Huntsville had seven lockups in town, plus two more nearby. There were sprawling acres of prison farms, run-down factories powered by prison labor, and the network of administrative offices that formed the nerve center of the biggest state prison system in the country. Not to mention the prison museum, the criminal justice college, and the aging building that housed the state’s death chamber.
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The flare-up also revealed much about the state of the nation’s prisons and the struggling people we rely on to run them. For many, the attraction of working in the incarceration industry isn’t some innate joy derived from locking people up or abusing them. Instead, it’s an opportunity, maybe their only opportunity, to escape a life of poverty and hold down stable jobs with good benefits. And to aspire to making middle-class salaries, even in places where their other main options are working at Waffle House or Walmart. But there’s a price to be paid for those jobs, by workers and their communities. When it comes to American incarceration, no one escapes undamaged.
Underscored
As the locals will tell you, being a prison town has side effects. Some are small: Huntsvilleans know not to go to Walmart on the first of the month, when it’s crowded with corrections employees who just got paid. Residents also know how to look past the dozens of road signs directing visitors to the prisons and administrative buildings. And they don’t blink at film crews coming to gawk at Prison Town, USA.
Other side effects of living in a prison town are bigger. The sheer acreage of property owned by the state cuts into the local tax base. Many of the thousands of prison jobs in town don’t pay particularly well; the starting salary for a guard is just over $36,000. Almost a third of the residents live in poverty, as compared to 13.4% statewide, and the median household income is barely half of the Texas average. Nearly two-thirds of Huntsville students qualify for free lunch.
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The locals don’t appreciate the notoriety associated with being the site of the country’s busiest death chamber. Plus, the prison where most of the condemned men live is actually an hour to the east.
“It just so happens that death row is in Livingston,” Stark said. “But nobody ever hears that. You just hear, ‘Oh, I'm from Huntsville, Texas,’ and they're like: ‘How much do they execute everybody?’ And that's the kind of negativity that people are trying to get away from.”
But, he added, on the rare occasions that state politicians have suggested moving the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s home base to Austin, locals have objected. They don’t want to lose the jobs. And even for the agency itself, he pointed out, the move wouldn’t make financial sense.
“One, because the rent's a lot cheaper around here than it is in Austin,” he said. “But also, TDCJ is part of the community lifeblood.”
Bottom line
For most of the two decades Melinda worked for the prison system, Texas kept more people behind bars than any other state. Over a two-year period in the mid-1990s, the incarcerated population nearly doubled as the state cut back on parole releases and opened 43 new prisons.
Even Huntsville, the original prison town, got another facility — though a lot of the new lockups were in West and North Texas. Some insiders said the far-flung units diluted Huntsville’s power, though the sheer size of the system might have played a role as well. By the time the prison population peaked in 2010, more than 170,000 people were behind bars.
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When Melinda walked out of work on her last day after 21 years, she said, it felt like she left behind a part of herself. The worst part was that she didn’t quite know why it all happened.
Jeremy Desel, a prison spokesman who has also since left the agency, blamed the decision on questions about the couple’s integrity that came up in the course of an internal investigation. “Any action on the part of an employee that jeopardizes the integrity or security of TDCJ institutions, calls into question the employee’s ability to perform effectively and efficiently in the employee’s position, or casts doubt upon the integrity of the employee is prohibited,” he said in July 2019. But he refused to specify what they had allegedly done or what the investigation found.
Melinda later learned that prison officials told the state unemployment agency that they may have fired her because of bad publicity stemming from news articles about her mother’s arrest. But those articles weren’t published until weeks after she lost her job, and the state’s workforce commission eventually said the agency was wrong and sided with Melinda.
After she and Wayne lost their jobs, they had to move their belongings out of the regional director’s house, uprooting their lives under a cloud of suspicion. A few weeks later, they sold Chasin’ Tail and started living full-time at the lakeside townhouse where we first met. That day, in September 2019, she was still bitter.
Read the whole article here.
Resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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