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Ritter 1
Sandra Ritter
Professor B.
Government 2306
8 July 2016
Texas Prisons
Prisons in Texas are more common than back in the 1980’s. In this essay you
will know what goes on inside a Texas Prison. I found four articles that I will write about
that tells you how it is for the inmates while incarcerated in Texas. I also have worked
inside a prison as a guard. Every article I found to write about is because I have seen it,
but not all of it. In these articles according to these authors which include Robert S.
Fong, Tony Fabelo, Ph.D., Jay Nordlinger, J Keith Price, and Susan Coleman they go
into depth of what and how inmates survive, or not survive.
Robert S. Fong, Ph.D. has studied Criminal Justice in many states, including
Texas. He served from 1984 to 1988 as a special monitor for the Texas Department of
Corrections in lawsuits, like Ruiz v. Estelle. According to the article that Fong wrote, it
tells you about all the organizational characteristics of gangs, and how they started out
with a couple to ending up with over a hundred. The author goes into details of when
the Texas prisons had inmates as guards called “building tenders”. The writer states
that building tenders are inmates that are carefully selected by the prison officials to
help maintain order among the inmates. The author studies show that Texas
Department of Corrections is the second largest prison system in the United States, and
was virtually free from inmate gang disruptions for decades. It was in 1980, when it was
declared unconstitutional by Chief Federal District Judge William Wayne Justice in a
Ritter 2
historic prison lawsuit, Ruiz v Estelle. The lawsuit involved over 300 witnesses and took
161 days for the trial, until June 1, 1982 when the immediate elimination of the building
tender system. That is what created new crises for Texas prison administrators a
shortage of security staff. Up until then Texas had only one known inmate group called
the Texas Syndicate, which was a gang of self-protection formed by a group from
California. After the ending of the program, that is when the administrators nearly lost
control over their prisons. Fong studied how the gangs started up by organizing
themselves during the chaos. In March 1983, it shows only one prison gang, which was
the Texas Syndicates with only 56 members. It didn’t take long to discover that after two
and a half years later, eight inmate gangs and a few small groups formed with a
membership of over 1,400 in total. The writer also states the other big gang, which is
