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Suicide Exposes Squalor in Texas Prison
This is a Monday, July 2, 2007 image of the Dickens County Correctional Center, located two miles south of Spur, Texas. Inmate Scot Noble Payne committed suicide on March 4, less than seven months after he was sent to the Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind. Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show that Idaho conducted little monitoring of its out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their familes and a prison inspector. |
Texas Prison Camp - Future American Gulag?
A detention camp in Taylor Texas that currently holds hundreds of rebuffed asylum seekers who legally entered the country, half of which are children swept up in midnight raids, is a potential prime location for the enforced transfer of American citizens during a time of national emergency. The privatized Hutto jail, which is also administered by Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S. on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal concentration camps. |
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Texas Prison Rodeo History
The Texas Prison Rodeo was launched in 1931 during the depression years, being first held at the baseball park outside the "Walls" Unit. The baseball park, located on the east side of the prison, was normally home to the Walls Tigers baseball team. The rodeo was the brainchild of Lee Simmons, General Manager of the Texas Prison System. Simmons envisioned it as entertainment for employees and inmates. Welfare Director Albert Moore headed up the organization and planning for the early rodeos along with Warden Walter Waid and livestock supervisor, R. O. McFarland. The attendants included a small crowd of local citizens and prison. Simmons realized he had a winner on his hands. Two years later, over l5,000 fans traveled to Huntsville for the show. Soon, the Texas Prison Rodeo was drawing the largest crowds for a sporting event in the state of Texas. With a lifespan of more than 50 years, the Prison Rodeo became a Texas tradition, held every Sunday in October. Crowds grew to exceed 100,000 in some years. |
The Daring Escape of The Texas 7
It was 11:20 a.m. when guards and supervisors returned 20 inmates that were assigned to the maintenance department to their housing areas and went to lunch, which Rivas and his cohorts had counted on. Earlier, Rivas and his gang had convinced Patrick Moczygemba, a maintenance supervisor, to allow them to remain behind to wax and seal the maintenance department’s floors. That, they figured correctly, would be effective in keeping most of the other prisoners, as well as the guards, out of the area. They had also convinced Moczygemba to allow them to take their lunch in a “picnic spread” in the maintenance area and use food that they had purchased at the commissary instead of eating with the rest of the prison population in the dining area. It was a privilege afforded the best-behaved inmates, and Moczygemba had agreed to allow them this “luxury.” Since it was not uncommon for this group of prisoners to be assigned special projects in the maintenance department, Moczygemba agreed to stay and watch Rivas, as well as Joseph Garcia, 29, Randy Halprin, 23, Larry Harper, 37, and Donald Newbury, 38, while the other supervisors went to lunch. Mark Burgess, another maintenance supervisor, allowed Patrick Murphy, 39, one of the inmates under his authority, to also remain in the department for lunch to assist the others in completing the project. |
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