Suicidal Texas Prisoners Held in Phone-Booth-Size “Containment Cages”
In an essay published by Slate on October 20, 2024, Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisoner Jeremy Busby admitted that even after 20 years behind bars, what he found when released from a 23-month solitary confinement in 2022 left him “shocked.”
It wasn’t the “containment cage,” which he’d been inside before when heading to or from solitary; Busby described it as “a contraption smaller than a telephone booth made of steel and mesh wire” that had “no toilet or sink” and “no room to lie down.” What shocked him was finding two nearby cages holding fellow McConnell Unit prisoners under CDO—“constant and direct observation”—while they waited for clearance from the mental health department or transfer to a mental health facility, “a process that often took days.”
As it turned out, each time a prisoner attempted self-harm, he was tossed in one of these cages. With no toilet, the wire mesh was clogged with feces, some leftover from previous prisoner occupants. For his feces, one enterprising prisoner saved the paper sack in which his meals arrived; Busby also saw a row of cereal cartons inside the cage where the man stored his urine.
“Housing prisoners in containment cages for days is a widespread and unchecked practice in certain Texas prisons,” Busby declared, noting they are also used in at least two other state prisons, the Gib Lewis Unit and John B. Connally Unit. At McConnell, seven cages stood side-by-side in an unused utility closet, where suicidal and mentally ill prisoners shouted and threw bodily waste at one another.
Two nonprofits, the Texas Civil Rights Project and Texas Prison Reform, asked for an investigation, but the TDCJ Independent Ombudsman reported in April 2023 that he could not “substantiate the allegation [that] staff violated policy … because a policy specifying length of time spent in [a holding cell] does not appear to exist.” The Prison Policy Initiative, another nonprofit, lodged a request for the policy, which was referred to the Texas Medical Board, which denied it to protect patient confidentiality. “So the official policy is still unknown,” Busby said.
Meanwhile another nonprofit, the Texas Justice Initiative, reported in June 2024 that the annual suicide rate in state prisons had nearly doubled from an average of 28.6 a year between 2005 and 2019 to 56 a year from 2020 to 2023.
Sources: Austin Chronicle, High Plains Public Radio, Slate