Texas Holds 1 in 41 Prisoners in Solitary Confinement
As of March 2024, Texas state prisoner Ricky Smith, 56, had spent over 30 years in solitary confinement. Though the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) calls it “security detention,” he is one of 3,141 state prisoners held alone in a cell about the size of a bathroom 23 hours a day, according to spokesperson Amanda Hernandez.
That’s just about one out of every 41 of TDCJ’s 129,653 prisoners “on hand” in August 2023. The number has declined dramatically, Hernandez was quick to point out, and is now two-thirds lower than it was in 2007, when more than 1 in 17 state prisoners was in isolation. But Smith’s case illustrates a bug in the program that TDCJ uses to hold prisoners in solitary, one that keeps looking backward further in time for a security risk that inevitably justifies prolonging it.
A December 2023 report published by the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) and the University of Texas (UT) School of Law Civil Rights Clinic called the state “a national leader in solitary confinement,” noting that second-place Florida holds only half as many prisoners in isolation. Though TDCJ stopped calling it “solitary confinement” in 2017, only 76 prisoners were released from isolation then. The rest are now in “administrative segregation,” “protective custody,” “security detention,” “pre-hearing isolation,” “isolation pending an offender protection investigation” or “state jail special management.” TCRP found that state prisoners in these types of High Restrictive Housing (HRH) are more likely to be non-White and more likely to die in custody than other TDCJ prisoners. Worse, they are at higher risk of suicide, which already claims the life of one state prisoner every week. See: Solitary Confinement in Texas: A Crisis with No End, TCRP and UT (Dec. 2023).
Smith’s original crime was assaulting a cop in Harris County when he was 19 years old. But his scheduled release in 1988 got pushed back 85 years after attempting escapes from two prisons. He was then sent to the Coffield Unit, where in 1993 he stole a truck from the prison parking lot and led law enforcement on a high-speed chase away from the lockup, only to be picked up two days later. Despite maintaining a clean disciplinary record for over three decades, Smith remains segregated. “I haven’t done anything since then but sit back here, slowly rotting,” he said, but TDCJ officials “keep using that over and over again to justify keeping me here.”
“The record indicates that the offender has repeatedly committed criminal episodes that indicate a predisposition to commit criminal acts upon release,” the state Board of Pardons and Paroles declared in denying Smith release after his fourth and most recent petition.
“There’s no way I can erase that history,” Smith said.
In cases like his, where a prisoner demonstrates good behavior and poses minimal risk, the financial toll on taxpayers is hard to justify. It cost the state $61.63 a day to hold a prisoner in isolation, but just $42.46 in the general prison population in 2020. The human cost is unpardonable. The United Nations has pushed for a global ban on solitary confinement since 2011, citing significant risks to mental and physical health.
“Humans aren’t really designed for this sort of environment,” Smith agreed.
Sources: The Austin Chronicle, Texas Observer
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