Hometown Prison Examines Its Texas Neighbors
Incarcerated readers of PLN will not soon get a chance to see Hometown Prison, a new documentary film released on February 27, 2024, which explores the relationship between some 80,000 people who make their home in Huntsville, Texas and the seven prisons there operated by the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). So here’s what it shows.
Although thousands of prisoners fill the lockups—there is room for 13,697 between the Byrd, Ellis, Estelle, Goree, Holliday and Wynne Units, as well as the 175-year-old State Penitentiary—students at nearby Sam Houston State University admitted to filmmaker Richard Linklater that it’s just something “everyone’s aware of” but “no one wants to talk about it.” Linklater, who spent his youth in Huntsville before finding Hollywood fame with films like Dazed and Confused and Boyhood, also talked to Dale Enderlin, a former teammate on the college baseball team, who recalled a 39-month prison stay when he routinely met men of color who had let themselves be coerced into false confessions.
Others interviewed included the manager at the bus station, who realized that he’d sold hundreds of thousands of one-way tickets out of town to men released onto Huntsville’s streets from the prisons, usually with enough “gate money” to make the purchase but little else. Advocating on their behalf, Linklater’s late mother became an activist. A civil rights lawyer she once dated, Bill Habern, recalled arriving in town in the 1970s and finding white supremacism like 1950s Mississippi. Huntsville’s first Black prison warden, Ed Owens, remembered the night of a prisoner’s execution, when the KKK demonstrated outside his home.
The cumulative effect of these interviews is massively depressing. Residents gaslight one another and themselves about the vast web of cells and razor wire in their midst. But Linklater found a few who couldn’t escape thinking about it—current and former prisoners and guards, beaten down by a brutal system they feel powerless to change. See: God Save Texas: Hometown Prison, HBO Documentary Films (2024).
Additional source: New Yorker