The Political Dynamics of Justice Reform in The U.S.

administrators in a number of states, though not Texas, have become outspoken critics
of solitary confinement.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice reports that about 3 percent of state
prisoners are housed in extreme isolation, which would place Texas in the bottom third
of reporting states. But Texas leads the country by far in the number of prisoners
serving long periods of time in solitary confinement. Nearly 70 percent of all the
prisoners in the country who have been isolated for six or more years are housed in
Texas state prisons.
Solitary confinement in Texas is more austere and restrictive than in other states. A high
proportion of segregated inmates in Texas state prisons have been diagnosed with
mental illnesses. Denied social contact, people housed in solitary confinement get
worse at relating to others. Until very recently, the TDCJ routinely released hundreds of
people from solitary confinement directly to the streets each year without any step-down
or transition programs.
Incidents of major use of force against prisoners have increased about 50 percent over
the last decade in Texas state prisons, likely due to chronic staffing shortages, high staff
turnover, inexperienced guards, and prisons that get brutally hot in the summer.
Thousands of untrained guards work in jails across Texas, thanks to a loophole that
permits jails to employ temporary guards for up to a year. The deadly consequences of
this loophole were shockingly apparent in the video of the death of Andy DeBusk, who
was coming down from a meth high in a privately run jail outside of Fort Worth when he
died of asphyxiation after being pepper-sprayed and shackled by poorly trained guards
on Christmas Eve 2016.
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