Though keeping prisoners locked up may seem like the most basic task for a corrections department, the inability to do so isn’t unique to Texas last year in Arizona, the prison system director abruptly retired after an investigation into the agency’s failure to fix broken locks even when they were linked to assaults and deaths. “The issue of lock manipulation could not be taken more seriously,” he said. Jeremy Desel, a spokesman for the prison system, said that assertion “is not just false, it is completely offensive,” adding that incidents in which prisoners break out of their cells are always considered emergencies that are referred to the highest levels of the agency for review. “Officer deaths and assaults are just not a priority for the agency.”
“Manipulation of locks is nothing new,” said Lance Lowry, a corrections officer and union official in Huntsville, Texas. Prison officials have known about the faulty locks for years, according to retired senior staff. At Briscoe, officials say dozens of prisoners swarmed a day room and took a 21-year-old guard hostage for more than two hours. But sometimes they get violent, with guards or with each other. Sometimes when they “pop out” of their cells, they just mill around and talk. More than a dozen current and former corrections-department employees told The Marshall Project about prisoners opening up their locked cells from Amarillo to Texarkana. At Briscoe and many other prisons across Texas, prisoners can let themselves out of their cells whenever they want, sometimes using tools as simple as a shoelace and a bar of soap. This article was published in partnership with Texas Monthly.īut one thing helped make the chaos possible: lame locks.
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