DannyBoyinExile

I’ll never forget the first time I was written up on the Wynne Unit. I was at work in the hallway (this was several years ago), and a Sergeant told me I needed to go to the Captain’s office. I stepped in, stood at attention, and said, “Sir, yes sir!” Just Kidding. Actually I said something like, “You called for me?” Being summoned to a Captain’s office is never a good thing, I just assumed it was something he needed me to do, work-wise.
He told me, “I’m investigating a grievance.”
I was like, “I haven’t written any grievance!” So he clarified. “No, someone wrote a grievance on YOU.”
A grievance form is our official means of filing a complaint about something – which is almost always against the Administration, or at least a guard. But not always. (I was just lucky, I guess!)
He told me, “Someone on A4 is complaining that you come around and sweep the run before they come out for dayroom – and mark all the tables or seats for your homeboys, so they have nowhere to sit.”
I’m like, what? It’s bad enough that an inmate wrote me up for something, which is really a No-No – or at least, it used to be. Ironically, A4 is the wing that houses the G3 offenders, who all have at least a fifty year sentence. They try to act (and talk) like they are stone-cold killers because they live there. And they filed a grievance on ME?
I told the Captain, “Sir, I’ll be honest with you. I HAVE put people’s stuff on a table or bench for them, from time to time. But I don’t even know them! I could care less who sits where – I was just doing the favor for them, because they asked me to.” (Apparently, no good deed goes unpunished!)
He said, “Well, don’t do it anymore, because they’re complaining about it,” and that was that. I wish he’d have given me the grievance form and let me post it on their dayroom wall – but that wasn’t about to happen, even though they don’t like grievance writers any more than we do.
That’s reality, in today’s TDCJ. Before the 1980s, it was the Building Tender Era. That’s when they had inmates (“Building Tenders” or “Turnkeys”) doing the job of guards, to an extent. They abolished the building tender system, by court order, around 1983.
The 1980s was the Gang Era. That’s when gangs such as the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, and Texas Syndicate sprouted up, and decided that THEY’D run things instead. There were over fifty homicides within a two year span, along with hundreds of stabbings (where they were simply lucky enough not to die) – including quite a few ex-building tenders, who EVERYONE hated, because they were practically inmate guards.
So TDCJ responded by starting its Ad-Seg program, where an inmate was kept in seg PERMANENTLY, simply because they were confirmed (or even suspected, in some cases) of being gang members. Believe it or not – some of them have been in seg ever since then! They have no desire to renounce their membership and go back to general population, because GP isn’t the same as it was for them, and some of them have it better in seg than they ever would in population.
The 1990s was the Gladiator Era. There was no longer any order or discipline among inmates, without the building tenders or gangs to enforce it – so people preyed on each other, and felt that whatever they COULD do was permissible. Might is Right, in other words.
TDCJ’s reaction to that was to start its Safe Prisons Program – which is the era we’re in now (the 2000s). Now they zealously (or even overzealously!) crack down on any sort of violence, so the whole culture has changed. Today you’ll see inmates doing things that they NEVER could’ve gotten away with before. (Like… ahem… writing grievances on each other!) Some people will still do whatever they feel like doing, simply because they don’t care about cases or losing good time. For better or worse, though, TDCJ is a much calmer place than it was before. I often hear people say things like, “I wish it would go back to the way it used to be!” Which is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I always tell them, “If that’s what you want – go beat somebody up, or stab somebody! Nobody is stopping you.” They don’t really want that, they just want people to THINK they do. The first case I ever got in TDCJ was for stabbing an inmate, and only a moron would want to live in a place where they HAD to do things like that.
I don’t like some of the things I see today, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. And I have to admit that many of the policies they changed were because of what WE did in the first place. Our actions caused these changes, and if we want to make things better, it will be our actions (and not our frivolous grievances) that will make it that way. So says DannyBoy.