I guess you might call me a racist. I see myself as a realist, and that just means that I admit that I notice race in others (and in myself), and I know that some assumptions can be made based on race. Racism implies that those assumptions based on race are all negative. Some of my assumptions are negative, some of them are positive. Some of them don't qualify as good or bad at all - they just are.

I lead with that because I'm about to share a race-related observation. About once a month I spend a Sunday driving 3 hours to Gatesville (Murray Unit) to visit Marcy for 2 hours, then driving one hour to Marlin (Hobby Unit) to visit Catrina for 2 hours, and then driving the 3 hours back home. That's an 11-hour day if everything goes perfectly. Of course you have to factor in the pit stops, but the biggest thing that slows me down is going through the search. See, first ya hafta get outta your car, pop the hood, open all the doors, show your ID, and open any bags that might contain your personal unmentionables. I suppose the officers don't really care what sort of feminine products you've got. After that, they let you through and you park your car and walk up to the guard shack. There you might hafta wait in line for a little while. You go inside, take off your shoes, belt, hat, glasses, empty your pockets, and get the traditional TSA treatment. After the pat-down, you quickly redress (not that you're exactly naked), and you get to go inside. The prison does scheduled count times during the day, and you'd just better hope you didn't get checked in right at count time. That would mean that you'd have to sit there and stare at your own folded hands for about an hour. But that's the part where you get to contemplate the fact that you ARE in prison, and this must be a little taste of what it feels like to have nowhere to go, nowhere to be, no control over the situation... Just waiting.

I bet you're wondering what all of that has to do with race. Well, it really doesn't. But as I was sitting and waiting this time, I was looking around me at the other folks in the slammer, visitors, inmates and officers, and I started noticing that (at the Hobby Unit) most of the folks were black and Hispanic. Hmm. Then I got to thinking, ya know, Gatesville's prison population does seem a bit on the white side. So I thought, surely they don't really segregate prisons. Can they even do that?? I looked it up when I got back home, and sure enough there was a court case in Texas... Desegregation resulted from Lamar v. Coffield (1977), a class action civil suit that forced the Texas prison system to racially integrate its double cells.

I guess I can see how it might make things easier to separate inmates by race. I think they separate by length of sentence (Hobby Unit has more people with longer sentences), so maybe it only looks like the separation is by race because the blacks and Hispanics are getting longer sentences?? We've heard talk of that going on, ya know. It's an interesting thing to ponder and maybe even pursue. Segregation by race isn't nearly as big a concern as is the fact that there is still no air conditioning in Texas prisons. It was well above 105 degrees almost every day last week. People keep talking about "take care of your pets" but who's talking about the inmates??

But my conclusion is not based on race, and I hope it's not a race-related thing because here's the deal: The "black prison" (Hobby) is way nicer to visit than the "white prison" (Murray). It's not because the razor wire is prettier at one place or the paint is less chipped at the other. Nope, it's the guards/officers checking in the visitors. Hobby is matter-of-fact, get you in, get you out, no nonsense. Murray wants to smile at you and make you feel good while they waste half your day. And from what I've seen, the Hobby officers treat the inmates better than the Murray officers treat theirs. Just little observations. I don't mean to slander the good name of a TDCJ unit, but I'm just passing on what I know.