Texas Tough

PRISONS & PUNISHMENT

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. — Oscar, Wilde.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former. — Horace Mann.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all. — Eldridge Cleaver.

While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. — Eugene V. Debs.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable. — George Bernard Shaw.

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood. —William Shakespeare.

“Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.” —Nathaniel Hawthorn.

Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long. — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is strong. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The history of penology is the saddest chapter in the history of civilization. — Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism. — Gustave de Beaumont & Alexis de Tocqueville

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. — Thomas Paine

TEXAS

There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else. — Pete Hamill, Boston Globe (1966).

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. — Henry David Thoreau

Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. — John Steinbeck.

Texas is rich in unredeemed dreams. — Larry McMurtry.

“We should go to war again, to make them take it back. — William Tecumseh Sherman.

Texas is a southern state masquerading as a Western state. — Michael Lind.

Texas is beginning to seep over the edges; Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, even California, feel its might impact, and if we were writing about Europe instead of the United States one might easily be tempted to a paragraph about Texas “imperialism.” — John Gunther, 1947.

Texas Justice

Write to me no more about prayer and religion; God is not on the Eastham State Farm; He has forsaken us; we are in the hands of devils. — Texas prisoner (1942).

To qualify as a competent court-appointed defense attorney in Texas means “having a pulse and a bar card.” —David Dow.

There’s tough. And then there’s Texas tough. — Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst.

You can’t work a convict without having him in some fear. — S. B. Maxey, prison physician (1915).

If you say you’re not scared, then you’re either stupid or crazy. — Texas prisoner.

RACISM & LEGACY OF SLAVERY

Although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence. — Alexis de Tocqueville.

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate. — Malcolm X.

…the policeman…moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country; which is precisely what, and where he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes. —James Baldwin.

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. …The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. —Thomas Jefferson.

…the practice of slavery became an institution. It grew, until every element of force in our civilization—the political arena, the sacred desk, the legislative hall, the academical chair—all—were wrapped in its dark shadow. — George Washington Cable.

I want to treat the negro justly and generously as long as he behaves himself, and when he doesn’t I want to drive him out of this country. — U.S. Senator Joseph Bailey.

Let no one delude himself that his work is done…While the races may stand side by side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow. We must overcome unequal history before we overcome unequal opportunity. —Lyndon Johnson.

Tho’ de slave question am settled, de race question will be wid us always, ‘til Jesus come de second time. It’s in our politics, in our justice courts, on our highways, on our side walks, in our manners, in our ‘ligion, and in our thoughts, all de day and every day. — Cornelius Holmes, former slave.

Whenever a colored man commits an unright action, upon his head is the guilt of only about one tenth of it & upon your heads & mine and the rest of the white race lies fairly and justly the other nine tenths of the guilt.” — Mark Twain.

Before the war we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him…But these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another. — Southern delegate to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1883).