Unfair Park from p4 is there because they bounced a $30,000 check, and the woman behind you killed two of her kids.” The Fort Worth facility houses many women with special medical needs, and it was those women who June (not her real name) was most worried about during the winter storm. “Some of the women who were living with us and going through this were in their 70s,” she says. “Other women are anemic, or on oxygen. A couple hours after losing wa- ter, pandemonium breaks out because some people are panicking. It’s like a refugee situ- ation in that place.” The picture she paints of Carswell during the storm is eerily similar to the stories shared by incarcerated people in Houston, Galveston and Dallas: The intermittent power plunged the buildings into freezing temps. The only warmth was found in scarce blankets crusted with dirt. With the water out and nothing available to drink, people scrambled to discreetly steal milk cartons or whatever liquid they could get their hands on. The feces piled up and no one, including corrections officers, knew what to do. But there is one maddening aspect that makes June’s story stand out from the oth- ers: Her unit didn’t have running water, but the building next door did. “Imagine being locked in a building without something you literally need to live, and you know the peo- ple next door have it,” June says. Some people carted water from one building to the next using trash bags, but it was hardly enough to flush a toilet, let alone drink. (The corrections officers on duty didn’t share that there was a boil-water no- tice in effect.) Then, as toilets overflowed, people re- sorted to fishing frozen feces out of the toi- let bowls, while others tried to find discreet places to urinate. “You think, ‘If I really need to go, I can find somewhere,’” June says. “But then you multiply that by 250 people.” A sewage backup created what June de- scribes as “ankle-deep feces and wastewa- ter” throughout her building. According to her, corrections officers let that water sit there for nearly a day. That is perhaps the most frustrating part of all: the lack of action and communication from the people up top. “They made the officers be the face of their inaction,” June says of the prison’s leader- ship. “There was no communication, no res- olution.” In general, incarcerated people have scant opportunities to speak out. Their phone time is limited, and in-person visita- tions have been unavailable throughout much of the pandemic. Many incarcerated people (including Mason McCormick in Dallas) are “lost in the system” for months at a time, unaware of what’s happening with their cases or awaiting court dates that are repeatedly rescheduled. Another option is to write and file a grievance, as many people in lockup did dur- ing last year’s winter storm. In Galveston, people incarcerated in the 6 6 county jail wrote that the lack of water was starting to infringe on their civil rights. A Mike Brooks couple bottles of water a day won’t cut it, they said. “If you can’t provide my basic necessi- ties,” a woman named Allison wrote, “you need to bond me out. I’m starting to feel sick from dehydration. I have a fraud charge. I didn’t kill anyone, and I don’t think I should be treated this poorly.” A man named Keith wrote, “We haven’t had drinking water or showers in two days. This is unconstitutional. There’s hepatitis, HIV, COVID, who knows?” It may be tempting to view these stories as an anomaly, but many advocates say jails and prisons throughout Texas are home to horrible conditions all year long. “I had a woman call me this summer and say, ‘My brother’s in prison, and they’re not giving him water,’” says Amite Dominick, president of Texas Prisons Community Advocates. “There’s really not much for me to do other than call down there and say, ‘Why aren’t you giving him water?’” Dominick’s organization advocates for incarcerated people and their families, pri- marily focusing on the conditions behind bars. That involves a lot of education, partic- ularly on the issue of air conditioning. The majority of Texas prisons are not fully air-conditioned. “People have died with internal body temperatures of 106 to 109 degrees,” she says. “Meanwhile, if I were to leave my dog in a car, I’m going to jail. We wouldn’t treat dogs like this; how are we treating human beings like this?” Dominick has an answer to her own question: It’s all about politics. So many of Texas prisons are in various states of disre- pair, she says. These facilities are simply not fit to endure extreme cold or extreme heat, and because of the stigma surrounding in- carcerated people, there’s little political will to provide the funding needed for repairs or any changes that would improve living con- ditions. For instance, multiple legislative at- tempts to add air conditioning to scorching Texas prisons have failed in recent years. “The reality is, in Texas, we are cooking people in prisons,” state Rep. Terry Canales, a Democrat from Edinburg, said on the floor of the Legislature in 2021 in an effort to fund air conditioning. “This is the right thing to do, it is the humane thing to do, and it’s something we should have done a long time ago.” There is also little to no motivation to close or partially close some of Texas’ most decrepit jails and prisons. In Dallas, advo- cates like Cooper have cited the horror sto- ries of the winter storm as a key reason why parts of the county jail should be closed. Even some corrections officers agree with her. “We’re forced to work overtime because we simply don’t have enough people to staff the jail,” one officer told the Observer. “That means we’ve got people in here working multiple 14- or 16-hour days a week. If we closed parts of the jail, we wouldn’t have this problem anymore.” Several of their coworkers shared similar sentiments, and they all asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. Sheriff Marian Brown recently told The Dallas Morning News, “[W]e continue to work to get to a point where overtime is not a neces- sity,” but to Cooper, that misses the point. The way she sees it, closing part of the jail could solve multiple problems at once: The reduced space could encourage a reduction in low-level arrests, and in turn, corrections officers wouldn’t be as overwhelmed. Most importantly, conditions inside the jail could improve. Yet on the point of population reduction, Cooper continues to face red tape and road- blocks. “The Commissioners Court passes the buck to the sheriff, who passes the buck to the police, who pass the buck back to the Federal Medical Center, Carswell is a jail located in Fort Worth. sheriff,” Cooper says. “Some of them will say they want to see reductions, but are there real signs that they want to do something? No. When it comes down to really being the champion and pushing the needle forward, we don’t see anything.” Meanwhile, Cooper can’t shake the memory of some of the calls she received during last year’s winter storm. At the time, she was helping the loved ones of incarcer- ated people find any shred of information they could about their families. “So many mothers and partners and grandparents had no idea what was going on with their loved ones,” she says. “I could feel the pain in their voices.” T ammy Hinton was experiencing some deja vu this month. Hinton, Mason McCormick’s longtime girlfriend, was preparing for another freezing cold snap, this one called Winter Storm Landon. “It’s hard having him incarcerated, because we have a child together,” Hinton says. “So that means, while he is locked up, I’m having to do everything for our son by myself.” While Van Zandt is effusive and speaks passionately, McCormick is often stoic. He talks about his incarceration in a matter-of- fact tone, his voice rarely fluctuating. He is, above all else, unfailingly polite. “How’re you feeling?” he asks over the phone from Dallas County Jail. “You ready for the storm?” In his words, McCormick has been “in and out of jail quite a bit,” and as a result, he has a unique perspective on the inner work- ings of the system. Apart from a six-month stint in Johnson County Jail south of Fort Worth, he has spent the last two-and-a-half years incarcerated on drug charges in Dallas. During that time, he has befriended >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 FEBRUARY 10–16, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com
