Texas Department of Criminal Justice

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is responsible for statewide criminal justice for adult offenders, including managing offenders in state prisons, state jails, and private correctional facilities.

Quotes

• Every prisoner confined in Texas is forced to work without pay. ... Only those very few with documented serious medical or mental health conditions which impair work performance, and those held in the TDCJ’s torturous segregation units, are not made to work. Often those with documented medical and mental health exemptions are still forced to work – their exemptions being simply ignored. Those who refuse to work are punished, thrown in segregated confinement, and their imprisonment is typically extended.
  • Kevin Rashid Johnson "Razor Wire Plantations: Amerika’s Ongoing Addiction to Slavery, Cruelty and Genocide," Turning the Tide, vol. 27, no. 1 (2014)

• TDCJ prisoners still do everything from growing all the food we eat (and which the TDCJ also sells commercially for profit), raising livestock and crops on hundreds of thousands of acres of TDCJ-owned farmland (which are aptly called “colonies”), to building and maintaining the prisons that hold us. The prisoners plant, tend and harvest everything from cotton, beans, carrots and potatoes, to peanuts and more. This work is performed by “hoe squads” of prisoners using primitive manual labor methods like those of the field slaves of yesterday or Third World peasants, while armed guards on horseback “oversee” them. The prisoners, like the old slaves, refer to these overseers as “bossman”. To see one of these teams at work is to witness a scene like something ripped from an old slave movie.
  • Kevin Rashid Johnson "Razor Wire Plantations: Amerika’s Ongoing Addiction to Slavery, Cruelty and Genocide," Turning the Tide, vol. 27, no. 1 (2014)