Amy Deibridge is busy preparing Espuma Coffee and Tea Emporium for the morning java rush. Her duties include setting out chairs, grinding coffee beans, and, although it isn't in her job description, holding four different newspapers behind the bar for Johnny Martinez. Martinez will be in between 9:30 and 10:00a.m, as he is every morning, to pick them up. Througout the day he will scan every page for news about the nation's prisons, then highlight, clip, and copy stories for inmates, reporters, and activists. This is just one part of his informal and ever-changing job description as director of the Prisoners' Defense Committee.
Sixty-two-year old Martinez, who was first incarcerated in 1953 for stealing cars, does not call himself head of anything. "I'm just a retired outlaw," he quips. "I never paid attention to how much time I spent in prison altogether. You can pretty much say I was ralsed there. I left all the shit that I was put through behind, but I also left my friends behind. I know what they are going through. I stay on top of the news because they are human beings in there. Who else is going to?"
Much has changed since the 1972 Ruiz case that first brought attention and eventual court-ordered reforms to Texas' prisons. Martinez was a courtroom witness in that case. These days, between the police brutality trial in New York City, Texas Chief Justice William Wayne's most recent court order stating that solitary confinement in Texas prisons is cruel and unusual punishment, and the state of Arizona's decision to require treatment
rather than incarceration for drug offenders. Martinez finds himself in the eye of a storm of inquiry into the state of the nation's incarcerated. Most of his work is at ground zero: visiting prisoners, writing letters, and asking questions. Lots of questions.
Martinez complains that he was recently taken off the visitor list of his longtime friend B.A. who is behind bars in Beaumont. "He has cancer and has had all this surgery and can't control his bladder," Martinez explains "and he has two sheets, and when one gets wet, he hangs it up to dry and uses the other one until that one gets wet. I was trying to get him some diapers, and they said I was being rude. I used the word shit. No one told him or me that I was taken off his list. They just did it."
This perceived impunity with prisoners' visitation rights has gotten the attention ofthe Texas ACLU, who recendtly circulated a letter to all death-row prisoners concerning visitation rules for Texas's death row prisoners. According to ACLU spokesperson Yolanda Torres, changes in the rules would give Texas Department of Criminal Justice's (TDCJ) Executive Director authority to suspend death row visitation for up 70 days for "secutity reasons"; give the Executive Director power to choose inmates' spiritual advisers for them; and give prison officials the right to limit death row prisoners
access to the media.
Martinez scoffs at citing "security reasons" for these changes.. "They can deny you a toothbrush in the name of security, and they can kill you. I never tried to escape. They use 'security reasons' for people they just don't like." But TDCJ Director of Public Information Glen Castlebury insists that the proposed changes are nothing new. "Maybe they are just now finding out what the existng rules are, Castlebury muses. 'About three months ago our General Counsel, Carl Reynolds, discovered that the Code of Criminal Procedure called for a board policy for death-row visitation and we realized that we didn't have one." What TDCJ did have was a series of lower level bureaucratic guidelines called administrative directives regarding visitation. According to Castlebury, Reynolds "just whipped that up into Board Policy language."
Martinez is dubious of incarceration lingo. He was there in the late 1950s and esny 1960s when George Beto ruled with "a baseball bat in one hand and a Bible in the other." Martinez says, "They changed a lot of wording back then too. The Texas Prison System became the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Thirty days of quarantine became the Diagnostic Center. Hell, they even started calling the pisser Isolitary confinement meditation."
Ongoing gang violence within prison walls, coupled with the Thanksgiving 1998 escape of Texas death row inmate Martin Gurule, has prompted officials to tighten security to unprecendented levels. Most new high-security prisons, five of which will be built in Texas by early next year, are stark, super-secure facilities that houses growing number of inmates in solitary cells with little or no human contact. Prison officials say this keeps inmates and staff safe. But in March, U.S. District Judge Williant Wayne justice wrote the opinion on the Ruiz case, which said that such isolation, known as administrative segregation. is unconstitutional.
An additional development partly prompted by the Gurule incident is the transfer of Texas' entire death row from the Ellis Unit just outside of Huntsville to the Terrel Unit about 50 miles away. This prison holds 3,000 inmates and will allow officials to house the state's 450 death row inmates in segregated cells. In addition, the work program on death row has been indefinitely suspended since Gurule's escape, and the ACLU cites TDCJ's proposed changes in visitation policy as a plot to permanently stop visitation. Castlebury denies the charges and says that the current rule allows for unlimited refusals of daily visitation without review. With new rule descriptions, the visitation suspension of 70 days corresponds to the maximum time available between TDCJ board meetings.
In their letter to death row pris oners, the'ACLU calls the pro posed board policy that would limit contact with the press "a mean-spirited attempt to limit YOUB access to those few media entities opposed to capital purtish ment, syttttpathetic to t'he wrong hilly convicted, or interested in exposing abusive guards."
Castlebury contends that media access often comes down to logistics." People have abused information in the past, I ain't gonna put this is writing, but Entertainment Tonight and Montel Williams and Oprah are not news media. And none of those independent filmmakers either. We have priorities and time restraints on who we can permit in. There is a difference between a show that needs six hours of film time and a Texas media current news story.
This ability of officials to "play God." as Martinez puts it, controls the public's image of inmates. "People don't see that they have old old men in jail as habitual criminals, old drug addicts who never got clean, old sick men. What good is it doing?"
This morning Martinez has just returned from prison where he visited his friend Standing Deer whom Peter Mathiesen's book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse made infamous as the whistleblower on the federal p1ot to murder Leonard Peltier. He says he told "The Deer" shout TDJC's ability to select prisoners' spiritual advisers. Standing Deer's most recent writings from prison details the virual prohibition of Native American religious practices, such as carrying medicine bags or conducting Sweat lodges. However, TDCJ holds that they need to prevent inmates from selecting what Castlebury calls "inappropriate spiritual advisors" from the Ku Klux Klan to an Iman of radical Muslim groups. Castlebury also says we will fight until the last court with Native Americans about that sweat lodge thing."
"It is Baptist or nothing with them," Martinez says with a laugh. He laughs alot. "Look, dude," he says. "They used to best me once a day and twice on Sundays. I just got tired of being kicked in the ass and being told to like it. Now I've just got to do what I do, keep talking about it. Sometimes people listen."
SAN ANTONIO
A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS: Martinez says he's a "retired outlaw" but to many people in the state prison system , he's the only hope they have for improving their living conditions.
- Return to Homepage
- Emergency Response Network, Bonnie Kerness and Anna Standing Deer
- Writings by Ronald Del Raine, Prison Activist
- Writings by Bonnie Kerness of the American Friends Service Committee (Prison Watch)
- Leonard Peltier and the Contemporary Indian Resistance in the United States: Excerpts from Akwesasne Notes
- Preface to Deceased Prisoner of War Bobby Gene Garcia's Poetry
- The Purple Prose and Poetry Pages by Anna Standing Deer
- Expressions of Sundiata Acoli, BLA Political Prisoner and Activist
- The Prisoners Defense Committee (San Antonio, Texas), John V. Martinez, Director
- Interview With John V. Martinez
- Texas Executes an Innocent Man
- Pamela Lynn Perillo, Death Row Inmate, Wins Her Appeal in the 5th Circuit Court
- Fidel Speaks on the Murder of Shaka Sankofa
- Poetry and Writing for Shaka Sankofa
- Issues Surrounding Mumia Abu-Jamal, Voice of the Voiceless
- Friends of Move Updates
- Writings by and about Standing Deer, Native American Political Prisoner and Spiritual Activist
