Chapter One

There are two prisons in Beeville, Texas. One sits on the site of a recently closed naval air base and is known as the Garza Unit. The other is known as the McConnell Unit.

Beeville, like many prison towns, is a remote place. It lies on the brushy plains of South Texas between San Antonio and Corpus Christi, but it is no closer than an hour's drive to either of them. I had come here for many reasons, but chiefly because I thought I could see in Beeville both the old prison world and the new. In Texas prisons they still do things much as they have for a hundred years. Many of the "units," as the prisons here are known, are run as large penal farms—plantations essentially, some spanning more than ten thousand acres—and the farms grow or raise most everything, from hogs to jalape'os. The crops are tended by inmates, who work the fields under armed guards on horseback, trailed by a pack of hounds (in case a convict tries to escape). Almost no place in America still treats inmates like this, and I had wanted to see this piece of living history before it died.1 I also wanted to see the modern prison town, and few places seemed to fit the bill bette ... read full excerpt from: Going Up the River ebook