A Love Story That Upended the Texas Prison System
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
I'm pretty surprised, given that he died in 1991 and I figure he'd be universally seen as a terrible person. But he's noted in several places as a master of PR, so perhaps that continued after his death, despite causing the death and enslavement of countless people and losing a Supreme Court case related to his literal enslavement of prisoners.
I wonder if he's got fans monitoring things for him after his death? Some form of post-mortem reputation service? In any case, I'm disgusted that someone who literally enslaved more than 16,000 people for over a decade seems to have gotten away with it scot-free. I figured that in the age of the Internet, someone with a horrific legacy like this would never get away with it, but indeed nearly everything about him I can find is positive, and he's even got prisons named after him operating today.
I mean, come on! He literally used violence to force prisoners to lie under oath to attack an attorney! He operated a system where prisoners were forced to mutilate themselves in order to survive.
From the article:
One former prisoner named Clyde Sewell told a graphic account of an incident in which three inmates, all supposedly shot by McAdams while they were trying to escape, were laid out as examples, alive but bleeding profusely, at the entrance to the dining hall. “We had to walk through the blood to get to the dining room,” Sewell testified.
Can you imagine a hell like this? Can you imagine someone who ruled over it for over a decade and knew about every little detail and was responsible for all this horrific carnage? It's absolutely insane. These things are crimes against humanity.
Being responsible for this shouldn't mean some mild mention of "Beto was the lead defendant in 405 U.S. 319 in which the court upheld a Free Exercise claim on the basis of the allegations..." in the last paragraph of an otherwise fairly uninteresting Wikipedia article. It should mean that the person is permanently condemned for the monster they were.
That's what I'm complaining about: that somehow, in today's society where people seem to think you can't escape the past, true monsters do escape with their reputation unscathed. And that unsettles me.
Most of the people writing about Beto are going to be learning about him from other people involved in the criminal justice field. They aren't going to value the word of a defense attorney and some convicts.
They also likely don't see many problems in his acts, it's not like the TDCJ or the US has ever really given a shit about prisoners rights.
Wikipedia articles should be neutral, fact based, and objective. If there is something important missing then add it neutrally with a citation.
When Wikipedia articles aren't neutral they become a failed shitstorm. For example see the article on Social Justice versus Social Justice Warrior, one of which is not neutral and locked from any edits.
But those articles are irrelevant to the discussion. I've contributed to Wikipedia for years and I've got a good idea of how to add things from a neutral and objective point of view. My point is exactly that the existing article is not objective. For example, pretend the article of the Charleston white supremacist mass murderer said the following:
"Roof was involved in the controversy of the events of June 17, 2015. After a flurry of media attention, he became the lead defendant in the trial United States v. Roof (2:15-cr-00472), which was noted for the request for a bench trial..."
The above is entirely correct, and written in a neutral, flat tone, but it completely misrepresents the situation. By noting tiny, irrelevant details like the request for a bench trial and the criminal number, the article both becomes uninteresting and hides the truth. If you read the snippet you wouldn't get the idea that he was a mass murderer.
The same thing applies to the article about George Beto. He was objectively a monster. He used prisoners as literal cotton picking slaves, he operated a system that forced prisoners to mutilate themselves, and his direct subordinates shot people for no reason and let them bleed to death in an occupied dining hall "as examples". These things are not speculation, they're not partisan comments on Twitter, they're not even reporting in a possibly-biased newspaper - they're proven facts that were litigated to the highest courts of the land! These things are not even buried in court documents from decades back, they've been reported on and published! There is no reason for them to not be on Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, his page is about as dry and non-negative as it possibly could be. It reads like intentionally obfuscated, reputation-managed doublespeak, and only makes reference to some of the things he was convicted of in vague ways. It's a tragedy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_Beto#Scrubbed_arti...?
The law and courts have long recognized that some people aren't capable of writing their own petitions for relief, and need the help of a 'next friend' because no attorney is available to help the disadvantaged make their case. Just now I searched for "Jailhouse lawyer habeas", and found that Columbia Law School has a manual [0] to help prisoners assert their rights. Habeas corpus is one way of presenting a case to the court that says your rights were violated (the manual has a comprehensive chapter on this type of filing).
[0] A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, 11th Ed. - http://jlm.law.columbia.edu/viewprevioused/
This manual would have been helpful, but it didn't show up in my searches 3 years ago... I just used Wikipedia, a template from a Florida law firm, and the legislature's listing of the state's statutes to figure out how to petition the court. The judge ruled that the hospital's authority to hold my friend against her will had expired, and that she was to be released. I made the little mistake of thinking the hospital would care about the judge's order, after their attorney blew off the hearing...
I think most state prisons have libraries for prisoners to use. Most county jails are terrible places with no meaningful access to libraries.
it's darkly ironic that beto's prediction of inmate-run prisons would come to pass, though for many reasons beyond just administration reform.
the old system broke down because the guards and older inmates could no longer effectively keep the new prisoners in line. the power vacuum was eventually filled by the race-based gangs we know today, which stepped in to effectively provide governance where the state was no longer able to. the massive availability of drugs provided them with a business model and incentive for creating stability among the other prisoners, enforced by ruthless violence where necessary.
it's still this way today in american prisons. the state of course formally controls the facility, but the gangs exert extraordinary power underneath the surface, over the relations and arrangements that aren't legible to the administration. i'm not making any normative claims about which arrangement was better, but it's a pretty interesting story. i'm giving a very brief summary of what i read in this book:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=A6D69CBF4ADEEA046A4...
If I understand correctly, and if the source is correct and not significantly misleading, he's a murderer, a human trafficker and an influence peddler. This guy should have gotten death sentence.
Worth reading.
Complaint written on TP. Hard to imagine that hell.
But my reaction is the same as yours -- maybe it was just the spectacular pacing by the article writer, but this story feels like it would make a great and timely Netflix original. Like, the Green Mile meets I Love You Philip Morris.
unfortunately; they are now banned ... "just for prisons". the courts will not enforce, or create any new consent decrees... "because it denies agencies their discretion".
the same discretion, that leads to rampant abuses in prisons and "detention" camps.