At 19, I stepped through the prison gates into the intestines of the Texas Prison System. Weeks earlier, Fred Gomez Carrasco and his female hostages had been shot dead by guards at the Walls Unit.

Prison is a place where monsters are made. 

People that knew Clyde Barrow, the head of the Bonnie and Clyde gang, would say, ”Clyde was a nonviolent petty crook, but that after his incarceration in a Texas prison he had changed for the worst.”

In 1931, Clyde and a fellow prisoner murdered a sexual predator. Clyde vowed when released that he would, ”someday return to prison to free the prisoners and kill the prison guards.” Clyde kept his word.  He returned to the Eastham Unit.  In the ensuing prison break a guard was killed and five convicts escaped. In 1935, the headlines of a newspaper story called the Eastham Unit, ”The most brutal prison in the nation. ”

I’m from the class of 1974, the 01‘ School of Hard Knocks when boys grew up fast to become men, or someone’s punk. The term ”01 School” has nothing to do with a prisoner’s old age, but with prisoners who espouse the traditional convict values that were in place before the prison system changed. The way it was then, and the way things are now, are two totally different worlds.

But there are those who believe that the world didn’t start until they were born, and that everything before them is just a story. But to the convicts that went through untold cruelties under the inmate-guard system, while serving time in a Texas prison, it is a lot more than just a story. It was how things were, Once Upon A Time.

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