Former Texas Warden: 'The Convicts Eat Them Alive'

In February prosecutors handed down a rare federal indictment accusing 13 Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison guards of racketeering, reported the Business Insider. The feds said they were cracking down on a Beeville, Texas facility's "culture of corruption" that involved smuggling phones in to members of the Aryan Circle--a rival of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas implicated in the death of two Texas DAs and the Colorado director of corrections.

One of the former corrections officers, 38-year-old Jaime Jorge Garza, pleaded guilty after getting caught at a checkpoint with four cellphones, pot, and tobacco, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times reported earlier this month. In court, Garza said he got pushed around a lot when he was a corrections officer.

“When I got caught at the checkpoint I was relieved," he said, according to the Caller-Times. "I was glad it was over.”

Former Texas prison warden Terry Pelz told Business Insider that prison gangsters rely on the very people guarding them to facilitate their criminal activities.

Not only is it tempting for low-paid guards to accept bribes in the first place, but it's hard for them to stop doing so because prison gang members might threaten them, says Pelz, who was a warden in an Angleton, Texas prison in the 1980s when the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas started to proliferate.

"Our standards aren't very high for hiring officers," Pelz says. "These youngsters come to work for the penitentiary and the convicts eat them alive."

To read more: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-warden-texas-prison-gangs-192315713.html