Texas prisons

In Texas, a long-forgotten series of prison albums offers a rare way to hear what incarceration sounded like decades ago. Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project is rescuing and reporting on the music recorded behind the walls.

This week on Texas Matters — forgotten songs from Texas prisons. Heartfelt tracks written, performed, and recorded by incarcerated men. The resurrected recordings from the '60s, ’70s, and ’80s tell us about crime and punishment, rehabilitation, and the humanity of the men locked inside.

Judge Robert Pitman says inmates who sued the state could win their case but that the fix is not easy or cheap.

Multiple Texas prisons are almost impossible to staff, and the agency responsible for more than 100,000 inmates currently isn’t set up to address it. That and other critiques were levied against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice by the Sunset Advisory Commission staff report this week.

More than 10,000 books are banned inside Texas prisons.

An investigation by the website Civil Beat in Honolulu identified communications between Jody Hall and a prospective adoptive mother that appear to show her brokering black-market adoptions from the Marshall Islands. Reporter John Hill spoke with KERA's Bekah Morr about that investigation.

Four nonprofits joined a federal lawsuit to protect people in Texas prisons from the heat. It's one of several attempts over the years to address this issue, but efforts haven't gotten much traction.

Bernie Tiede, whose murder of a Texas widow was immortalized by Richard Linklater, is suing the state over what he calls its “cruel and unusual” treatment of inmates in hot prisons.

When Quinton Cox assaulted Servando Dominguez the results were blood, terminations, and questions.

The family of Correctional Officer Jovian Motley plan to protest at the prison where he died because they said the state has not provided answers to what happened.