Texas prisons are filling up with the old and the ill — at enormous expense.
Benito Alonzo is a short, 140-pound 80-year-old. His quiet-spoken manner, drooping jowls and gray hair, trimmed in a buzz, give him the appearance of a benevolent grandfather, and indeed, he is a grandfather. In thick-framed black eyeglasses, he bears a resemblance to the defanged and aging Henry Kissinger. But Alonzo is neither a celebrity nor a statesman. He’s a convict who has lately grown infirm.
He says he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he’s afflicted with Hepatitis C. For several years he’s been prescribed a drug called Lactulose, which Dr. Owen Murray, chief of medical affairs for the Texas penal system, says “we use for people whose livers are at the end of their lives.” In November, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston told Alonzo’s son in a letter that during a recent medical examination, it also found “evidence of cirrhosis,” an often-fatal ailment.
I talked to Alonzo in December in the waiting room of the Polunsky Unit, near Livingston. That was not the way I wanted to see him: I had wanted to visit his cell, his pod, to observe how he passes his time — to see how he lives. But the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) doesn’t allow reporters beyond its visiting rooms, and it forbids taking pictures inside the prisons. For a year I corresponded with Alonzo and a dozen other elderly inmates, querying them about their circumstances. Mail was the only connection we had. When I asked Alonzo, in Spanish, if he thought prison authorities could monitor our conversation in that language, he chuckled and said, “And in Japanese, Arabic or Russian.” We conducted the rest of our chat in English.
[For more of this story, written by Dick J. Reavis, go to http://www.texasobserver.org/e...mates-texas-prisons/]
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