20 March 2005
Bruce Jackson
Death Row, Texas, 1979
Click here for the images.
Twenty-six years ago this week, Diane Christian and I went to Ellis Prison Farm, about 15 miles northeast of Huntsville, Texas, to work on a documentary film and book about living in the special prison Texas had for men it intended to put to death. Death Row was released in December of the same year; we showed it first to the men on the row, using the television sets bolted to the brick walls opposite their cells. The book, which had the same title, was published the following spring by Beacon Press.I took about 1000 black and white and 250 color 35mm photographs while we were working on the book and film, but printed only a few for publicity stills for the film and for inclusion in the French editions of the book in the Terre Humaine series (where they translated our title, Death Row, as Le Quartier de la mort, 1985 and 1986).
Texas has moved Death Row to another prison where there is more room. It held slightly more than 100 condemned men when we were there in 1979; it now holds nearly 450. The Row is, I've been told, managed far more rigidly than when we were there and it is far more paranoid and violent. But those are cosmetic matters: the heart of Death Row remains the same. It is a place where people live while they wait to learn if and when they are going to be killed.
Recently, I looked again at those 35mm stills and decided that some of them ought to be published as the third component of our report on what life was like for those who lived and worked on Death Row in Texas in 1979. I've digitally scanned about 650 of the negatives and slides. My working title for the book is "Killable Others: Some Men the State of Texas Got to Kill and Some Men it Didn't Get to Kill."
The photographs here are a sampling of the images that will be in the book. One man in them, Kerry Max Cook, was set free after almost 20 years on the Row when DNA evidence proved he couldn't have been guilty of the crime for which he'd been convicted. Some of the men have been executed, some have had their death sentences changed to life sentences, and one—Jack Smith—is still there, still trying to keep the State of Texas from putting him to death.Copyright 2005 by Bruce Jackson
