Leaders of the Texas Jail Project on Tuesday delivered a harsh indictment of the Taylor County Jail, including a mock "Texas Hellhole Award."

The organization announced the designation at a news conference and rally at the war memorial north of the Taylor County Courthouse that attracted roughly two dozen people.Read more

At the Taylor County Jail in Abilene, some inmates say they've been strapped to chairs and left outside all day in the sun or rain.

Others say guards sometimes sprayed pepper spray directly into their eyes. Another staffer allegedly asked a mentally ill inmate: "Why don't you do something positive and hang yourself?"

The allegations, some among 200 pages of complaints filed with a state agency, are alarming even in a state with a "hang 'em high" mentality, according to the Texas Jail Project. The group rallied Wednesday in Abilene to decry inmate mistreatment, saying reform is still needed nearly 2 years after the U.S. Justice Department lambasted the Dallas County Jail for serious lapses resulting in deaths.Read more

THEY called it “falling off the calendar.” It was the kind of phrase that I came to understand while teaching a creative writing workshop at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island in the 1970s. I learned, for example, that a “pelican” lawyer — black suit, large scoop beak dripping torts? — was an appellate lawyer and that the dreaded syllable “bing” was the term for solitary confinement, calling up the sound of a slamming cell door.

But falling off the calendar was the scarily evocative and precise metaphoric phrase for being forgotten by the court system. It meant that the person, unseen, unheard of and uncharged by any judge, had been abandoned behind bars for weeks, months, sometimes years.Read more