It was a Tuesday in May when Lupe’s wife texted me: “Lupe said he received the book but they denied it because it contained information that could disrupt the system.”
Texas prisons are among the most prolific banners of books in the world, with nearly 10,000 banished titles under their belt. But this was unprecedented, in no small part because the author wasn’t some Pulitzer prize winner, Nobel laureate or acclaimed civil rights activist. The author was Lupe.
Born in Bee county, Texas, the eldest of six children, Lupe Constante grew up in a disciplined household, not missing a day of school for 12 years straight. He had aspirations of becoming a customs agent but instead joined the US army during his senior year of high school, eventually taking on the role of combat engineer. I met Lupe decades later, during his 20-plus year stint in solitary confinement.
A notorious user of long-term isolation, Texas keeps more people in bathroom-sized cells for three years or longer than any other US state surveyed, according to a 2022 report out of Yale Law School. Over 500 people have lived this nightmare for at least a decade. The United Nations has called for an end to solitary confinement, and considers it a violation of human rights to lock someone up in solitary for more than 15 days. And yet, American prisons confine people like this for years.
It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that I began writing to and visiting people in solitary confinement and on death row throughout the Texas prison system. They’d send letters every month in return that pulsated with pain, describing the torture they endured, often with no end in sight.
Our correspondences inspired me to put together Texas Letters, an ongoing anthology by nearly 50 writers who have spent more than 550 combined years in the bowels of Texas’s solitary confinement. In their contributions, they describe the loss of humanity, sanity and family connections in solitary. They say they have experienced copious violence, including assault and sexual abuse, at the hands of prison staff – one writer said a woman in a nearby cell had died after being beaten by a guard – and rampant neglect. Many describe poor mental and physical health that often leads to a desire to self-harm. Rates of suicide in Texas solitary confinement are disproportionally high, as these writers can attest.
One of the letter-writers was Lupe.
“It is hard to accept being locked in a 9x5 cage, for 24 hours a day, for years on end, with at most one hour a day out of your cell to shower, or to recreate alone in a slightly larger cage,” Lupe wrote to me in November 2023. “For the last few years,” he added, “the one hour a day out-of-cell time was cut down to one hour a week on a good week.”
Now a grandfather, Lupe is not allowed any physical contact with his family. “The only contact I’ve had in 20 years are the hands of officers putting on handcuffs to escort me from my cell to the shower. You try to hold on to what it felt like to hug your loved ones, but it fades after so many years. It’s hard to believe that it was real,” he wrote.
When he looks at his wife through the glass during her visits to the prison, “I remember her hand and how much I love her, but I can’t remember what she feels like or even a kiss.”
Since 2021, Texas Letters has been published with the hope that this collective work shows that people in prisons are not pure monsters deserving of the most inhumane punishment, but rather imperfect beings who are far more than a prison sentence. Their words are powerful and deserve to find a wide, wandering readership – including in prisons, where the anthology stands to benefit the incarcerated by showing them they are not so entirely alone in their enforced aloneness. For the writers featured in it, the anticipation of receiving a copy was high. For some of them, it was their proudest accomplishment. Unfortunately, the anthology now lands on a long list of banished titles throughout the statewide system.
Truth, it appears, is trouble in the Lone Star state.
Texas is one of the most suppressive places for books in the country, alongside states such as Florida, Missouri and South Carolina. These states also have high incarceration rates; tough-on-crime states tend to be tough on the written word. And while book bans are a hot-button issue, particularly when it comes to public schools and libraries, prisons are actually some of the most restrictive reading environments in the US.
In Texas prisons, Texas Letters rests among banned titles including The Color Purple; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire; and A Charlie Brown Christmas, in addition to New York Times bestsellers and books by Nobel peace prize nominees, civil rights leaders and even the Bard himself.
The Texas department of criminal justice (TDCJ) denies books for myriad reasons, as the Dallas Morning News reported in 2017. Where’s Waldo? Santa Spectacular was banned because it had stickers. Freakonomics was banned because it “communicat[es] information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through … strikes, riots, or security threat group activity” – books that talk about social justice movements or race often fall into this category. Shakespeare’s Love Sonnets was banned because it used “sexually explicit” imagery, as were reading materials about filing taxes, which could be used to commit fraud.
In reality, this censorship is a ploy to limit knowledge – about connections between slavery and mass incarceration, about literacy’s role in inspiring the desire for freedom, and, in the case of Texas Letters, about what takes place in solitary confinement under the guise of “justice”. It pits the ensemble behind these letters against the large-scale ignorance prisons try to cultivate and the enforced silence they apply.
Xandan Gulley, a former military service member, completed basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri and advanced training at Fort Bliss in El Paso before seeing combat in Kuwait at just 18 years old. Now, he pens letters that show us what life looks like in a place that allows Hitler’s Mein Kampf yet bans a book written by incarcerated people. He’s been in solitary for nearly a decade.
“I hear the screams, I hear the cries, I hear the calls for help. Is it real or is it in [my] mind? Both!” he wrote in a 2022 letter. “These four walls squeeze out the soul, murdering the mind and spirit.”
Xandan also described being “punched, kicked, spit on, and stomped in the skull” by prison staff after he filed complaints about what he experienced: harassment and abuse, no light in his cell at night, improper personal care supplies. As someone who considers reading and writing a therapeutic lifeline and an essential means of survival, he calls prison book bans “a form of educational genocide”.
“This prison promotes an anti-reading environment,” wrote Kwaneta Harris, a former nurse, now an incarcerated journalist, for the Emancipator last October. “This prison” is the aptly named “Miserable Murray” unit in Gatesville, Texas, a small rural town with what is believed to be the largest female solitary confinement population in the country. Kwaneta has spent eight years in solitary; she and her solitary neighbors can’t even go to the prison library.
Over 80% of women in US jails are survivors of abuse, and many incarcerated women have been criminalized as a result of defending themselves against those abusers – as Kwaneta was. She says that women like her end up in solitary not because of gang violence or other security threats, which policymakers often cite to justify excessive use of solitary confinement, but for “trivial reasons such as rolling our eyes, swearing and wearing hair in ‘masculine styles’”.
Kwaneta saw Texas Letters as her chance to speak freely about life in Texas prisons – sharp edges and all.
“If I’m forced to witness suicides, self-harm, rape and assault, surely, the public can handle reading it. We live this, we’re the experts in women’s carceral isolation,” Kwaneta wrote in August. “By design, our daily lives are hidden from the public. I planned to spotlight the prevalent gender-based sexual violence by staff. I would be our voice.”
Against the rules, before it was banned, she shared a copy of the anthology with her solitary neighbors, feeling that “the best way to postpone isolation-caused psychosis was to constantly remain busy by reading, writing and learning new things”. She has also recommended the anthology to grieving mothers who have lost their daughters to suicide in solitary confinement, mothers who have begged her to help them understand what could have driven their children to such drastic measures. In the anthology, they have found the answers Kwaneta is incapable of repeating. She’s told it helps.
Dillion Compton wanted his contributions to the anthology to help other incarcerated men.
When he was a boy, Compton traveled through Texas’ dysfunctional juvenile prison system, where violence and solitary confinement were tools of control. Now he’s on death row, awaiting his execution in solitary confinement.
“Like me, there are hundreds if not thousands of young men in juveniles, jails, and prisons searching for a way to adjust to solitary life. I wanted my words in the hands of men … because once a person changes the way they think about something, they can change their life/lived-experience,” he wrote. “So to see TDCJ ban my words, it’s like they were saying my sources of hope and my lived-experiences should be destroyed.”
But while prisons try to destroy, the anthology can still serve as a resource for professors, students and future lawmakers working to end solitary confinement. It now sits among the collections of law school libraries including Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and Stanford, as well as the University of Texas, Texas A&M and, fittingly, Texas Southern University, where Toni Morrison, one of the most banned authors in America’s history, taught.
Morrison once received a letter from TDCJ citing Paradise as a banned book because it was “designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons through inmate disruption such as strikes or riots” – the same reason TDCJ denied Texas Letters. Morrison hung her denial letter on her wall, right next to her Nobel Prize citation.
Monsour Owolabi, who is regularly denied his mail in prison, was not shocked by the ban on the anthology, to which he has contributed letters for years. For him, such censorship aligns with the prison system’s consistent attempts to erase Black history through book bans. In his eight-plus years in isolation, he has grown ever more susceptible to mood swings that pass through his mind and body. But, like Morrison, he sees how powerful a banishment can be.
“It is a token of our collective progress and relative success,” he wrote, “in getting the issue of solitary confinement being torture and being utilized at its highest rate in Texas, out to the public.”
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
