“I’ve been here 33 years and I’ve never seen anything so bad,”

January 18, 2016 5:28 AM

The Story Behind The Deadliest Prison Bus Crash In Texas History [BuzzFeed] In January 2015, a prison transport carrying 15 men — three guards and 12 chained-together inmates — ran off the road. It was one of the bloodiest days in the history of Texas prisons.

“The bus smashed into the top of the freight train with a thunderous boom — so loud that Self and Rivera instantly went near deaf in one ear. The train, still moving, bashed the bus against a cement pillar under the bridge, and then another, and then a third, and the bus rolled over with each hit. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” Rivera recalled. “Everybody started flipping everywhere. Left to right, right to left. Some bodies are heavier than others, and we’re all handcuffed, so the bones were coming out of their bodies, because when you’re handcuffed and you’re flying from here to there, everybody gets tangled up.” The bus tumbled off the train and landed on its side in the dirt next to the tracks. And then there was silence. It was dark inside the crumpled bus, and Pineda could see nothing but the white linens just above his face. He lay on his back and could feel the weight of many men on top of him.”

posted by Fizz (19 comments total)

...Deadliest Prison Bus Crash In Texas History

I'm sadly struck by the idea that there have been enough prison bus crashes in Texas to justify ranking.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:49 AM on January 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

I recognize that nobody is really to blame for the accident, but I wonder if at least some of the carnage might have been less if the prisoners had not been handcuffed together.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:22 AM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Do they have seatbelts on those buses?
posted by oceanjesse at 6:56 AM on January 18, 2016

I wondered that, too. In light of what happened to Freddie Gray, having seatbelts but not strapping prisoners into them is clearly criminal behavior.

My other thought was about the fact that they keep moving prisoners around Texas, moving them farther away from their families. If they kept folks at prisons closer to home, less time on buses means fewer accidents. It also means more kids growing up knowing their incarcerated parents, and fewer incarcerated folks who don't get to see their aging relatives before they die.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:54 AM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm sadly struck by the idea that there have been enough prison bus crashes in Texas to justify ranking.

Back in the days when I worked and lived in Texas I would see the distinctive white school buses with steel grates over the windows (and no air conditioning) nearly every day on my commute on I-45 and from the window of my office. They move a lot of people around. There are something like 200,000 people in prison in Texas.
posted by Bee'sWing at 8:13 AM on January 18, 2016

Even the school buses don't require seat belts.

I get way emotional about this because prisoners are people and deserve to be treated as such. Treating someone like crap has never made someone behave better.
posted by AlexiaSky at 8:17 AM on January 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Even the school buses don't require seat belts.

Not trying to derail this entirely into a bus-safety discussion. But there are reasons why school buses don't require safety-belts. Whether those reasons are sound is an entirely different discussion but there are reasons why.

Twenty three million kids nationwide ride the school bus every day, and the bulk of them are making the trip without a seat belt. So why do cars come with seat belts and most school buses don't? It comes down to cost and design. Large school buses don't need seat belts because the seats are specifically designed to absorb the impact if a child was thrust forward in a crash: They are close together, high and padded, explains CBS affiliate in Minneapolis. This safety system is called compartmentalization. Moreover, the cost to install seat belts outweighs the safety benefits. A study done by the Alabama State Department of Education found that it would cost between $32 and $38 million to install seat belts on all the state's buses, while only saving one life, the station reports.

Passenger safety should definitely be revisited/revised with regards to how prisoners are transported but I also imagine that security plays an important factor in how that issue is handled and discussed.
posted by Fizz at 8:23 AM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

State policy mandated that the inmates could not receive visitors outside prison grounds. Only inmates nearing death were allowed to have visitors in a public hospital.

This is really disgusting.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:36 AM on January 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

Yeah, I think the worst thing about the whole disaster - because this part wasn't an accident - was that they wouldn't let families see the prisoners who were still alive. Those heartless bastards.
posted by dawkins_7 at 8:54 AM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

Do they have seatbelts on those buses?

It fell off a bridge and then got hit by a freight train. Seat belts would not have helped.
posted by miyabo at 9:06 AM on January 18, 2016

My other thought was about the fact that they keep moving prisoners around Texas, moving them farther away from their families. If they kept folks at prisons closer to home, less time on buses means fewer accidents. It also means more kids growing up knowing their incarcerated parents, and fewer incarcerated folks who don't get to see their aging relatives before they die.

When I was doing a fair bit of reading about prisons, and talking to people who had worked in them, this was one of the worst things, to me. They move prisoners around to try to manage the population at each facility, but also deliberately to avoid relationships forming that could lead to united action of various kinds. The image we get from movies, where someone goes to a specific prison and stays there for the rest of his life, is apparently rarely true. I was told that here in Michigan, there are inmates from the southern half of the lower peninsula housed in prisons in the Upper Peninsula, I was told. That's a long trip and not easy traveling—I remember my mother commenting that when my brother went to college at Michigan Tech, he was farther away from home than I was when I went to college in western Pennsylvania.

My knowledge of this is all hearsay from a person doing an educational presentation, but still. This kind of thing is inhumane in such a petty way.

When we toured a minimum-security prison, in the prisoner dorms each man had a tiny black and white TV they could watch with headphones. These were the only TVs they could have, and they were sold in the prison shop. This was between 15 and 20 years ago, and manufacturers had just recently stopped producing b&w tvs. The person doing our tour said that the prison system had had to make a special arrangement with a manufacturer to make these TVs for the prison. Again, so petty—going to extra trouble and, no doubt, expense, just to keep these men from having the simply luxury of a color TV. These things somehow bothered me almost more than the overcrowding (3-4 men in a dorm cubicle that was meant to house 2, all of this in a flimsy building that had been thrown up as "temporary housing" 20 years earlier) and other problems. Because somebody had to go out of their way to withhold a simple comfort.
posted by not that girl at 9:12 AM on January 18, 2016 [13 favorites]

Prisoners in hospitals is a really wierd thing.

Here they are assigned two guards per prisoner and are monitored 24/7. They are handcuffed and leg cuffed, get no visitors or outside time. Sometimes they get to walk the hallways shuffling around one guard in front one and one behind. They are required to continue wearing prisoner uniforms and not hospital gowns.

Some of them have just been charged with a crime, and not even found guilty. Sometimes they are just mentally ill. The number of swallowers I've seen (basically swallowing anything that isn't bolted down like screws, pencils, ect) is significant.
posted by AlexiaSky at 9:15 AM on January 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

It fell off a bridge and then got hit by a freight train. Seat belts would not have helped.

Except that according to the article, much of the damage was done by the way the men on the bus were pulled and thrown around by the person they were chained to. Also by men from the back of the bus falling to the front, hitting seats along the way. The chains, and the chaotic fall to the front, also made rescue more difficult, and resulted in at least one first responder being additionally traumatized by accidentally cutting off someone's thumb with a bolt cutter when he was trying to cut apart a tangle of chains and people he couldn't reach well or see clearly.

I'm coming down on the side of, "Seat belts would have helped."
posted by not that girl at 9:16 AM on January 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I get the compartmentalization idea for school bus design but I don't get how the same train of thought says "Busses are heavy and stable, just make the seats big and padded" then goes on to add rooftop emergency exit hatches for when the bus tips over.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:22 AM on January 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Adolfo Ruiz, 32, had a one-year sentence for selling bootleg recordings

Ah, Texas. Guy probably sold a couple of hundred dollars of recordings; state spends near a quarter million on legal system costs and incarceration. :/ What a racket.
posted by buzzman at 9:37 AM on January 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

I have also heard that transporting prisoners is a way to defeat the prison census. The prison isn't overcrowded enough to require some early releases, if you put enough prisoners on busses on the day of the census, and thereby avoid having to count them as residents of any given prison.
posted by elizilla at 9:38 AM on January 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Although I agree that seat belts would be a better option for school buses, the single biggest reason not to for each case that I can see are:

1: School buses? Kids won't wear them. Also the first time there is a crash and a kid is injured for not being in a seat belt the school or bus company gets sued for not 'making them' wear a seat belt. The compartmentalisation makes sense if you assume a not-insignificat proportion of the kids won't wear belts anyway.

2: Prison bus? Seat belts would be an excellent weapon. It wouldn't take much to strangle the guy in front of you if he had a seat belt on, even if you were chained up. Also, you can't make a guy in chains put his own belt on, and you get REALLY up, close and personal with a person to put their belt on for them. Lots of potential for biting and attack and trouble there. So the dangerous prisoners would get no belts, so see point 1.
posted by Brockles at 10:24 AM on January 18, 2016

Then how about those mechanical seat restraints like in a roller coaster? They lock down at the push of a button.

Yeah yeah, too expensive, these lives aren't worth protecting.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:35 PM on January 18, 2016

If they don't think it's important enough to spend the money to save kids, they're definitely not going to spend money on inmates.
posted by LizBoBiz at 6:04 PM on January 19, 2016