Lance Lowry in the Criminal Justice System - 879 Words

Lance Lowry began his 20 year career in Texas’s criminal justice as a cadet in 1994 in South Texas’s Police Academy. He worked as a police officer in Alice, TX, a town of about 20,000 starting in 1995. In 2000, Lance left police work to become a TDCJ Correctional Officer. From 2000-2003, Lance worked as Correctional Officer in Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas and then transferred to Holliday Unit, also in Huntsville. From the Holliday Unit, Lance worked at James H. Byrd Unit (Huntsville), which was formerly the diagnostic intake unit for DR inmates prior to being transferred to Polunsky. It was at Byrd Unit that Lance was promoted to Sergeant. He went to the Gib Lewis Unit in Woodville, Texas and he was promoted to Lieutenant. After one or†¦show more content†¦In 2007, a group of criminal justice experts got together and agreed reform was needed, and the legislature joined the discussion. Lance says that lock up numbers had been ballooning since the 1980s. Lots of prison violence prompted the solitary lock-up of prisoners in the 1980s, mostly a result of how the prison system was run. Turnkeys were used in the early 1980s. These were inmates who were given authority to do the job of guards, enforcing prison rules. They were chosen based on their ability to get things done. They were brutal and violent, and they were the ones in charge of â€Å"correcting† prisoners who messed up. William Wayne Justice put an end to the use of turnkeys in the mid 1980s, but problems escalated when he did because there was no proper control to replace turnkeys. Guards on duty then had already learned to relinquish their power to inmates. These guards had no proper training on the use of force. They had no experience handling trouble in the prison themselves. With no one in charge, violent prison gangs emerged to â€Å"keep the peace,† exponentially increasing the problems of prison violence that the elimination of turnkeys had hoped to fix. I asked Lance what was the first essential step in controlling a prison population is developing a staff of professionals through adequate training. Violence in prison has to be detected and addressed immediately for officers to maintain control. Lance is very critical of TDCJ’s