James Casebere-photographer

Texas Department of Criminal Justice-architect

In prison lingo, a "hard unit" is a maximum-security building where the most violent or "hardened" prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells. These inmates are referred to as the "ad-seg" population--they are administratively segregated from the rest of the prison because of the threat they pose toward guards or one another.

In 1992 the Texas Department of Criminal Justice began a massive prison-building program that tripled the state's inmate capacity to 150,000. But by the time it was completed in 1995, the new prison system was already inadequate: Longer mandatory sentences and fewer possibilities for parole had created a surging and hardening inmate population. Officials were worried about how to deal with this population, and they argued that the only way to maintain order would be to build additional ad-seg units.

"We knew--and stated publicly--that the longer we hold criminals, the less incentive they have to improve," says Glen Castlebury, director of public information for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "This is the ultimate result of long-term incarceration with little chance of release. Inmates become much more dangerous, assault each other and the staff, and tear up prison property. eHard' also goes to the way you treat the inmates." The state legislature responded to such concerns by voting to fund five new hard units.

A prototype was designed by the Department of Criminal Justice and opened in Huntsville in June 1997. More than 200 design changes were implemented for the next four units in Wichita Falls, Amarillo, Lamesa, and Woodville, all of which are big prisons with sizable ad-seg populations (ad-seg inmates currently make up 10 percent of the state's prisoners).

Each of the five units can house up to 1,320 inmates and costs about $36 million. Electronic controls, including computer-operated doors and showers, decrease day-to-day expenses because they minimize the number of guards required to monitor inmates.

With solid steel doors instead of bars, and no windows, the cells offer inmates little interaction with the surrounding environment. "The trendy diagnosis for this is esensory deprivation,'" says Castlebury. "But that is not our problem."