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Constructed in 1918, the Charles Zanco Unit is one of the oldest prisons in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Located in the Trans-Pecos region, in the upper eastern reach of the Chihuahuan Desert, it occupies eight hundred acres in the southwest corner of Terrell County, one of the largest counties in the state and, with fewer than a thousand residents, one of the most sparsely populated. The vast majority of its inhabitants live in Sanderson, the county seat and only actual town, set on Highway 90 and a dozen miles northwest of the prison. The closest town of moderate size is Fort Stockton, sixty-five miles farther north, in Pecos County. Less than seven miles south of the Zanco Unit is the nearest portion of the Rio Grande, or as it’s known in Mexico, the Río Bravo. The border.

This is arid, windswept country of limestone hills and rocky plains rampant with scrub brush and cactus and bony mesquites, an outland of spectral mountain ranges carved with canyons and snaking with cottonwood creeks too far-flung to serve for irrigation. The winters are short and chill, the summers long and roasting. The sandstorms can scour the paint off a car. Rainfall is scant but once in a great while there are thunderstorms of uncommon ferocity, generating flash floods that tear through the gullies with freight train force. Other than petroleum and natural gas, the earth here produces little of economic worth. Goat farms. Small cattle ranches. A scattering of pecan groves.

Although Zanco is classified as a medium-security prison, popular opinion holds that its surrounding desert presents as formidable an obstacle to escape as any at the max-security units in the TDCJ. Even so, the prison was built here only because the land it stands on was bequeathed to the state by a former lieutenant governor who specified the property could be used for no other purpose. The institution has neither a cooling nor a heating system. In winter the place is colder within than outside. In summer it swelters. Among Texas prison guards, an assignment to Zanco has long been regarded a prime test of one’s commitment to a career as a corrections officer.

The prison’s population is nearly the equal of the county’s, varying between eight and nine hundred inmates. They are serving sentences of from two years to life, for crimes ranging from murder to driving drunk for the third time or more. The grounds are enclosed by a chain-link fence fifteen feet high, topped with double rolls of razor wire, and watched over by armed tower guards. In addition to the cell blocks and administration buildings, the prison contains a small plant for the manufacture of state-issue footwear, a large garage for the maintenance and repair of state motor vehicles, and a kennel for the training of commercial security dogs. The kennel also houses the prison’s tracking hounds, though in the institution’s ninety-year history there has never been need of them.

There have been only two escape attempts from Zanco, and none in the past forty years. In 1937 a trio of convicts made it out of their cell block and to a darkened section of the fence—it was then only eleven feet high and crowned with barbed wire—and they had scaled it to the top when the spotlights found them and the tower guards opened fire and killed them all. The fence was thereafter made four feet higher and additional barbed wire was added. In the early 1960s the wire was replaced with razor coils.

The more recent effort was in 1968. Four convicts overpowered a pair of guards, held shivs to their throats, and demanded that the warden provide a car and guns for them at the front gate. The car was brought and the inmates shuffled out of the building in a tight group, holding the guards close to them as shields. They were halfway to the gate when a quartet of sharpshooters on the roof fired simultaneously, the volley of head shots dropping all four convicts, three of them dead and the fourth critically wounded. The warden took his time about summoning the prison doctor from his home in Sanderson, and when he arrived he was directed to treat the rescued guards for their scrapes and bruises before attending to the wounded prisoner. When the doctor finally turned his attention to the convict, the man was dead.

Today the front entrance of the Zanco Unit bears a large bold-lettered sign found at other Texas prisons as well:

NO HOSTAGE SHALL PASS THROUGH THIS GATE.