STEALING TIME
“The [TDCJ] admin suffers from intellectual incest. They all live in a little town, went to the same little college in Huntsville and are terrified of new ideas. I’ve never worked in a stranger place.”
John Hurt, former TDCJ spokesperson
“The core values of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice are Courage, Perseverance, Integrity and Commitment.”
From the TDCJ website
Under executive director Brad Livingston, TDCJ became increasingly opaque and fearful. For years, everything I learned from Larry I applied to my role, but that transparent way of doing things went out of fashion. People called Brad “The Bean Counter,” because he had been TDCJ’s chief financial officer. People also used to wonder why he was running a prison system, because he had never worked in corrections.
Whereas previous directors left us alone to do what we had to do, Brad’s motto was “no news is good news,” which meant he often made it difficult for me to do my job. He didn’t understand how to handle the media, because he didn’t have any kind of background in journalism, and he wasn’t interested in my advice either. That said, the suspicion was that Livingston and his deputy Bryan Collier were taking most of their cues from Houston Senator John Whitmire.
When Lawrence Brewer was scheduled to die in 2011, for his part in the Jasper dragging case 13 years earlier, he ordered a last meal that would have fed 10 men. Inmates usually ordered their last meals two weeks before their execution date, but on the day of the execution, some would find themselves too nervous to eat any of it. That’s what happened with Brewer. When the warden asked him if he wanted his last meal, Brewer replied, “You know what? I don’t think I’m gonna be able to eat.” The warden said he’d bring in a few snacks anyway, in case he changed his mind, and that was it. The following day, Whitmire read about Brewer’s last meal request and went ballistic. He was angry that Brewer had ordered all this food and not eaten it, thinking it was Brewer taking one last jab at the prison system and his victims. That simply wasn’t the case—it was clear to everyone who was there that Brewer was just nervous. What Whitmire also didn’t seem to appreciate was that a last meal request is exactly that, a request. A condemned man could request what he liked, but that didn’t mean he was going to get it, just as Odell Barnes didn’t get justice, equality and world peace.
Whitmire claimed to be outraged that this evil man was being shown compassion and demanded that the prison system do away with last meals. Previous executive directors of TDCJ would have told Whitmire that they appreciated his concern, but that they were going to continue serving last meals anyway. But Livingston immediately caved. That day after Brewer’s execution, last meals were scrapped, and from that time on, condemned men ate whatever their fellow inmates happened to be eating. If the units were on lockdown, which happened several times a year so that officers could search for contraband, the condemned man might get a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, because the inmates who would normally be working in the kitchen were locked in their cells.
I viewed last meals as respect for a prisoner’s humanity, the right thing to do. Yes, Brewer had committed a horrible crime, but this was a tradition dating back decades, and there were certainly other inmates who asked for larger, more elaborate and more ridiculous last meals. Because of an uninformed, knee-jerk reaction by a lawmaker who had no knowledge of what Brewer actually received, and because none of our administrators thought to ask those of us who had actually been there, we were doing away with last meals, so that the condemned couldn’t even look forward to a cheeseburger before they died on the gurney.
I don’t know what Charles Reynolds got to eat before he was led to the electric chair in 1924, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was more comforting than a crappy sandwich and a piece of fruit. But I was more upset about what Livingston’s capitulation represented. It showed that the agency was feeble and at the mercy of people who didn’t understand anything about the prison system.
I sometimes wondered how Larry would have coped under the new leadership. I suspect they would have had far less tolerance, because they were so anti-media and TDCJ was no longer a place for mavericks. Because I was still young and malleable, I went along with it for a while. But some of it was difficult to stomach.
TDCJ became more and more paranoid about what we could release to the public, and I started arguing with them regularly, not just the directors but also the office’s general counsel. The Texas Open Records Act required us to hand over existing information immediately on request, but they started ignoring this provision, instead waiting until the eleventh hour to release information that we had readily available. I wondered why they were suddenly playing this game. Members of the media were asking for something we had, so why weren’t we just turning it over? I’d be told it wasn’t public information, and I’d say, “But almost everything we have is public information!” Access also became a problem. A reputable TV crew out of San Antonio wanted to film the death chamber in HD, but Livingston told me not to let them in. I fought and fought and that just made him angry, because it looked like I wasn’t on his side. I wasn’t enough of a yes woman, and butting heads with authority started to wear on me.
There was a prison unit in Sugar Land, which is a fast-growing suburb of Houston. The Central Unit sat on acreage now worth millions of dollars, and the City of Sugar Land wanted to build an airport extension on it. It wasn’t a secret, they even had a scale model of the extension in the existing airport. They lobbied the Texas Legislature to close the unit and finally the Legislature agreed, directing TDCJ to shut up shop in 2011. When the media asked why it was being shuttered, I explained that the land had become very valuable and the City of Sugar Land wanted an airport extension, having successfully lobbied the Legislature for rights to the land. Whitmire went nuts, calling Bryan Collier to demand that I be directed to stop telling the media the truth, replacing it with a narrative favorable to him.
Specifically, I was instructed to tell the media that we were closing that unit because of prison reforms Whitmire had passed, which reduced the prison population and made the unit unnecessary. I guess in this narrative, the City of Sugar Land’s successful lobby for the unit was just a coincidence. I thought, “Okay, the population has gone down, which is why we are able to absorb the Central Unit inmates at other state lockups, but that’s not why that unit is being closed. There are plenty of other units in various states of disrepair that would have been closed before that one.” Whitmire’s version of events wasn’t true, so I refused to parrot it. The reporters liked me because I was honest and gave them accurate information, just like Larry, and I wasn’t going to stake my reputation on a big lie. I talked around the issue, said stuff like “there are a number of issues at play.” It all went downhill from there.
“Some flacks [public information officers] live to circle the wagons and block the free flow of public information. But Lyons works her ass off to make sure that if a reporter’s going to write something about an institution as massive and complex as TDCJ, that reporter’s going to have the correct information, and they’re going to have it ASAP. She’s fast, patient, whip-smart and doesn’t make you feel like an idiot for asking possibly stupid questions. She gets the job done.”
Houston Press, announcing Michelle as “best flack” 2009
In November 2011, I was told I was under investigation for falsifying my timesheets. My bosses at TDCJ said I’d been claiming for hours spent in the office when I wasn’t there. But Larry had hired me as an exempt employee, which in the US means you work a certain number of hours a week and receive a set salary, even if you’ve done a ton of overtime. On the day of an execution, or when there was a prison escape, I might work 14 hours, but maybe leave early the following day. But now they made me go back through my timesheets and if, for example, there was a day when I’d left 15 minutes early, they ruled that I had to take those 15 minutes as vacation. When I protested that what they were doing was against the law because of my status as an exempt employee, they went ahead with a hearing anyway, without showing me the results of their investigation. I was found guilty, suspended for five days, put on probation and demoted. They didn’t want to get rid of me completely, because although my code of transparency made people uncomfortable, they were also aware I was good at my job and popular among the reporters.
Usually when they wanted someone out, they’d make up an irrelevant position elsewhere, but keep them on at the same salary and hope they resigned in time. But I was now doing the same job for $12,000 less. Why was I the only one who got a pay cut? I met with a lawyer friend in Huntsville and he helped me file an Open Records Request. Aside from asking for all the documents from my investigation, I asked for specific records that only I knew existed. I knew they were talking about me via their BlackBerries, because they had something called PIN-to-PIN, which meant the messages weren’t stored anywhere. I got hold of one of the messages by accident, because it was part of a forwarded email chain, but they refused to turn any more over, which is a violation of the Open Records Act.
I met with Bryan Collier, the short-statured deputy executive director who did all of Brad Livingston’s dirty work. Collier’s words to me were, “I should have just fired you.” I said, “Well, you didn’t, and now we’re here.” They banished me to a different office, which was infested with flying cockroaches and bees. I sat there for hours on end, vigilantly watching for honey-covered roaches that might fly down from the ceiling, while twiddling my thumbs, because they were no longer sending calls my way.
I knew my career in the prison system was over, but they still wanted me to watch men die. I liked George Rivas a lot, and I didn’t want to go in that room and see him be executed. Was he a good person? Not really, he killed a cop. Should I have liked him? Probably not. But I’d gotten to know him over the years and he was smart and engaging. Then again, they could have been executing the Devil and I wouldn’t have wanted to see it. Walking up the steps of the Walls Unit, my shoes felt like they had lead in them. I must have looked like a condemned man, dragging his feet on his way to the gurney.
Ten years earlier, I probably would have commented in my journal that Rivas looked like somebody I knew, written up my story and gone out for margaritas. But my shield wasn’t as strong as it had been, and I cried in my car instead.
I was banned from board meetings and legislative hearings after Whitmire accused me of looking uninterested and snapping gum. He later admitted he’d mistaken me for somebody else, after a reporter informed him I wasn’t actually present at that meeting. At times, the bullying and harassment was farcical, like a bungled hit.
One day, I moved some press releases I’d written from a shared folder to a private folder, because I wasn’t going to allow Jason Clark, my former subordinate who was now trying to take my job, to also take my work. I figured that if we were now doing the same job at the same pay, he could write his own press releases. The moment he noticed he no longer had unfettered access to my work, he tattled to Bryan Collier, who called me into another disciplinary meeting, during which my computer was confiscated. I ended up with another charge, this one for “misconduct.” An administrator assigned to conduct one of my investigations said to me, “This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever had to do,” but I was still found guilty, because the bosses had already decided on the punishment.
I decided it was time to remove my belongings from my old office, so I visited after-hours, taking with me everything I had amassed during my time at TDCJ—books, inmate art and all my execution files, including the notes I’d taken since my days at The Huntsville Item. The following day, Collier called me, said that all my files now belonged to him and demanded I return them. When I told him that I’d be keeping them, because many of the files were from my time as a reporter, contained public information and my own notes, he threatened to call the police and have me charged with theft. I replied, “Do what you gotta do,” and hung up on him. I then put a call in to TDCJ’s Inspector General and explained the situation. He told me that Collier was within his rights to insist I hand the files back, but brokered a deal for me to return them much later in the day. I made copies of every single note I ever took, and those documents form the spine of this book.
After having my computer confiscated, I was moved to a different division completely, where my role was to field research enquiries from students and academics. I told my new boss in advance, “Everything I do from this point on has nothing to do with anything you’ve done. I’m just doing what I have to do.” She understood. In my new role, I’d get calls from women who weren’t able to visit their sons or husbands because they were imprisoned in units many miles away. Because I still knew a lot of people in the prison system, I pulled some strings and got some of the inmates moved. It was not official, but nobody ever found out.
TDCJ’s expectation was that if a reporter contacted me, I was to ignore them. That wasn’t going to happen. These were people I’d built up relationships with for 11 years, so I wasn’t going to act like they suddenly didn’t exist. I’d tell them to contact Jason Clark, the guy I hired who was now in my job. That was a bitter pill to swallow. The final straw was when I received an email from a blogger, who was a correctional officer at one of our units. I’d always been told not to reply to this guy, because they didn’t consider him to be a journalist. My view was that this was the internet age, he was one of ours, and I worked for the public information office, therefore I should help him with any information he requested. In his email, the blogger complained that I hadn’t replied to a previous request, and copied Whitmire in on it. I replied, leaving Whitmire copied in, and filled him in on everything that had happened to me. Within an hour, my computer access had been terminated and I was written up for insubordination.
My crime this time was communicating with a journalist, when I’d been told not to. I did point out that they’d previously told me they didn’t consider him to be a journalist, but by now they were just fucking with me. When I spoke to a woman from HR, she said, “You know what’s gonna happen tomorrow.” I knew that meant they were planning to fire me. I realized I was going to have to get another job immediately, and that it would look better if I quit. I drafted a resignation letter, waited until my new boss left for the day and slid it under her door. With that, I was gone.
“Michelle Lyons was the last line of defense and the open door that provided some sense of transparency for an agency still living and operating in the dark ages. With her gone, the agency will surely suffer a huge blow to their ability to be believable and honest.”
The Backgate Website, May 10, 2012
There were only a handful of people in TDCJ I had no respect for, but nobody wanted to put a target on their back and make a stand on my behalf. I was close to a woman who worked in the Governor’s office and said to her, “Please, you can stop this?” But she didn’t want to get involved. TDCJ employees I thought I was friends with didn’t want to know either, including some who de-friended or blocked me on Facebook.
What TDCJ did to me broke my heart—it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Family members and close friends die, relationships end, and all those things are awful. But this was a different kind of grief.
I’d tried so hard to do everything that Larry had taught me, and watching all those executions had taken a toll. I took so many hits for TDCJ. When Whitmire was upset and on the warpath, I’d tell Livingston that I’d put out a press release and make any quotes attributable to me, so that Whitmire wouldn’t get angry with him. One time, Livingston said to me, “I don’t know how you do what you do, I could never watch an execution.” But he didn’t have any qualms about sending me in there, over and over again, without ever asking if I was coping. That’s how cheap I was to him. Livingston didn’t even have the nuts to sit down with me and tell me what was going on. Instead, he got his lapdog Collier to handle it all, drum up this bullshit stuff and paint me as this shady person who was rigging my timesheets. I’d been hired by Larry to ensure transparency, had spent years being as helpful as I possibly could to reporters, and now I was being punished for doing the very same thing.
You know what they told me at my initial investigation? That I’d been “stealing the state’s time.” Are you fucking kidding me? They stole plenty of time from me—hours working on escapes and executions and every other crisis—but more than anything, they stole my peace of mind. All I stole from them was a stapler when I left. And, no, they’re not getting that fucking stapler back, even if they beg for it.
I’d started working while I was still at college, so I’d never had a hiatus. I’d never back-packed around Europe or taken a career break, all I’d ever done as an adult was work. So now I didn’t know what to do with my time. And how do you enjoy it when you’re feeling heartbroken and depressed? I’d remarried in 2011, but I was the main breadwinner and trying to figure out how to make enough money to hang on to my house and my car and pay my bills. My husband and family were angry at the prison system, and it was nice to have their support, but there was nothing they could do. It was summer 2012 when I left, and I’d lay by the pool with my daughter, crying behind my sunglasses. I was mentally shattered.
I’d always had the ability to bounce back quickly from a knock. I am a very confident person by nature, but this was the exception. It felt like the things that came so easily to other people were beyond my grasp, that I couldn’t get things to line up or the pieces to fit. My head was swimming. All I wanted to do was fold in on myself and be left alone, while at the same time wanting people to realize I needed a life vest. I’d tied so much of my identity up with that job, and if I was no longer the spokesperson for the prison system, what was I? And maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was? I didn’t know where to go or what to do, and that just wasn’t me.
I was getting blackballed from other state agencies, and it’s not like a lot of places had a real need for a specialist in crisis communications. I’d spent the previous 11 years telling people about the nuts and bolts of the prison system, about things that didn’t happen anywhere else: riots in Mineral Wells; escapees stealing a truck and killing an officer on horseback in Huntsville; a sex offender pulling a gun on his guards while passing through Conroe; a death row inmate with 25 bottles of hooch hidden in his cell; the guy who kept a pet mouse in a matchbox; countless suicide attempts in units all over the state, some successful, most not; outbreaks of mumps and flu and pretty much everything else; inmates smearing themselves with their own feces; inmates throwing urine and semen in officers’ faces; inmates with cell phones hidden up their asses; inmates trying to milk black widows for their venom… for God’s sake! It was a very specific thing that I did, a niche market. You don’t tend to find many people with cell phones up their asses in the free world, and if you know of anybody trying to milk black widows for their venom, you should probably let somebody know. My situation reminded me of that line from a song by Jimmy Buffett: “After all the years I’ve found my occupational hazard being my occupation’s just not around.”
My biggest hang-up was that nobody would remember I’d ever existed. It was a similar feeling to being dumped by my first boyfriend, only ten times worse. With a break-up, you’re sad and confused, but when I divorced my first husband, I was reasonably certain I wasn’t going to die alone. But when I left TDCJ, all I could think was, “I’m never gonna have a job that I care about again. Never. Again. For the rest of my days.” I’d lost all that time with my family, watched all these people die, gone through so much shit, and I was now convinced the reporters and rank and file staff at TDCJ would forget about me as soon as I walked out of the door for the last time. I thought I was destined to be that lonely gravestone, overgrown with weeds, that nobody ever visits.
My husband assured me that wasn’t going to happen, and he was right. A lot of journalists I’d worked with for all those years covered my story, which I appreciated. I’d tried my best to treat them well, and they paid me back when I really needed it. I still got calls all the time from reporters telling me Jason Clark wasn’t helping them. It made me feel good—maybe I wasn’t as suck-ass as I thought I was?
TDCJ’s new spokesperson John Hurt called and confided that he was having real problems. He couldn’t get his head around the environment, couldn’t understand why they insisted on replying to reporters by email, which journalists hate. He was confounded by the agency’s lack of transparency, the fact they actively dissuaded him to talk to the media and became “unglued” when he did. And when he came out and criticized the agency in public, I felt vindicated. Now people knew I wasn’t just a bitter ex-employee, because here was a man with years of experience, a veteran of the Texas Department of Transportation, also saying that TDCJ had serious problems. When I read that line about TDCJ being “intellectually incestuous,” I laughed out loud; I thought that was the best.
There were some really good administrators and leaders in the prison system who I respected immensely, but there were others who had no business being there, including Livingston and Collier. Huntsville is a small town, and a lot of TDCJ leaders had known each other for decades. They went to school together at Sam Houston State, studying criminal justice; they were correctional officers together; they came through the ranks together, because they were constantly promoting one another. It was an old-boy system, and old pals tend to stick together. They become stale, because they aren’t interested in anything or anyone from outside their network. They become insular, protective and fearful.
Fighting an organization as huge as TDCJ is unpleasant and intimidating and not for the weak, but I couldn’t not do it. One of Livingston’s favorite sayings was, “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” And now I made it mine. They’d won all the early battles, but I was determined to win the war. I’d been so loyal to those people and they had betrayed me. I knew I was on the side of right, and I couldn’t let them get away with it. There was a principle at stake.
My attorney was recommended by a reporter-turned-friend from the Houston Chronicle—a very good, relentless journalist who was pissed when she found out what was happening to me. While my attorney prepared the case, the central plank of which was that I was a victim of gender discrimination, I started work at the Israeli Consulate in Houston. I was disgraced and in the process of suing my former employer, so I didn’t think anyone would want to touch me with a ten-foot pole. But the Israelis didn’t care about any of that, which is why I feel so warmly toward them. I was Humpty Dumpty, who had fallen off a wall and shattered into a million pieces, but they picked me up and helped put me back together again. Very quickly, it felt like I was part of this big, loud, funny family that I loved dearly.
Life was still tough. I was making half of what I had at TDCJ, so I had to trade in my car, a big SUV, because I couldn’t afford the gas. I probably would have lost my house, but received an $8,000 check for backdated unemployment in the nick of time. Then, in August 2013, a federal court judge in Houston, who was always going to side with the prison system, tossed my lawsuit. At that point, you can either quit or you can take your case to the federal court of appeals. So we dusted ourselves off and went back to war, filing an appeal with the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
I had to live it for more than two years, repeating my story over and over again, including an eight-hour deposition with our opposition, the Texas Attorney General’s office, with four or five people sitting across the table from me and my lawyer. I even drove to Austin just to listen to Jason Clark’s deposition, because I thought, “You know what? If you’re gonna lie, you’re gonna lie to my face.” I stared at him the whole time, to make him as uncomfortable as possible, and every time he said something, I’d ostentatiously write in my notebook and whisper something to my lawyer. We just wanted to shake the little weasel up a bit, and by the look on his face, it seemed to do the trick.
They expected me to fold and walk away, but the whole sorry saga taught me that I was a lot tougher than I thought I was. I spent a lot of time thinking, “I worked for TDCJ for 11 years, but did they ever pay attention to who I was? Did they really think I was going to lie down and roll over? This could not have been a surprise to them.” The whole time, I was getting emails and calls from TDCJ employees, telling me they were going through something similar and wondering how to fight it. Now it felt like I was fighting for them as well.
The court of appeals said that it was improper that Larry’s affidavit, which confirmed that I’d filled out my timesheets exactly as he’d told me, was not introduced by the original judge. The court also agreed that Jason Clark had been filling out his timesheets the same as me, and as such I had been discriminated against. Jason got promoted, while I ended up heartbroken and depressed and crying by the pool. The Attorney General’s Office must have advised TDCJ to stop fighting and wasting taxpayer money on the case, because they agreed to a financial settlement. I’d won, and it felt wonderful.
At the settlement conference, the lawyer for the Attorney General’s office told me that it should never have gotten this far, I’d been done wrong, and they’d heard it was because I’d had a disagreement with a senator in Houston. But once we’d agreed an amount and TDCJ had paid me out, now it was my time. I thought, “Go ahead and let it all out.” If a reporter or blogger wanted to know what had happened, I told them, in gory detail, because it was clear that certain publications were on my side. I called for Livingston and Collier to be sanctioned, I said that Jason Clark should be investigated for perjury, having lied about his timekeeping practices under oath in his deposition, and warned journalists to be wary of any information he dispensed to them. I knew from my time at TDCJ that they’d just have to take the criticism, which I enjoyed immensely.
TDCJ released a statement saying my case was “without merit.” But the appeal court’s ruling was there in black and white. I didn’t care if people thought I was bitter. I was bitter, and I hated those lying assholes. But the tax-paying public also had a right to know, because it was their money TDCJ were forced to pay me. A few years later, a judge friend of mine, with contacts at the Office of Inspector General, told me that TDCJ had indeed fabricated the whole case against me, to keep Senator Whitmire sweet. I also discovered that Jason Clark was earning $21,000 more than me for doing the same job. Had we known that at the time, we could have taken TDCJ to the cleaners.
“Hey, here’s a phrase to make your day go by a lot smoother: ‘Happiness isn’t getting what you want, it’s wanting what you got!’”
Letter from Randy Arroyo to Michelle, July 17, 2002. Arroyo’s sentence was commuted to life in 2005