Texas Observer

“Prison families, researchers, and even TDCJ officials agree that visitation is a critical lifeline for incarcerated people, and integral to their rehabilitation. Research has shown that visits with loved ones can maintain and strengthen social ties that can help prevent criminal behavior during and after incarceration.

“Texas’ health system has been underfunded, understaffed, and unprepared for years. Here, COVID-19 found the perfect place to spread.”

In the Texas Panhandle, which produces a fifth of the U.S. beef supply, communities are being choked by fecal dust from nearby feedlots. The state’s regulatory agency isn’t doing anything about it — and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

Decades with no personal contact, no way back into the general prison population, cut off from the possibility of parole — solitary confinement is an ongoing experiment in cruelty on human subjects.

Texas’ rural hospitals are closing in record numbers, and without access to medical help in an emergency, Texans’ lives are in danger.

Sophie Novack reports on why residents of the Rio Grande Valley lose limbs and appendages to diabetes-related amputation at a rate 50 percent higher than anywhere else in the United States.

ICE is bad, but as that agency gets the bulk of critics’ ire, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency legally operates within 100 miles of the border, where it needs neither warrents nor explanations to search and detain American citizens. Civil liberties are in danger. How did this happen?

Hurricane Harvey decimated a small Texas Cambodian community’s houses and farmland. When white far-right groups arrived to help them rebuild, tensions mounted between FEMA and the volunteers, whose vocal, Neo-Confederate politics raised many questions about what they wanted with a group of Buddhists.

An attorney remembers the life of a death row inmate killed by the state of Texas.

Thirty-eight years ago, a young woman in Texas died of an illegal abortion. Rosie Jimenez’s story is now more relevant than ever.