-
- Looks are deceiving.
You know, uh, that's a, that's an old adage,
but Luke's are very deceiving.
Don't just because they look clean, cut.
Don't think they are. Well, hell, Ted Bundy.
Look at Ted Bundy. Look at what he did.
I mean, he was a considered a handsome man. Clean cut man.
Look at all the people he did.
- Former Texas prison warden David Staggs
holds a unique perspective on personal safety.
One that emerges from the heart
of Texas most notorious prisons.
He spent a 30 year career overseeing some of the meanest
and most dangerous inmates
that the lone star state has ever known.
I interviewed Stax at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville,
where he serves as its director.
Its exhibits show the history
of the world's biggest prison system, the good,
the bad, the ugly.
We delve into a world rarely seen. By most.
It's a world where hardened criminals roam a world
that's been homed to serial killers, sexual predators,
and some of the most violent individuals in Texas history.
You'll want to stay tuned until the end of the episode
to hear the veteran warden answer a question
that I get all the time about the movie,
the Shaw Shank Redemption.
I explore the invaluable insights that Stax has gained
through decades of managing violent offenders
and ask him to share his personal safety tips.
These are lessons forged in the crucible of Texas prisons,
and they are lessons that can help you avoid
becoming a victim of violent crime.
With all your experience of dealing with, uh, violent
criminals behind bars, what advice do you have
to the public about staying safe, being aware
what to be on the lookout for?
- I would tell your listeners the same thing I tell my,
my wife and my family,
and that is one,
don't go somewhere that looks seedy.
Don't care how much you need this shirt or this pant.
Don't go, okay?
Uh, two, for instance, walking down the sidewalk, you need
to assess who's coming at you.
Uh, uh.
Now you can call that, you know, aerial type,
and you can call it whatever you want,
but the heck with that, you got to, you gotta be aware
of your surroundings, and you need
to assess who's coming to you.
If they, if they got their, uh, clothes
where being worn in a certain way
that look like they might be a banger,
they probably are, you know?
Mm-Hmm. . And you need to be aware of that.
Uh, you need to be aware, you know, in my opinion,
if they've got a, a lot of, uh, tear trops
and things like that on their face, that's a sign of, uh,
some criminal activity.
Or at least it was back when the criminals I dealt with.
Mm-Hmm. . Um, and,
and once that person comes to you for that incident as far
as walking on the sidewalk, uh, you turn around
and make sure he's still walking away from you
just don't expect to think that he's still walking.
You need to turn around and verify he ain't turned
around fixing hit you in the head
or put a gun to your back or something like that.
Uh, I would say, I would say for most, like I told my son
years when growing up, my son, he liked to that generation.
My son, they didn't even get ready to go out
until 10 o'clock at night.
Well, my generation, you couldn't wait to get out.
You know, I would tell your audience that they need
to size people up when they beat 'em,
when they're discussing them.
Never turn your back on somebody.
Uh, if you can walk away from a situation,
all means walk away from it.
Uh, it doesn't mean you're a coward. It means you're smart.
Uh, there's been situations in the penitentiary where, uh,
um, I could have engaged in an inmate toe to toe,
but, um, it was best to get some assistance, you know?
And, uh, uh, I think the same
vernacular applies out in the world.
Uh, you need to be smart about your surroundings.
You need to be smart. How you're going to engage.
Watch your, watch your verbiage.
You know, don't get in an argument.
I mean, there's some crazy people out there doing some
crazy stuff right now.
I mean, for no reason. I mean, it,
it floors me what's happening in some of our cities.
, it just, it, it, they walk amongst us.
I mean, just put it that way
- For college, co-eds, any behaviors, you know
that the guy may look like one of them,
or what are, are there behaviors
that you should be watching for?
- Yeah, I, I, you know, just
because you go to penitentiary doesn't mean you've got
tattoos all over you.
Doesn't mean your face is full of tattoos.
Doesn't mean you got a, a gold grill.
Doesn't mean that you, uh, have long, dreamy hair.
There are some well-groomed handsome
men and women in the penitentiary,
and they take advantage of that.
I have a daughter, and I always told my daughter when she
worked at Sam Houston State, same thing.
I told my son, nothing good happens after midnight.
And just because this person may look like he is prim
and proper, you don't go anywhere.
Even if you're stranded, you call me, I'll come get you,
call a friend, call somebody,
but don't go with someone you don't know,
or you just met in class maybe 30 days before.
Uh, to me, whether you're a male
or a female, putting yourself in that environment,
you don't know if you're gonna come outta that environment
in a good shape or not come out of it all.
Yeah. And there's been people, Kenneth mcd Duff's.
A good example of that
- For my new listeners.
Kenneth McDuff was a notorious serial killer,
released on parole under a cloud of corruption.
After walking out of prison, McDuff resumed a spree
of abductions in murders that lasted two and a half years.
Meg Duff briefly worked
as a convenience store clerk after his release.
Coworkers had no idea about his horrific criminal
record to them.
He just looked like a big awkward guy, which is typical
serial killers blend in, they walk amongst us
and don't look scary, at least not
until their mugshot is published
with the gory details of their crimes.
In our previous episode,
stacks recall the well-healed funeral home director
who murdered his wife in cold blood.
He was a pilot and she had turned him in
for smuggling drugs into the US from Mexican cartels.
He killed her, put her body in a bathtub, dissolved her body
with chemicals and down the drain.
She went.
- He was a nice looking man. I mean, he was a handsome man.
He was very professional. I mean, he was a professional.
He was a, he, he ran funeral homes.
Um, yeah, I mean,
don't Lukes are deceiving.
You know, uh, that's a, that's an old adage,
but Lukes are very deceiving.
Don't just
because they look clean, cut, don't think they are.
Well, hell, Ted Bundy. Look at Ted Bundy.
Look at what he did. I mean,
he was a considered a handsome man.
Clean cut man. But look at all the people he
killed, you know?
So, yeah, if there's, uh, my advice to anybody, old
or young, don't put yourself in that situation.
Get to know who you, who you're gonna be around.
Make sure you know what they're capable of and,
and, uh, watch your surroundings.
- Stacks took the measure
of the convicted criminals under his supervision
by studying their behavior past and present. I
- Think your best way of determining
a person's future, look at his history.
That's always been my way of managing a man.
If he has, uh, been a turd all his life,
uh, he's going to have to be, be not a turd for a long time
before I changed my view of him,
and I'm sorry for your listeners using that terminology,
but, um, uh, most,
I think it's pretty common.
Uh, humans are creatures of their, you know, their,
their habits, you know, and,
and, um, a lot of these guys just continue
to do the same stuff and same stuff and same stuff,
because that's all they know,
and that's what all, that's all they want to be.
I don't know how you can't, as a, as a person
who studies the mind, can't associate that behavior with
where that person is right now.
That's my, my view.
I don't know if that clarifies much here,
but that's my kind of my view.
I always looked at the person's history.
I always thought, you know, this guy, he's doing this.
If he was doing good and he was changing his behavior,
first thing in my mind is, why is he doing that?
Why is he changing his behavior?
Is because he really is tired and fed up
and wants to be a good guy?
Or is he trying to manipulate the system,
get in a position where he can do something?
That was always the way I looked at this type
of guy's behaviors is, uh,
although I had a good hope that they were changing
for the right reason, I never put all my money in it.
- A recent escape attempt was foiled
by an alert college student who works at the prison museum.
She spotted an inmate jumping from a 15 foot high red brick
wall around the prison yard of the walls unit.
It's the oldest Texas prison established in 1849,
located in downtown Huntsville.
It also houses the Texas Death Chamber.
- She calls me and she says, uh, uh, her stack says, uh,
I just saw an inmate jump off the wall over here
at the Huntsville unit.
I said, well, where are you? And she told me, gave me a kind
of a geographical, I said, well, gimme a building.
Where are you at? And she told me,
I said, she described the building.
I said, okay. I said, where's the guy at now?
What is he wearing? What color he is?
He said, well, he's a Hispanic,
appears to be a Hispanic man.
He is wearing a white shirt, a white pants,
and he's going to every car
that he sees seeing if it's open.
- The college student who was hot on the trail called the
police, the escapee was on foot headed towards Sam Houston
State University, which has a noted college
of criminal justice Staxx called the prison's warden,
who locked down the walls unit and started counting inmates.
Stax was alarmed because of an escape that turned deadly.
A few months earlier, a fugitive member of a Mexican cartel
executed a family of five
and stole their truck from a rural weekend cabin
to make his getaway.
- I guess it was a natural instinct for me.
I left, I'm not a law enforcement officer,
but we just had a very unfortunate incident happen in Texas
where a whole family got massacred up in Centerville, Texas.
And, and I did not want to see something like that happen,
obviously, in, in Huntsville or anywhere else.
So I got in my truck and I started going,
and I was talking to, um, uh, this young lady,
you know, where are you now?
Where are you now? And I kind
of just cold trailed her phone call messages.
And sure enough, the law enforcement pulled this guy over.
He had stopped at a parking lot at Sam Houston on their
campus, convinced this young student to give him a ride,
still wearing his white uniform.
He got in the car with the guy.
He was a young Hispanic student. They started driving off.
I don't know what the verbiage was.
The discussion was between the student and the convict,
but obviously he convinced him to mm-Hmm,
let him get a ride, and they took off.
And, uh, by the time the officers pulled this vehicle over,
I pulled up, I mean, within just a few seconds,
and got him out, handcuffed him,
and, um, offered my assistance to the law enforcement.
- Earlier in our interview stack's,
personal safety tips included sizing up people
and not going anywhere with a stranger.
Yet, an unwitting college student gave a strange man wearing
a white shirt and pants characteristic
of Texas prison inmates a ride.
Let that be a lesson. I'll be back after this message
during my investigation
of corruption in the Texas Parole Board.
Its unsavory members often justified the release of inmates
with a violent history by describing them as model inmates.
Is any measure of them being, quote, a model inmate
or how they behave in prison?
Is it really a, a true measure of
how they may behave when they're back in society?
- You know, I would say, uh, no,
because, and the reason I say no, you've got
to understand we're, while they're in prison,
they're in a very structured environment.
We're telling them when to get up, when to go eat,
when to shower, when to go to work, when to stop working.
And a lot of those guys need that structure.
And when they get out,
if they don't have a coach out there helping them make those
type of basic decisions that you
and I make every day, uh, they get in a wreck pretty quick.
Now, I will have to say this, I, I have seen some men
who have totally changed their heart.
I mean, there's no doubt in my mind they, they,
they were a change person.
Uh, and, and I'm, I give all that glory to God, you know,
for changing that.
And the outta my whole career are
the ones that have been out.
I can probably count 'em on my hand.
I mean, probably five, six that are gotten out, done well,
or still out and doing well.
Most of 'em have gotten out and have died.
But, uh, there's two or three of 'em
that are still out there that send me, you know,
Christmas card or a birthday card
and say, thank you for showing me the light.
You know, mentoring me, showing me how I need
to change my behavior and change my who I am.
- Finally, I asked Stax a question that I get all
of the time is the depiction
of sexual assault in the Hollywood movie, the Shaw Shake,
redemption true to life Behind bars.
Everybody thinks that
the new inmate coming in is beat down, beat up,
raped, what have you.
What's the, what was your experience in seeing?
- My experience has been that in the 30 years
that I did with the Department of Corrections, I never once,
never once had a sexual assault.
Now, that doesn't mean they haven't happened.
Obviously they have, but I can honestly say I've never had
an inmate get sexually assaulted, raped if, if you will, uh,
on my watch.
Now, that was brought
to my attention, lemme put it that way.
Okay. Now, was there some
consensual sexual activity occurring?
Yeah, unfortunately those things happen.
It is not because we agree to it, we allow it
to happen, but it does happen.
And they know we're, it's kinda like the, the inmate that,
or the, the person that robs, uh, somebody's house,
they know they can probably get in that house,
but they wouldn't try it if there was
a police car in the driveway.
Same way in the penitentiary.
If there's an officer on the cell block,
they're not gonna try and do something illicit.
They're gonna wait till
that officer's gone, then they're gonna try and do it.
I mean, that's just the way human nature is, you know, in
that, that realm of thinking.
But yes, most inmates that come in, uh,
they need to be on guard.
They need to try and isolate themselves as much as they can.
In my observation, uh,
if they have money being brought into them
through the commissary accounts, they need
to minimize what they spend.
They don't need to go down
and buy a hundred dollars worth of, of, uh, uh, candies
and cokes and stuff
because you just told, uh, everybody on that cell block
or in that penitentiary, that's our next target.
That guy, there's got more money and he's small,
or he is big or whatever.
It doesn't matter how big you are.
If you got money, they're gonna try and get you money.
Money. That's what it's about.
- Just like they behave in the outside world.
- Absolutely. The, the prison, I think that's best said.
The prison environment is nothing more than a small
community or what you and I live in.
There's good and bad out there.
There's good and bad in the prison.
There's good things happening in the prison.
There's a lot of powerful things happening in our prisons
here in Texas from faith-based programs to, uh, educational
substance abuse programs, outstanding programs.
But there's some inmates that don't want to have anything
to do with it, and they're not going to have anything to do
with it, and sooner
or later, they have the ability to get out.
- In closing, here's my reporter's recap in reflections.
I've met convicted criminals
who have made remarkable changes in their lives,
becoming better spouses, better parents,
and even successful business owners
after they're released from prison.
But as the veteran warden David Stacks pointed out,
there are also career criminals who do not want to change,
and they're walking amongst us.