by Matt Clarke

The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) recently published “Unlocking Safe Water in Texas Prisons,” a report on the lack of transparency exhibited by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) when it pumps and treats its own drinking water and apparent provision of unsafe drinking water to some Texas prisons. Although the report emphasized the poor quality of drinking water at the Coffield and Michael Units, unsafe drinking water has been an issue at several Texas prisons for decades, resulting in numerous lawsuits against TDCJ.

 The issue of unsafe drinking water was illuminated when TCRP and the Edwards Law Firm in Austin helped prisoners at the Pack Unit win a preliminary injunction requiring the TDCJ to provide safe drinking water. Drinking water at that prison contained levels of arsenic between 200% and 450% of the maximum permitted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

The suit eventually resulted in the installation of a filtration system capable of reducing the arsenic levels in the drinking water at the Pack Unit to safe levels. But it did nothing to help prisoners at other TDCJ units who dealt with water that stank, was discolored, or contained organics that precipitated out when the water was heated.

TDCJ is responsible for providing safe drinking water to over 130,000 prisoners housed in around 100 prisons. Some of the prisons are close enough to cities to use municipal water but many are in rural locations and must pump and treat ground water to use as drinking water. It was at those latter prisons that TCRP intended to focus when it sent public information requests for drinking water records to TDCJ and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the state governmental agency responsible for enforcing state laws related to drinking water.

Although TCEQ is responsible for enforcing drinking water and environmental laws to keep 31.7 million Texans safe, its $557 million annual budget is dwarfed by the nearly $4.5 billion TDCJ receives each year. Thus, much of its monitoring depends on self-reporting. This works well when the self-reporter is honest and competent but fails in the face of incompetence and cover-ups, which are the cultural norm in many prisons.

TCEQ was open and highly responsive to TCRP’s Texas Public Information Act requests. It maintains an accessible, searchable online database, the Texas Drinking Water Watch, that provides real-time access to monitoring results, violation histories, and enforcement actions. However, the information rarely included details on how a violation was resolved.

By contrast, TDCJ obfuscated information on whether contamination issues were actually addressed. The limited information TDCJ provided was delayed, disorganized and inconsistent. By policy, TDCJ limits research and studies into health and environmental issues by independent researchers to studies it deems “mutually beneficial” to both TDCJ and the researcher.

TDCJ’s lack of transparency increased the amount and cost of labor required for the investigation. This led TCRP to narrow the scope of its investigation to two prisons, the Coffield and Michael Units, that share a single water system and together serve around 8,000 people, for which at least some public information was available.

The report noted that, since 2020, the Coffield/Michael Water System has been issued 22 distinct drinking water violations. This included microbial contamination, exceeding limits of disinfection byproducts that are linked to cancer, long-term infrastructure failures, and repeatedly failing to perform basic monitoring and reporting. Two of the 22 were for health-related issues. “By comparison, in 2024,” the report added, “95% of water systems in Texas functioned without violating a single health-based standard.”

Other violations included repeated citations for failure to maintain critical components of the physical infrastructure, persistent problems with equipment degradation, unaddressed leaks and missing safety signage. One citation was for an immediate public health risk, four others indicated compromised system integrity, and two more were for failing to follow required treatment methods to control contaminants.

The water system has also been out of compliance with the state-mandated minimum requirement of 100 gallons of elevated storage per connection since at least 2012. Inadequate elevated storage can result in water pressure drops that allow the back flow of contaminants into the drinking water supply.

Backflow can also result when a backflow preventer fails. A backflow preventer in the Coffield kitchen failed testing in October 2021 and went unrepaired for more than six months. Food service areas are considered at high-risk for contamination and repairs in such areas should be undertaken as soon as the fault is discovered.

TCRP communicated with close to 50 prisoners dependent on the water system. Twenty-six of them reported testing positive for H. pylori, a bacterium that can cause intestinal ulcers, resist standard disinfectants and has been detected in water systems. Some tested positive multiple times, becoming reinfected after the initial infection was cured via antibiotic treatment. Nineteen prisoners described other gastrointestinal issues such as stomach pain, bloating, diarrhea, ulcers, acid reflux, polyps, and abdominal hernias; eight described persistent rashes, lumps, and sores they attribute to water used for drinking or bathing; and 21 had other serious health concerns, such as burning sensations while eating, drastic and unexplained weight loss, and thyroid disease.

Ten prisoners were warned by staff not to drink the water and another ten described water that was foul-smelling or greasy; twenty-one said they were in daily fear of their health because of the water.

Most of the TDCJ staff at prisons with compromised water buy bottled water to drink from the prison commissary. This is less of an option for prisoners for a number of reasons. Over half of TDCJ prisoners cannot afford bottled water at any price but even those who can may not be able to afford the current price of $3.60 for a case of 24 bottles. With the exception of a few tiny industrial programs, Texas prisoners are not paid for their labor and are dependent on gifts from family members who are often living from paycheck to paycheck themselves.

Even prisoners who can afford bottled water may not be able to purchase it in sufficient quantities to last the two-to-four-week periods between opportunities to purchase it at the commissary. They would be required to carry their purchase often long distances from the commissary to the housing area. Once in the cell or cubicle, Texas prisoners are faced with extremely limited property storage options, usually between a quarter and a half of the storage available in a common foot locker. A person drinking six bottles of water a day would have to purchase, transport, and store a case for every four days of intended use, an impossible task for most Texas prisoners.

Whether bottled water is available for purchase or not also sidesteps the obligation TDCJ has to provide all of its prisoners with clean, safe drinking water. To help achieve that, the report recommended stricter oversight by TCEQ, escalating penalties for repeat violations, and a reduction in prison population. 

Additional source: Truthout

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