Lance Lowry in the Criminal Justice System

Lance Lowry began his 20 year career in Texas’s criminal justice as a cadet in 1994 in South Texas’s Police Academy. He worked as a police officer in Alice, TX, a town of about 20,000 starting in 1995. In 2000, Lance left police work to become a TDCJ Correctional Officer. From 2000-2003, Lance worked as Correctional Officer in Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas and then transferred to Holliday Unit, also in Huntsville. From the Holliday Unit, Lance worked at James H. Byrd Unit (Huntsville), which was formerly the diagnostic intake unit for DR inmates prior to being transferred to Polunsky. It was at Byrd Unit that Lance was promoted to Sergeant. He went to the Gib Lewis Unit in Woodville, Texas and he was promoted to Lieutenant. After one or two years in Woodville, Lance took a voluntary demotion to be able to return to Huntsville, where he continued his TDCJ career as sergeant. Today, Lance is a Sergeant in the Byrd Unit, in Huntsville, Texas.

Lance has been actively coordinating political action for prison reform since 2007. He is President of the AFSCME, a union for correctional employees throughout the state of Texas. The AFSCME has national representation with 1.6 million members; Lance represents about 5000 Texas correctional workers, about one-eighth of Texas’s total correctional staff, which includes non-correctional employees like parole, victim services, etc. There are roughly 26,000 Correctional Officers in Texas, but whether the state is staffed to that capacity is open to debate. There are typically officer shortages, give or take 3000 at any given time. Today, Texas faces the most severe shortages of correctional staff they have seen. I asked Lance why he thought the Texas Prisons were in such storage for Correctional ...

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... movement not only on Capitol Hill but in the media as well. Many states are making positive changes. There will be hiccups along the way. It will take such out of box thinking to make improvements because the way Texas has looked at corrections has not changed much in the past 100 years.

My interview with Lance Lowry has really opened my eyes to our prison system. I have always believed our prison system was there to reform and change inmates, and rehabilitate them back into law abiding citizens. That is definitely not the case. It makes me affirm my decision in criminal defense, and make sure everyone has a chance for reform and change.

Works Cited

Clear, Todd R., George F. Cole, and Michael Dean Reisig. American Corrections. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2013. Print.

Lowry, Lance. "Interview about Corrections." Telephone interview. 21 Apr. 2014.