In 1960, a young man from San Antonio, Texas was arrested for robbery, convicted and sent to a state prison farm to pick cotton. He denied committing the robberies, but couldn't afford a lawyer to appeal his cases. With only an 8th grade education, he read every law book he could find access to and filed his appeal pro se. WRIT WRITER tells the story of jailhouse lawyer Fred Cruz and the legal battle he waged to secure what he believed to be the constitutional rights of Texas prisoners. 

Cruz grew up Mexican American in the racially segregated Texas of the 1940s and 1950s, surrounded by a growing drug trade operated by some of his own relatives. His parents divorced when he was a boy, and he and his brother had frequent run-ins with the law as teenagers. Cruz developed a heroin habit, was convicted of robbery by assault when he was 21 and sent to prison in 1961.

By most measures, Cruz was an ordinary criminal. But in prison he studied law in order to file an appeal of his conviction and 50-year prison sentence. Before long the harsh field labor, brutal corporal punishments and arbitrary disciplinary hearings experienced by prisoners prompted Cruz to file lawsuits against the prison system. He was classified as an agitator and transferred to the Ellis Unit—“the Alcatraz of Texas”—a maximum-security prison overseen by C.L. McAdams, the most feared warden in Texas.

Under pressure from McAdams and his guards to drop his lawsuits, Cruz was subjected to long periods in solitary confinement on a bread and water diet. Despite the isolation and confiscation of his legal papers, he managed to help other prisoners with lawsuits. In 1968, when an inmate was caught with legal papers prepared by Cruz for Muslim prisoners who alleged that their civil rights were being violated by prison authorities, tensions mounted and came to blows. The uprising that ensued drew the attention of outsiders, including attorneys Frances Jalet and William Bennett Turner, who assisted in Cruz’s watershed case, Cruz v. Beto. 

Told by wardens, convicts and former prisoners who knew Cruz, WRIT WRITER weaves contemporary and archival film footage to evoke the fascinating transformation of a prisoner and a prison system still haunted by their pasts.

Episode Website: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/writwriter

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