"We got to see different cultures of people, different sides of people that other kids don't get to experience," says Jacob, 26. "I can get along with just about anybody."
When he and his older sister Jordan were growing up, the prison system allowed well-behaved inmates to work on the grounds near their house, doing landscaping and odd jobs. When Jacob was 5, he would sometimes play with an inmate named Donald. "Once he snuck some Ding Dongs out of the prison and brought them out to the house, and we shared one," Jacob recalls. When he was older, he'd play catch with a middle-aged prisoner named Hines. The man had been in and out of prison for some 40 years, and when he got out, he sent Jacob a letter listing "the top 10 things you can do to enhance the quality of your life through God." Jacob still keeps it tucked in his Bible. "I treated him like just another person," he says. "They're human beings too, and a lot of people don't look at it like that."
MARK GRAHAM
Jim Willet was warden of the Walls Unit for three years. The executions were never easy, he says. "The hardest were the young fellows. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something."
MARK GRAHAM
All executions in Texas since 1924 have been carried out in a small room in the state prison in Huntsville.
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When his sister was little, she grew close to an inmate named Stafford who worked in the yard. Janice recalls that he had gorgeous handwriting and could make anything out of scrap. "One year he made little wooden pumpkins for every child in Jordan's class–he painted them and put their names on every one," she says. "They were beautiful. They'd make something for every holiday." After he got out of prison, Stafford came by the house and gave Jordan a present. He died a month later. "He'd gotten home from work, lay down on the couch and had a stroke. He wasn't even 50," Janice says. "That was a tough one–he'd been around for a long time."
Janice kept an eye on the kids when they were with the inmates, and she always had a rule for the men: If my children ask you why you're here, tell them the truth. "Don't blame someone else," she says she told them. "That was very important to me. I didn't want them to feel sorry and think these guys didn't do something wrong. They just learned that these people are people, and they do have lives. They knew these guys had done something wrong to get there and that when they got their life turned around they had an opportunity to go back out and live with the rest of us."
For Jacob, knowing that the men his father had a hand in putting to death had committed horrible crimes enabled him to accept capital punishment as part of his father's job and a logical consequence of unspeakable actions. "A lot of those guys don't get put in that position for something they did right," he tells me. "They don't get put in that position unless they've done something that's completely inhumane. I don't think that as human beings we have the right to judge, but if they do those things they've got to have some kind of consequence."
When Jacob's high-school class visited the prison for a tour and his father escorted them through the death chamber, he watched impassively while other students reeled. "I wasn't really shocked," he says. "It was just his job. My dad's not the kind of person that would kill somebody. He's a solid guy–he was in a position to do a job he was called to do, and he did it as best he could."
Janice, who seems to have more ethical concerns about the death penalty than her son, echoes Jacob's thoughts about her husband's job as warden and her belief that God had a hand in leading him to it. "It was interesting to me that those three years were the [death chamber's] busiest," she says. There were times during those years that three inmates were put to death in one week, sometimes two in the same day. "If there was going to be a time in our history when you would need someone who's a humble person who treats everyone with respect whether they're inside the bars or not, he does." This, she says, is why even though he was reluctant, Willett continued to give the prison system his time. "I always envision Jim as this horse, trying to slow down from going over a cliff," she says. "He never really wanted to move up in the system; he was always saying, 'Whoa.' [Criminal justice] was a profession for me; it was a job for him. But he was good at it."
Willett stresses that his first priority was always his family. "Working at the prison was something I did eight hours a day so I could do what I wanted the other 16," he says. "I liked my job, but it wasn't my favorite thing in life." Jacob was an avid baseball player, and Willett asked his supervisors not to schedule an execution on game days. "He made it very clear to everyone that when there was a game, he was going to be there," Janice says. "He got an award our son's senior year in high school for being the only parent who never missed a game."
