Bringing down the hammer: Where the Texas Legislature's gavels are made

Yahoo

20-05-2025

If statistics were kept on the number of gavels broken in the Texas Legislature each year, it seems likely that this session would set a record. While presiding over the House floor, lawmakers have smashed at least 14 gavels and even shattered a tempered-glass cover on the speaker's desk in a freak accident. (No one was injured.)
The incidents have become so frequent and so well-known around the Capitol that state Rep. Lauren Ashley Simmons joked in a social media post that 'They're ordering these gavels off of Temu,' referring to the Chinese e-commerce platform that sells dramatically reduced-cost goods.
Although that isn't the case, where the gavels come from might be surprising.
State prisoners make every wooden gavel used in the Texas Capitol, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed to the American-Statesman. Inmates also manufacture the desks, chairs, flags and other furniture that populate the House and Senate, making prisoners a key part of the legislative process that shapes Texans fate.
The department that manufactures gavels and other furniture is Texas Correctional Industries, one of many 'correctional industries' programs around the country. Like the vast majority of incarcerated workers in Texas, inmates who make this furniture are not paid, a practice some Democratic state lawmakers disagree with.
'They should get whatever credit they deserve for that,' state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, said of inmates who make Capitol gavels and furniture. 'Whatever value (the furniture) has, it should be real' and paid into inmates' accounts.
The House purchased 400 gavels this year, while the Senate purchased 100, according to the TDCJ. Smaller gavels —used for committee hearings — cost $25, while larger gavels used on the House and Senate floors cost $40 each.
The Legislature created Texas Correctional Industries in 1963 to provide inmates 'marketable job skills, help reduce recidivism and reduce department cost' by selling products for profit, according to the TDCJ website. Only local, state and federal agencies, public hospitals, schools, universities and other public entities can purchase the prison-made wares.
The program's website shows the vast range of products made at prison factories: janitors' brooms, courtroom podiums and benches, mobile office chairs, aluminum bleachers for schools, desk name plates, restroom signs, saddles, bullwhips, tear gas holders and inmate transport belts.
In addition, each lawmaker's office has a catalog of Capitol-specific items available for purchase, including Texas flag cutting boards, 89th legislative session key fobs, mouse pads, barbecue grills and even bird houses.
Texas Correctional Industries generated $76.7 million in sales in 2019, according to a 2022 report from the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union. The TDCJ did not respond to the Statesman's request for updated figures.
The program accounts for a small subset of the many jobs that inmates perform for the Lone Star State's prison system, which requires all prisoners who can work to do so. This mandate is made possible by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits involuntary servitude and slavery except those confined for a criminal conviction.
Incarcerated people work as cooks, dishwashers, firefighters, barbers, plumbers, farmers, carpenters, construction workers and launderers, among other jobs. More than 120,000 inmates were employed in Texas in 2019, according to the 2022 ACLU report, and less than 2% — around 2,700 — were part of Texas Correctional Industries.
Able inmates who refuse to work can be confined to their cells, stripped of personal property and barred from commissary, recreation, visitation and personal telephone calls, as per TDCJ policies.
Simmons, a Houston Democrat, said inmates should be paid for their work. The requirement that inmates work without pay 'goes back to our country's origins in slavery,' she said.
State Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, is one of a handful of House members who presides over the lower chamber when Speaker Dustin Burrows is occupied with meetings or other business. He has broken two gavels this session, he said, and feels that has no bearing on their quality.
'I'm not gonna lie, we do kind of hit (the gavels) as hard as humanly possible,' Vasut told the Statesman. 'I'm not sure how you can design a gavel to withstand the level of abuse that we subject these things to. And it's so funny compared to the Senate, where it's just like, a little love tap.'
The gavels were made in the W.F. Ramsey Unit, a state prison just south of Houston that's in Vasut's House district.
'So, I guess, then, my constituents are making the gavels, my involuntary constituents,' he said pensively.
In 2015, three cracked gavels were sent back to the Ramsey Unit for prisoners to evaluate why they failed, according the Dallas-Fort Worth NBC affiliate.
Moody, who often presides over the House as speaker pro tempore, also said the breaks are often intentional.
"I've never broken one and I've hit the gavel 1,000 times," he said.
Republican State Rep. Cody Harris of Palestine is the undisputed record-holder for most gavels broken this session, with 10 of them on display in his office.
He does it on purpose, he said. Once he sees a crack developing in the head of the gavel, he hits it on that crack until it splits.
'You kind of watch it throughout the day, and you know that it's going to break,' he said. 'A lot of them are chips off the side.'
Asked whether he feels the gavels are well made, he said, "absolutely."
'It's not something bought off of (Temu),' he said. 'They're solid. They're very solid."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas Legislature's unexpected source of gavels: state prisons