The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

He was serving a life term for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and perjury, and most recently had been housed in a unit south of Huntsville.

Among the numerous grievances and legal challenges Mr. Ruiz filed while incarcerated was a lawsuit in 1972 saying Texas prisons were overcrowded and understaffed, with poor medical care and rampant violence that denied inmates their civil rights.

In 1980, after a trial that lasted nearly a year, Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court ruled in favor of Mr. Ruiz and ordered changes. The State Legislature passed laws to reduce the inmate population, but by the mid-1980's the prisons were among the most dangerous in the country, with gang violence and fatal stabbings routine.

Judge Justice threatened the state with huge fines, and in early 1987 he found the state in contempt. Late that year, voters approved a half-billion dollars in bonds for prison construction, the first step in a building program that today includes more than 100 prisons housing an estimated 154,000 inmates.

"We are still human beings and should be treated in a humane manner, and there are laws supporting that," Mr. Ruiz said in a 1992 interview. "If you cage an animal and kick him every day, one day that animal is going to attack."

Over the years, Mr. Ruiz had spent time in more than a half-dozen Texas prisons and later some federal lockups.

In April 1988, he was knifed in a federal prison in Indiana in what his lawyer at the time said was a hit ordered by a prison gang in retribution for the lawsuit that ended the "building tender" system, where dominant convicts served as guards. At his request, he was returned to Texas custody.

He was serving life for a robbery committed during a brief parole in 1983.