https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/31/magazine/dungeons-dragons-death-row.html

The Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row

For a group of men in a Texas prison, the fantasy game became a lifeline — to their imaginations, and to one another.

By Keri Blakinger
Aug. 31, 2023
The first time Tony Ford played Dungeons & Dragons, he was a wiry Black kid who had never seen the inside of a prison. His mother, a police officer in Detroit, had quit the force and moved the family to West Texas. To Ford, it seemed like a different world. Strangers talked funny, and El Paso was half desert. But he could skateboard in all that open space, and he eventually befriended a nerdy white kid with a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Ford fell in love with the role-playing game right away; it was complex and cerebral, a saga you could lose yourself in. And in the 1980s, everyone seemed to be playing it.

D.&D. had come out a decade earlier with little fanfare. It was a tabletop role-playing game known for its miniature figurines and 20-sided dice. Players were entranced by the way it combined a choose-your-own-adventure structure with group performance. In D.&D., participants create their own characters — often magical creatures like elves and wizards — to go on quests in fantasy worlds. A narrator and referee, known as the Dungeon Master, guides players through each twist and turn of the plot. There’s an element of chance: The roll of the die can determine if a blow is strong enough to take down a monster or whether a stranger will help you. The game has since become one of the most popular in the world, celebrated in nostalgic television shows and dramatized in movies. It is played in homes, at large conventions and even in prisons.

By the time Ford got to high school, he had drifted toward other interests — girls, cars and friends who sold drugs and ran with gangs. Ford started doing those things, too. He didn’t get into serious trouble until Dec. 18, 1991. Sometime before 9 p.m., two Black men knocked on the door of a small home on Dale Douglas Drive in southeast El Paso, asking for “the man of the house.” The woman who answered, Myra Murillo, refused to let them in. A few minutes later, they returned, breaking down the door and demanding money and jewelry. One opened fire, killing Murillo’s 18-year-old son, Armando.

Within hours, police picked up a suspect, who said Ford was his partner. They arrested Ford, who was 18 at the time, the following day. He has maintained that the two men who entered the house were brothers, and that he was outside in the car the whole time. There was no physical evidence clearly connecting him to the crime. He was so confident that a jury would believe him that he rejected a plea deal and took his case to trial in July 1993. He lost. By October, at age 20, he was on death row.

Back then, death row for men was located in a prison near Huntsville, where hundreds lived in tiny cells. The men were allowed to hang out together, watch television, play basketball and go to work at prison jobs. And because they were locked behind bars rather than solid doors, they could call out to one another and talk. That was how, one day, Ford caught familiar words drifting down from the cells above him, phrases like, “I’ll cast a spell!” “Aren’t there too many of them?” “I think you have to roll.”

It was the sound of Dungeons & Dragons.

Roughly 200 people are on death row in Texas today, less than half the peak population in 1999. The number of people sentenced to death each year has declined over the past two decades in Texas and across the country as the cost of prosecuting and defending death-penalty cases has ballooned and public support for capital punishment has dropped.

While fewer prisoners arrive on death row each year, they languish there far longer. Some states have had difficulty procuring execution drugs, and landmark court rulings have banned executions of people deemed “insane” or intellectually disabled. Lawyers can spend years arguing that their clients have such low cognitive capacity that it would be cruel to kill them or that new DNA technology could prove their innocence. In the early 1980s, prisoners across the country spent an average of six years on death row before they faced execution. Now, they can wait for two decades.

In many states, prisoners spend those years living in isolation so extreme the United Nations condemns it as torture. “All international standards and norms say that the use of isolation should be a last resort,” says Merel Pontier, a Texas-based lawyer who has researched death-row conditions. Decades of research shows long-term isolation can cause hallucinations and psychosis. Prisoners living in severe isolation — like the men on Texas’ death row — turn to suicide at a higher rate than those in the general population. Some simply drop their appeals and volunteer for execution.

Not every state keeps its death-row population in solitary. Some prisoners sentenced to death in Missouri and California, for example, are mixed with the general population. In Arizona, people on death row can go to the rec yard and day room in groups for a few hours a day. In North Carolina, they can take prison jobs; in Florida they can have TVs in their cells; and in Louisiana, they’re allowed to have contact visits, where they can hug their friends and families.

The death row that Ford entered in Huntsville offered some of those freedoms until an incident in 1998 changed everything. The night of Thanksgiving, seven men staged a breakout. One person stayed behind in the rec yard to shoot hoops, making enough noise to cover the sound of a purloined hacksaw cutting through a chain-link fence. When the guards spotted the men and started firing at them, six surrendered. Only one made it all the way into the woods. Off-duty prison workers found his body a week later, drowned in a nearby stream.

By the time the following summer rolled around, the men on Huntsville’s death row knew their lives were about to change for the worse. Officials spoke of imminent transfers to a new, higher-security death row in Livingston. As Ford remembers it, he was on the second bus there.

In the decades since then, the men on death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit have spent their days in near-total isolation, only allowed to leave their cells for two hours of recreation, three days a week, alone, in day rooms or fenced-in cages — if the guards feel like letting them out or aren’t too short-handed. Sometimes, the men say, they go weeks without setting foot outdoors or being able to take a shower. (The Texas Department of Criminal Justice denies these claims.) The prison permits one five-minute phone call every 90 days. Their only regular physical contact with another human is when the guards put them in handcuffs. Even when the men manage to nurture relationships with girlfriends or wives in the free world, they’re never able to touch.

Just after the start of the pandemic, a new warden made a few changes, setting up TVs in some of the day rooms and letting the men exchange written notes with a handful of prisoners who run a radio station. When the Texas prison system got tablets last year, the men on death row were given limited access to email, which was closely monitored. Even so, Polunsky remains home to one of the most restrictive death rows in the nation. To report this article, I spent several years exchanging letters with men on death row in Texas. Phone calls with reporters aren’t permitted, and I could only conduct monitored, in-person, one-hour interviews with specific individuals every three months. For some of these men, I was their most regular visitor.

To cope with the isolation they face daily, the men on death row spend a lot of their time in search of escape — something to ease the racing thoughts or the crushing regrets. Some read books or find religion. Some play games like Scrabble or jailhouse chess. Others turn to D.&D., where they can feel a small sense of the freedom they have left behind.

When Ford first overheard the men on the old Huntsville death row playing D..&D., they were engaged in a fast, high-octane version. The gamers were members of the Mexican Mafia, an insular crew that let Ford into their circle after they realized he could draw. The gang’s leader, Spider, pulled some strings, Ford recalls, and got him moved to a neighboring cell to serve as his personal artist. Ford earned some money drawing intricate Aztec designs in ink. He also began to join their D.&D. sessions, eventually becoming a Dungeon Master and running games all over the row.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons is more difficult in prison than almost anywhere else. Just as in the free world, each gaming session can last for hours and is part of a larger campaign that often stretches on for months or years. But in prison, players can’t just look up the game rules online. The hard-bound manuals that detail settings, characters and spells are expensive and can be difficult to get past mailroom censors. Some states ban books about the game altogether, while others prohibit anything with a hard cover. Books with maps are generally forbidden, and dice are often considered contraband, because they can be used for gambling. Prisoners frequently replace them with game spinners crafted out of paper and typewriter parts.

On the old death row, prisoners could call out moves easily through the cell bars; they also had the chance to play face to face, sitting around the metal tables in the common room or under the sun of the outdoor rec yard. That was where, sometime in the late 1990s, Ford saw four men playing Dungeons & Dragons together. He asked someone who they were and learned that the 6-foot-5 white guy from the country, with a buzz cut and glasses, was Billy Wardlow.