Texas After Violence Project Interview with Professor Dennis Longmire - part one of ten

COPYRIGHT 2008 Dennis Longmire and Texas After Violence Project

Date: October 28, 2008

Place: Huntsville, Texas

Equipment: Sony mini-HD DV camcorder; Sennheiser external microphone

Recorded on: Sony DVC premium

Interviewer: Gabriel Daniel Solis

Videographer: Virginia Raymond

Also present: Victoria Rossi

Transcription: Jorgé Antonio Renaud

Reviewed & edited: Virginia Raymond & Kimberly Bacon

GABRIEL DANIEL SOLIS: Okay, so now we’re on. Do you have any other questions?

PROFESSOR DENNIS LONGMIRE: No other questions; no other questions about the process and I appreciate that.

SOLIS: Okay, I’m sorry to interrupt you.

PROFESSOR DENNIS LONGMIRE: Where we were, and quick summary: I’m hopeful that what your project includes is some effort to translate what we are doing and all of the things that you are doing into Spanish so that it can reach the Hispanic community in Texas. I believe the Hispanic community’s involvement in the issues around the death penalty will help toward the death penalty’s demise. I think that as Hispanic voters grow in numbers and become better informed about what the death penalty system is like and particularly how the death penalty system affects Hispanics in Texas, there will be greater resistance to the death penalty than currently appears if you look at the survey data that looks at Hispanics versus whites versus Blacks concerning attitudes about the death penalty, that research generally shows Hispanics are more like whites, in that they tend to support the death penalty more than Black citizens do. But I think that we’re getting a bad sample, an unrepresentative sample of Hispanics, and I think that we need to do better research in that regard. So, I encourage you to do that. If you need support in terms of letters or anything to get additional funding to translate this material into Spanish, I will happily try to assist you, and recommend that you do that, because that’s a very, very important community that often gets ignored in this entire discussion.

SOLIS: We’re always trying to think of new ways to get our oral history interviews as public and as accessible to everybody in Texas.

PROFESSOR DENNIS LONGMIRE: Good.

SOLIS: —and so, any ideas are very much welcome.

Professor Longmire’s Background

PROFESSOR DENNIS LONGMIRE: Good. And now you want me to talk about my experiences with the death penalty?

SOLIS: Your experiences with the death penalty.

PROFESSOR DENNIS LONGMIRE: I’m gonna just start and tell you how I got here, and what my role here has been, and in this process. As I’m doing this, interrupt me and ask clarification, or ask me to slow down or speed up or whatever you want to do to expedite the process and make sure I’m responsive to issues that you know are important that may have been mentioned before. I came to Texas in 1984, very reluctantly, and my reluctance to coming to Texas was largely because two years prior to 1984, Texas had resumed the process of executing. I was coming here from Ohio. I was on the faculty of the Sociology Department at Ohio State University. One of my colleagues had come down here for a visiting professorship at the College of Criminal Justice. And he returned to Columbus and told me—at that time I was a young assistant professor—he told me, “Longmire, you need to get down to Texas. The College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University has a lot of resources and they are really doing some interesting things. You need to get down there.”

I was born in Washington, D.C., so my immediate response was, “I’m a Redskin fan. I can’t go there because the Dallas Cowboys are close.”

I figured out that Huntsville was kind of close to Houston and it’s not quite so bad, so I came to Texas with a five-year plan. I interviewed for the job that was available. At that time it was the Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs, and I told them that there were two conditions that I will accept the job.

One is that you realize that this is not a fully administrative position. I’m a faculty member and I want to remain a faculty member. I don’t think that I want to be an academic administrator, but “Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs” sounds close enough to faculty that as long as everybody knows coming in the door, I’m not an administrator, I’m a professor, I’ll come.

Secondly, I’m gonna come for five years. I don’t think I can live in Texas very long, for a wide variety of reasons, but more importantly, I’m an East Coast kid, born and raised in the Washington, D. C. area, did my Ph.D. at University of Maryland, and I wanna go back home whenever I can. So I can give you five years, if you like me for five years. If you want me to leave sooner, we can negotiate that deal. But I’ll come for five years and five years is it. As soon as I got here, the Assistant Dean for Graduate—they said everything is cool, no problem –as soon as I got here, the Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs role was converted to Associate Dean for Academic Administration, which was as administrative as it could possibly get.

And after a couple of months, I started dating a woman who was from Houston, as she would say, “born and raised in Houston, Texas,” and we started dating, and over a couple of years, our dating got more serious, and my five-year mark was coming closer. I had actually come to be very good as an academic administrator, although I hated every day of my job. I didn’t like it, it wasn’t what I trained to be, and so I was having angst, angst about my role as administrator, but I also had fallen in love with a Texas girl.

So she, we were talking one day and she says, “You know, we’ve got to talk about your five-year plan.”

And I said, Why?

And she said, “Well, there’s something you need to know about Texas women,” she said. “Texas women never leave Texas. Or if they do, they come back whether they’re alone or not.”
And so I renegotiated my plan, and continued doing academic administration for another eight years, I think, but more importantly, I tell everyone that my five-year sentence to Huntsville was commuted to life.

So, Lin and I got married and I’m here and I love Huntsville. I love Texas. I’ve gotten over all of that Yankee angst over living in the land of Texas.

But two years prior to my arrival, Texas had been infamous on the news because there had been two people executed under the “modern” execution regime, following the Furman stay, Gregg and other decisions opened up Texas’ death chamber again, and there were two widely publicized executions, both of them lethal injections, the first lethal injections in the United States of America, and both of them were at midnight. It was when we still executed people at midnight, and there were hundreds of students, protesters, as I thought they were, when I first started watching the film, the media.

There were hundreds of protestors, which kind of made me think there is hope, because as an academic criminologist, I was opposed to the death penalty prior to leaving graduate school because of problems associated with the discrimination that seems to follow most punishments, not just the death penalty, but the death penalty that issue of discrimination is more salient because we’re killing people, not simply depriving them of liberty. And so I was opposed to the death penalty watching these films, but I saw protestors at the Walls Unit, and I thought, Maybe there is hope, for Huntsville, for Texas.

And so as I watched it they began interviewing people at the execution, and almost all of the people there were protesting in support of the death penalty, and they were protesting with great relish. They were having a big party. And many of them identified themselves as criminal justice majors at the school just up the street from the execution chamber. So when I saw that, I knew I would never come to Texas and I would certainly never teach at Sam Houston State University with a bunch of small-minded students who celebrate the killing of another human being.

So, the job is offered and I’m coming here reluctantly with a five-year plan that ultimately gets converted to, commuted I like to say, to life. So I was unclear about what I was going to be able to do when I came, but I knew that upon my arrival I was going to have to do something beyond simply be a professor and/or an administrator, and I had to do something for myself, to make certain that I felt like I was being honest about my position toward the death penalty.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Dennis Longmire and Texas After Violence Project