Their jobs are much like those of a district attorney or public defender in a medium-sized city. Except the ever-expanding steel metropolis where Gina DeBottis and David O’Neil make their living is populated by 150,000 of Texas’ most dangerous citizens.

DeBottis and O’Neil are lawyers in the insular and sometimes bizarre criminal law world inside Texas’ prison system. The state pays them to deal with the rising number of crimes committed by inmates already behind bars.