Texas getting better at identifying problems at juvie facilities, but not fixing them

In reaction to revelations of dysfunctional youth prisons, advocates including your correspondent have been calling to dismantle them and shift to smaller facilities located closer to the urban areas from which most of the youth first came. (Check out Grits' interview with former Dallas News reporter Brandi Grissom on the topic.) I still think that's a good idea.

But we must then pay closer attention to how locals are treating juvenile offenders under their care. For example, inmates at one secure youth-treatment center in Dallas may go months without being allowed to exercise outside. Here's the lede to the Dallas News article breaking the story:

Unused basketball courts at the Lyle B. Medlock
Youth Treatment Center in South Dallas

Death row inmates in Texas are given at least an hour a week outdoors. Hardened criminals inside California's famous San Quentin prison get 10 hours.

Yet kids at a Dallas County correctional center for boys went months, sometimes more than a year, without going outdoors more than a few times.

For years, the boys at the Lyle B. Medlock Youth Treatment Center in southern Dallas County were rarely allowed outdoors, according to former guards, probation officers and families of incarcerated teens.

One boy said he was locked up for nearly 10 months and wasn't let outside for exercise once.

That we even know about this is a testament to the creation of the Independent Ombudsman at TJJD as part of the 2007 reforms, and the expansion of their authority to include local facilities. They began inspecting local juvenile detention facilities in 2015 and immediately identified the issue, reported the DMN. By May 2016, "During a third ombudsman visit, in May 2016, the inspector again noted the lack of outdoor time and submitted a 'Request for Plan of Action' to Dallas County juvenile officials: 'What plan can be developed and implemented at Medlock that would ensure youth have access to outdoor recreational areas?'"

So the mechanism to identify the problem worked, but the Ombudsman was not empowered to enforce her request to create an action plan for changing a bad policy. That didn't happen until the County Judge saw the Morning News article and sent the juvenile probation director a Nastygram, after which the policy was immediately changed.

Ideally, you want government structures that identify problems in order to fix them, not to allow them to linger until some reporter catches on and embarrasses the government into changing bad policies. This reminds me of Austin's police monitor, which at its best made important recommendations for reform but had no authority to fix the problems they'd identified.

At a minimum, when the Independent Ombudsman recommends this sort of policy change, local officials should be required to either implement the recommendation or formally reply to explain why they won't.

The TJJD Ombudsman had similarly identified most of the problems the Dallas Morning News reported on as Brandi Grissom was on her way out the door (check out Grits' interview with her; this was Brandi's final story as Austin bureau chief). So they're giving government officials an opportunity to rectify problems long before they become front-page news, but it's just not happening.

Which leads Grits to this conclusion: Legislators were successful in 2007 at creating a mechanism to identify problems at state and local facilities. But waiting until already-identified problems mushroom into front-page scandals and crises makes little sense. Someone must be empowered to fix identified problems, and to force local actors to adjust bad practices when they persist in the face of Ombudsman recommendations.