TJJD Ombudsman Firing: Shooting the Messenger

When one reads the press accounts which broke the recent scandals at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department or talk to the reporters who covered it, one thing becomes clear: Much of what we know would have remained a secret if it weren't for the work of Debbie Unruh and her staff at the Ombudsman's office.

So naturally, Gov. Abbott has fired her, the Houston Chronicle reported. The chair of TJJD's board is also gone, and the executive director of the agency had already been replaced by the head of Gov. Abbott's Criminal Justice Division (which is in charge of dispensing mostly federal grant money). See also coverage from the Texas Tribune.

Incidentally, the new board chair, Wes Ritchey, comes from the same job Grits' paternal grandfather had for 29 years: County Judge of Dallam County.

State Sen. John Whitmire defended the changes, declaring, "Surely they can't say that the status quo was working well." To which Grits would reply, "No, it's not, but the only way we know that is because of the good work of the Ombudsman who's now being fired."

I get firing the ED and the board chair, even if I wasn't happy with the subsequent ED's initial missteps. But firing the Ombudsman is a different breed of cat. Hard to see that as anything but shooting the messenger, which breeds skepticism about whether the Governor would rather solve the problem or cover it up.

Rather than embracing modern best practices on juvenile justice like Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Gov. Abbott is doubling down on failed big-government solutions from the past and shutting down voices that exposed its shortcomings. That's a discouraging start to what will surely be a long and painful process.

If Unruh's office had never documented and exposed some of these problems, they would continue to have been swept under the rug. Same goes for problems at county detention centers.

My own takeaway on this remains the same as when the latest scandal first broke: "The mechanisms the Legislature created [in 2007] to identify, prosecute and punish sexual misconduct by staff actually appear to have worked. But the corrections culture that produces these illicit relationships at TJJD and TDCJ continues to afford opportunities for predatory behavior." The Ombudsman's office is part of what worked in this case: It's the management and ultimately decision makers and budget writers in the Legislature who decided to keep these large facilities in rural areas far away from treatment or mental health resources, then underfund them to the point that, in some cases, staff turnover approaches 40 percent annually.

Will the next Ombudsman be anxious to expose problems at juvenile detention centers knowing that doing so got the last person fired? Not likely.

Unruh wasn't technically a "whistleblower" because her JOB was to expose this stuff. She wasn't doing it against the interests of the agency, it was part of her job description and the Ombudsman's explicit mission.

But the circumstance is essentially similar to firing a whistleblower: She's being punished after exposing problems everyone agrees shouldn't have been going on. Indeed, given that most of the changes at TJJD so far are non-responsive to the details of the recently reported scandals, punishing her seems to be prioritized over fixing the problems.

RELATED: "Shifting youth to adult prisons puts Texas on the wrong side of history."