Texas prison pop reaches 21st-century lows, but jail populations rising again

Keri Blakinger brings word that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice a) has shuttered three additional prison units and b) has witnessed the prison population dip to 120,709, which is the lowest it's been since before the turn of the century. That's mainly because county jails for several months stopped sending new inmates to TDCJ, says Blakinger, but they started taking them again in June. I'm a bit surprised that they wouldn't have caught up four months hence.

Perhaps also contributing: a substantial, reported crime decline this spring and court slowdowns, including most not setting felony trials, thus possibly delaying plea bargains.

By contrast, Texas county jails statewide had reduced populations by about 15% this spring, but as of October 1st are back to pre-COVID levels.

Both juvenile commitments to youth prisons and certifications of youth as adults also declined in 2020, reported the Legislative Budget board.

Texas should raze last, large youth prisons in light of high sex-victimization rates

The Bureau of Justice Statistics came out with a new report last week declaring that one in seven youth prison inmates in Texas are sexually assaulted while in state custody, see the Texas Observer's coverage. This confirms based on data what legislators have already heard via anecdote: Texas juvenile prisons are unsafe for the youth incarcerated in them.

The Observer did a good job fleshing out the reasons, which will be familiar to (very) long-time Grits readers: Texas continues to rely on larger facilities instead of following bipartisan, national best practices of using smaller, better-staffed facilities closer to the urban areas where the youths' families live.

It was solely at those larger units that the sex-assault problem was so severe: Four facilities reported that double-digit percentages of inmates in their care said they'd been sexually victimized.

• Evins Unit: 13.5%
• Gainesville: 16.0%
• McLennan Co.: 16.1%
• Ron Jackson Unit: 14.0%

Some of this has been reported in the local press but this report reminds us that the problem has systemic roots.

By contrast, nationally, the new survey found that sexual victimization reported in juvenile justice facilities declined. The state-run Texas units were among a handful of outliers.

In addition to high rates of violence and sexual victimization, employee turnover at Texas youth prisons are the highest at any state agency, and employees describe a nightmarish work environment.

Over the last decade, Texas has closed most of its youth prisons, regular readers will recall, with youth-inmate populations down to 786 from more than 5,000 kids 12 years ago when the youth decarceration effort began.

Community-based responses are more expensive per kid, but more effective and less costly in the long run. And they aren't prone to large proportions of youth in their care being sexually victimized.

It's worth mentioning, since Texas began decarcerating youth prisons, reducing those held by the state by more than 80 percent, juvenile crime by all measures has continued to decline. Even though a handful of those released committed serious offenses, juvenile-crime rates plummeted and the state overall became a safer place.

Since Nate Blakeslee first broke the story that Texas Youth Commission staff were molesting youth back in 2007,  Texas has tried everything to reduce sexual victimization rates at youth prisons except to follow expert advice to abandon large youth prisons altogether. In 2007 when these allegations first arose and the Legislature intervened, they created a "blue ribbon panel" which recommended closing these large facilities and shifting to smaller, community-based settings. Red and blue states alike have followed that approach, but the Texas Legislature balked, insisting on keeping a few large units open, even as their numbers dwindled. That's where the youth are allegedly being sexually victimized.

To make matters worse, legislative leadership have used allegations of violence and high sexual-victimization rates at these facilities as an excuse not to "raise the age" of adult criminal responsibility from 17 to 18, insisting that youth prisons are already out of control and couldn't handle the influx. Despite bipartisan agreement that 17-year olds shouldn't be incarcerated as adults, Texas remains one of only three states that does so.

Think about that: legislative leaders have both insisted "We won't close dangerous youth prisons," and also, "As long as youth prisons are dangerous, we can't raise the age." That's a strange, self-imposed Catch 22, but a convenient one if you're somebody who just thinks 17-year olds should be incarcerated as adults.

Grits understands the raise-the-age transition could be bumpy and won't be cost-free. In the long run, however, the success of Texas' juvenile-decarceration experiment over the last decade makes me sanguine it can work. But only if Texas legislators embrace juvenile-detention best practices and abandon these large, anachronistic facilities.

MORE: From the Waco Tribune-Herald.

TDCJ Youthful Offender Program accused of 'culture of cover-up'

Readers will recall that, after more staff-on-youth sex-assault scandals were uncovered at Texas Juvenile Justice Department facilities, the new executive director immediately sought to certify 35 youthful offenders as adults and send them to TDCJ, even though staff, not inmates, had caused all the scandals that forced her predecessor's ouster.

So where did she want to send those 35 kids? To the Youthful Offender Program at TDCJ. And now Lauren McGaughy at the Dallas News - in a story called, "'Culture of Coverup': Warden forced to retire from prison where whistleblower says teen inmates abused" - has pulled back the curtain on how youth are treated there, thanks to the diligent reporting of misconduct, abuse, and neglect by a now retired program supervisor* who formerly worked there. Read the whole story, excerpts won't do it justice. TDCJ has fired the warden and moved the youth to a unit in Huntsville.

What does it say about the state's priorities that, rather than solve problems of violence and abuse by staff on youth inmates, the first big policy shift from the new TJJD leadership was to ship off 35 kids to another environment characterized by abuse, fear, and predatory staff?

What exactly are we solving for here? Is the goal to protect the kids or to generate a headline where pols and bureaucrats can say, "We're changing something in response, so everyone can move on. Problem solved." Except the change didn't correlate to the problem and may create even bigger problems for those 35 youth.

Everyone essentially knows what needs to be done. Grits has discussed the expert consensus on the topic before (see below), and an extensive recent blog post from Texans Care for Children elaborated even more.

Bottom line, we need to move away from large units sited in rural areas far away from services and youth inmates' families and adopt the same model Gov. Scott Walker has embraced for Wisconsin, creating smaller, treatment-oriented facilities closer to urban areas following what's known as the "Missouri model." That's the same recommendation made by a blue-ribbon panel convened by the Texas Legislature eleven years ago after another sex-abuse scandal at Texas youth prisons. The National Conference of State Legislators recently issued similar advice.

Everyone basically agrees with this approach except Governor Abbott, his new appointee at TJJD, and handful of legislators. But they're the only ones who can make the necessary changes!

That's the conundrum. Fixing the problem will require spending more money on the same number of kids (or even fewer, if juvenile crime continues to go down), because there are fixed costs involved with creating a new system of smaller facilities. Plus, the current ones are understaffed, suffering from the highest turnover rate of any state agency.

(N.b., one anticipates private contractors will want in on this action, too, and state facilities have a terrible track record to try to defend, so increased privatization of youth services is likely on the horizon if reform succeeds. That would reduce the initial sunk costs but create a host of additional issues.)

We're not going to make youth safe by shipping them off to TDCJ or extending that agency's control to TJJD. Wherever they're housed, more must be done to keep youth safe from both predatory staff and from being victimized by other offenders. But the mistake in the past has been to assume keeping them safe is enough. It isn't. The system is failing on many levels and, at this point, it's hard to see the resistance to following best practices recommended by basically everybody who's deeply thought about it.

From shifting the Missouri model, raising the age of criminal responsibility from 17 to 18, etc., pretty much everyone knows what the best policies are for protecting and reducing recidivism among youth. But the policies instead are being created based on what's best for the politicians who want to avoid accepting responsibility for bad outcomes on their watch. As long as that continues to be the case, this pattern of abuse-scandal-and-blame will continue to arise every few years. Convincing the public to ignore a problem is not the same as solving it.

MORE: See Texas Appleseed's response to the latest scandal at TDCJ's Youthful Offender Program, titled, "Young Offenders Need Developmentally Appropriate Rehabilitation."

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Entry-level TDCJ wage hikes exacerbate TJJD staffing problems
• Texas Ranger is new TJJD Ombudsman
• TJJD Ombudsman Firing: Shooting the Messenger
• Raise-the-age opponents radically overstate 17-year olds incarceration levels
• Shifting youth to adult prisons puts Texas on the wrong side of history
• Texas getting better at identifying problems with juvie detention, but not fixing them
• Brandi Grissom interview: TJJD/Gainesville sex scandal
• What's next after TJJD's Gainesville scandal?
• Looking through the 'Glass Door' at TJJD employee complaints
• New TJJD sex-abuse allegations recall similar but different '07 scandals

* The original version of this post said the whistleblower was a correctional officer. In fact, she was a supervisor for a youth program.

Entry-level TDCJ wage hikes exacerbate TJJD staffing problems

At the Dallas News, Lauren McGaughy has a story that reaches to the heart of problems at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department, even if it's an aspect of the crisis state officials have been loathe to address: Low pay and poor working conditions, exacerbated by siting youth prisons in rural areas with limited labor pools, contribute to a nearly unmanageable situation where up to 40 percent of staff turn over every year.

Now, Texas adult prisons have increased starting pay to stave off their own high turnover rates, and the result is that juvenile facilities are no longer competitive. There's already a lot of migration back and forth between adult and juvenile facilities, but this change ensures that migration will flow only in one direction.

This is not a problem one fixes by firing managers, much less watchdogs. It requires ponying up money, which the Legislature has been unwilling to do. Indeed, if new spending is required either way, IMO it'd be better to follow Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's lead and invest in smaller facilities near urban areas based modern best practices. Just increasing pay to try to attract workers to undesirable jobs in rapidly depopulating rural areas strikes this writer as a fool's errand.

State leaders have an opportunity to re-imagine the juvenile justice system in a way that reduces both incarceration and recidivism. Between the understaffing crisis at youth prisons, the sexual assault charges against an increasing number of staff, the need to implement federal prison-rape regulations at county jails, and the bipartisan push to raise the age at which youth may be prosecuted as adults (a measure which passed the Texas House each of the last two sessions), there's a nexus of opportunity here to install a global fix that sets juvenile justice in Texas on a more stable, long-term path.

But they're blowing it. The desire to appear tough has so far trumped the desire to be smart. And because state leaders have paid no political cost for living in denial, they haven't addressed these more fundamental problems, of which the sex-abuse scandals are simply a recurring symptom. In the long run, as I've written before, Texas state leaders are on the wrong side of History. And these staffing shortages at TJJD show History may soon catch up to them.

See prior, related Grits coverage:

• Texas Ranger is new TJJD Ombudsman
• TJJD Ombudsman Firing: Shooting the Messenger
• Raise-the-age opponents radically overstate 17-year olds incarceration levels
• Shifting youth to adult prisons puts Texas on the wrong side of history
• Texas getting better at identifying problems with juvie detention, but not fixing them
• Brandi Grissom interview: TJJD/Gainesville sex scandal
• What's next after TJJD's Gainesville scandal?
• Looking through the 'Glass Door' at TJJD employee complaints
• New TJJD sex-abuse allegations recall similar but different '07 scandals

Texas Ranger is new TJJD Ombudsman

There was an Ombudsman named Unruh

Who reported on bad things that staff do.

Newspapers reported

Her data exported

And so Debbie Unruh is now through.

Governor Abbott replaced TJJD Ombudsman Debbie Unruh with a retired Texas Ranger with no relevant experience, whatsoever. Reported the Houston Chronicle, "the incoming ombudsman is a former special ops commander with experience in special weapons and tactics, bomb squad, reconnaissance, crisis negotiations and border security." That background should really help when coaxing stories out of abused kids in youth lockups.

Meanwhile, Grits remains concerned about the message sent when the person who exposed many of the problems driving change at the agency is targeted for removal. I hope this new guy will do a good job, but the optics sure are bad. And if all of a sudden his reports show that problems at the agency have cleared up, will those findings be accepted as credible, or will the shoot-the-messenger circumstances surrounding his predecessor's departure make even good news something questionable? Time will tell. 

Putting a cop in the job instead of someone who's worked with kids - when the main job requirement is traveling around the state listening to kids - may work out despite the bad optics. I hope so. Certainly, I have no reason to believe the new Ombudsman is anything but a good man with the best intentions, despite the mismatched skill set. But coupled with moving troubled kids into TDCJ and uninformed comments by the new ED about raise-the-age proposals, Governor Abbott's change program still seems to this observer like it's off to a rocky start.

RELATED: A couple of editorials out this week speak to the small-government strategy that, in this writer's opinion, the Governor should adopt, following Scott Walker's lead in Wisconsin, instead of doubling down on large youth prison facilities.

• Austin Statesman: "Why Texas should close its last five juvenile lockup sites"
• Washington Post: "Time to close all youth prisons"

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."

Raise-the-age opponents radically overstate 17-year olds' incarceration levels

The new head of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department opposes raise-the-age legislation - to increase the age at which youth can be prosecuted as adults from 17 to 18 - reported the Dallas Morning News, on pragmatic grounds. According to her, TJJD facilities are so dysfunctional that an influx of youth would "break" them. She estimated that the change would add 300-400 new youth inmates to understaffed Texas youth prisons.

This is such a brazen falsehood it's really hard to swallow! Looking at the most recent (2016) TDCJ Statistical Report, as of August 31, 2016, there were only 51 youths under age 18 housed in TDCJ (see p. 18 of the pdf; p. 8 of the document). Most of those were probably certified as adults, so the number of 17-year olds sentenced is even smaller.* Plus juvenile courts tend to use incarceration LESS than on the adult side, so that number would likely come down if 17-year olds are prosecuted in juvenile courts.

That influx could be easily handled by TJJD institutions with adequate budget support from the Lege - it's within the range of the year-to-year fluctuation on youth prison populations already. No big deal. Overall, offenses committed by 17-year olds tend to be similar to the caseloads of juvenile courts.

There would be some additional costs to the state budget, mostly for the added juvenile probation load. But for taxpayers, that would be offset because local county jails wouldn't have to be renovated to comply with juvenile detention standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act to avoid costly civil litigation. The fact that the extra expense accrues to the county budget and not the state doesn't reduce its significance to taxpayers footing the bills.

Bottom line: There will be some additional cost for youthful offenders in the next few years, no matter what. The Legislature has tried to do the job on the cheap for too long. Eventually something had to give, which is what you saw at the Gainesville State School.

Grits has seen some insensible and overstated stances taken by raise-the-age opponents, who are becoming a little frantic as state after state amends their laws, leaving Texas increasingly isolated on this front. But overestimating the number of incarcerated 17-year olds by 600-800 percent is a little much. Let's at least please base this debate on real facts.

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

*The observation about youth certified as adults belongs to Lauren McGaughy, the Dallas News reporter who wrote the story, and was added after this post was first published.

Shifting youth to adult prisons puts Texas on wrong side of history

Grits feels a little deflated at news that the Texas Juvenile Justice Department will transfer youth prisoners to adult prisons in the Department of Criminal Justice, supposedly as "part of a push to boost security by working to remove assaultive youth," reported the Houston Chronicle. They're moving up to 35 juvenile offenders into the adult system.

It's a small number, but to the extent it gives us a window into state leaders' thinking, it's very much a move in the wrong direction.

Problem is, this approach is completely non-responsive to the recent scandals at the Gainesville State School, which supposedly is what's spurring the move. There, the problems were staff engaging in sexual predation against their charges. The assaults making headlines involved staff paying youth to assault other youth they didn't like! Staff turnover approached 40% annually because of low pay, plus understaffing created dangerous working conditions. And the location of state facilities in rural outposts meant youth had little access to mental health or drug treatment services.

That's not a problem with "assaultive youth," that's a problem with underfunded, understaffed, and unaccountable institutions.

Moreover, it's a problem that's at least as bad at TDCJ as TJJD, and probably worse for young, vulnerable inmates. When the Gainesville stories first came out, Grits observed:

These troubles mirror problems witnessed at the adult system, where sexual misconduct by staff at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) is a big source of federal Prison Rape Elimination Act violations. The Texas Association Against Sexual Assault has recommended the Legislature create an independent oversight mechanism at TDCJ comparable to the Ombudsman created for TJJD after the 2007 scandals.

So TDCJ has the same problems, but TJJD has more systems in place to catch them (which is how the Gainesville scandal arose in the first place - media reports didn't surface until after four staff were indicted).

The Chronicle story tells us the governor backs the move, in addition to Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, who is quoted more prominently in the story.

But the better approach is being modeled right now by the governor in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who is responding to a similar scandal at that state's main youth prison facility in which two guards were indicted. Instead of shifting youth into the adult system, he's following best practices identified a decade ago in Texas based on the "Missouri model," an approach that emphasizes community corrections and smaller residential units housing fewer than 48 inmates each.

Governor Abbott and state leaders in Texas, though, appear inclined in a direction contrary to the best practices followed elsewhere (and recommended by its own blue-ribbon panel a decade ago). And it's not just conservative governors like Scott Walker shifting away from big institutions toward a more modern, evidence-based approach.

This week the National Conference of State Legislators issued a set of principles regarding juvenile justice,  which included this recommendation: "Determine the maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction, the age of extended jurisdiction, and the scope of transfer to the adult system in accordance with research on adolescent brain development, behavioral change and the effects on public safety."

The reference to "research on adolescent brain development" stands out here. Grits has argued that the push to raise the age of adult criminal culpability in Texas from 17 to 18 is an effort to bring Texas into the 20th century, but not the 21st. In the modern era, following the lead of brain science showing youthful brains continue developing into the mid-20s, even that age looks a little young.

Massachusetts recently raised the minimum age there for adult prosecution to 19 years old. The best evidence from neurological research, a judge in Kentucky found last year in evaluating the death penalty for young defendants, shows that the brains of 19 and 20 year olds are more like those of someone aged 15-16 than they are of someone aged 25.

In that light, Texas remains on the wrong side of history, both in continuing to charge 17 year olds as adults and in the recent shift of youthful offenders into adult prisons. Sen. Whitmire declared, "I am very positive on the plan to once and for all make Juvenile Justice safe." But we've heard that before. A quick check of the Houston Chronicle archives finds Harold Dutton, chair of the House committee overseeing TJJD, declaring to R.G. Ratcliffe in 2007 (March 11, p. A1) that Texas would fix the problem "once and for all" back then. Yet state leaders failed to execute the plan experts laid out for them, refusing to pony up for sufficient staff or smaller, residential facilities, and so here we are.

Now, once again we're hearing promises to fix the problem, but unlike Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Lone Star leaders are doubling down on outdated approaches. Texas needs to look for more appropriate models for dealing with young offenders, not more ways to ratchet them into the adult system as quickly as possible.

Brandi Grissom Interview: TJJD/Gainesville sex abuse scandal

In the December episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast, we included an excerpt from an interview by Grits with Brandi Grissom-Swicegood, who just left her post as Dallas Morning News Austin bureau chief to pursue a second career as a professional triathlete. Brandi's final story for the News focused on the emerging sex-assault scandal at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department's Gainesville State School (see prior Grits coverage).

Find a transcript of our full conversation after the jump.

Executing non-killers, imagining life without plea bargaining, no oversight for forensic hypnosis, and other stories

Here's a brief, browser-tab clearing roundup of items about which I haven't had time to blog, but of which Grits readers should be aware:

Forensic commission can't address 'forensic hypnosis'
First, updating an earlier Grits report, I communicated with Lynn Garcia, General Counsel for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, who informs me that forensic hypnosis does not fall under their jurisdiction, even as a general area they're authorized to study, because it does not involve "physical evidence," which is defined in the statute as something tangible. She said they've received complaints about the practice in the past, including one recently, and agrees it's problematic, but doesn't believe it falls within their jurisdiction. While I understand her legal interpretation, that leads to an unfortunate situation where government-sanctioned junk science (the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement gives out certifications in forensic hypnosis) cannot be evaluated by the state Forensic Science Commission. That should change in 2019.

Maybe they'll listen if they Rangers tell 'em
Governor Abbott has asked the Texas Rangers to investigate sexual abuse at the Gainesville State School. But we've had an Ombudsman complaining about these problems and recommending solutions for years, and for the most part those recommendations have been ignored. Most of the details in the disturbing press reports out of Gainesville came from Debbie Unruh, the TJJD independent ombudsman, and had been included in her prior reports. Why would we imagine state leaders will listen to the Texas Rangers when they haven't implemented the recommendations from Unruh who's been sounding the alarm all this time? The state already knows the solutions here, they just haven't heretofore been willing to pay for them.

Did TDCJ understaffing allow rape of prison teacher?
A teacher at a TDCJ prison blames chronic understaffing for the circumstances that led to her rape. Grits readers know this is a longstanding problem. The solution here is to reduce incarceration levels and close understaffed units. There just aren't enough people in some of these rural areas to consistently staff the prison units there. And the problem will be much-exacerbated at certain South and West Texas units if and when oil prices go back up.

Coverup at TDCJ?
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice allegedly shredded documents they were obligated to turn over as discovery in a federal lawsuit alleging the summer heat in un-air conditioned prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The warden who approved the shredding allegedly already knew about the litigation. Hard to interpret it otherwise: This smacks of a coverup.

Executing non-killers
Something about executing a person for a murder they didn't themselves commit feels inherently unjust. Even the prosecutor from Jeff Wood's capital conviction, who had 13 months experience as an attorney at the time she was designated shot-caller in the case, has asked the Governor to commute his sentence. Wood's example reinforces Grits' belief that the law-of-parties doctrine is ripe for revision: the concept stems from British common law, but Parliament abolished it in 1957, followed soon thereafter by all of Europe, India, and in 1990, Canada. This is a holdover from a less evolved time.

Paying for public defenders would reduce incarceration costs

Long-time Grits readers are aware that defendants represented by public defenders have better outcomes than those with appointed attorneys. We've seen this both in national data and Texas examples. But a new national analysis suggests that public defenders do such a better job that using them reduces incarceration costs: Using "public defenders reduce[s] the probability of any prison sentence by 22%, as well as the length of prison by 10%."

When your 'tiny house' means a tiny privacy footprint
Here's an unintended consequence to the "tiny house" movement: If your tiny house is on a trailer, your Fourth Amendment rights are likely diminished and the automobile exception will apply to searches of your residence, according to academic from Texas State.

Life without plea bargaining?
For the reading pile: India's court system doesn't do plea bargains. They've tried to implement them in the last decade and it's been a flop. I want to read this new academic article to learn more about the situation.

What next after TJJD's Gainesville scandal?

In the wake of recent sex-abuse allegations at the Gainesville State School, the Dallas Morning News editorial board recommended closing Texas' five remaining youth prisons. But they didn't really address what should happen with the inmates there or how the juvenile-justice system should be structured in the aftermath of youth prison closures.

For more detailed thoughts on that, check out this GFB post from several days after the story broke anticipating that recommendation and also what might lie beyond.

In that vein, yesterday, four liberal groups called for the creation of a joint House-Senate legislative committee to create a plan to close Texas' remaining youth prisons and utilizing alternatives to secure lockups including TJJD halfway houses located closer to urban areas. Grits has no problem with the policies they're suggesting but am not certain a joint-legislative committee is the way to go. For starters, that would require that Dan Patrick and Joe Straus to both assent, and presently I doubt those men could agree on what to order for breakfast. Moreover, it feels to me like it's already fairly obvious what needs to be done.

After the Texas Youth Commission sex scandals put the agency into conservatorship in 2007, the Legislature commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to recommend how to transform the system. They suggested shifting to the "Missouri model" where youth offenders are housed in smaller facilities (fewer than 48 beds) closer to urban areas where more treatment and mental health services are available. That goal has been partially achieved, but the Gainesville episode shows that youth left in those few remaining large facilities are still at risk.

All this to say, the state has a long history here and most people involved understand in broad strokes what needs to be done. State leaders just need to muster the political will, and money, to finish the job.

MORE/TEASER: This week Grits interviewed Brandi Grissom-Swicegood on the Gainesville State School scandals for the December episode of our Reasonably Suspicious podcast. We discussed similarities and differences to the TYC episode and where state leaders may go from here. As veterans of the 2007 episode, we shared the same sense of deja vu, and exasperation, that such similar problems had recurred. And we talked about how to prevent such episodes in the future instead of merely document and prosecute them after the fact. Look for an excerpt of our conversation in the main Reasonably Suspicious podcast for December, then Grits will post the full interview online soon thereafter. Brandi just left her job as Austin Bureau Chief of the Dallas Morning News to pursue a career as a professional triathlete, and this was her last story. So it was fun to get to interview her on her way out as she reflected on her career reporting on the capitol, in addition to discussing all this juvenile justice stuff. Coming soon! (And thanks for doing that, Brandi, that was a lot of fun.)

Looking through the Glass Door at TJJD employee complaints

In the wake of the new Texas Juvenile Justice Department sex scandal out of the Gainesville State School, and reports by the Dallas News of absurdly high turnover rates and abuse of inmates by staff, it occurred to me to check the service "Glass Door" to see if current or former TJJD employees had ever posted there. Indeed, they had!

Glass Door is a service for people looking for jobs. It allows current and former employees to provide input on anonymously on what it's really like to work for an employer. Mostly it's used in private sector contexts, but it turned out there was state agency information, too.

The main positives about the agency were that pay and especially benefits were good for the jurisdiction. But the various negative critiques mounted up. Here's a short compilation of some of the more negative comments made by TJJD employers about their jobs:

• very dangerous environment with little to no troop support.
• we should have been paid more for the crap we had to deal with
• Unsafe environment to work in, Messy Cliques, No appreciation shown to the employees.
• Morale is the lowest in seven years.
• The stress level can often run high. The turn-over rate tends to be high so there are some issues involved with maintaining veteran, well-trained staff. These positions are not for the faint of heart or those who can be easily manipulated.
• Short staffed. Mandatory overtime that you're not paid for.
• The workplace has a negative culture and the state is constantly threatening to close down the facilities.
• Safety is at risk.
• Unsafe work environment. Management is clueless and uncaring. Employees are treated as pawns to be used for coverage. Poor attendance by coworkers is not addressed and employees often have to work 12 hour to 16 hour shifts as you cant leave unless management can find a replacement for you at the end of your shift. 
• This is the most racist place I have ever seen. It is full of hateful and negative teachers and administrators , which they likely keep around. Most if them call the kids trash and have no real desire to help them. Your treatment is based on how well you suck up or sleep around.
• Expectations are high and those that genuinely care for the youth can find themselves doing the work of two or three. 

One employee offers this disgruntled assessment:

Pros
In this company there aren't any pros, unless you are in with the "in" crowd, the morale at the company is very low and that's from management down. As a clerk, there is no room for improvement, no training. There are basically no pros for working for this agency. 

Cons
A lot of work for one person, no career ladder, no room for improvement, self taught.

Ouch!

See a related Grits post: "New TJJD sex-abuse allegations recall similar but different '07 scandals."

New TJJD sex-abuse allegations recall similar, but different '07 scandals

For anyone paying attention a decade ago, news of sex-assault allegations against staff at a Texas youth prison in Gainesville brings on a deja vu feeling regarding the Texas Youth Commission scandals in Pyote, an episode which ultimately brought down the agency and sent its successor down a tumultuous path toward reducing incarceration levels by 75 percent.

Now, "At least four former staff members at the Gainesville State School, including a woman allegedly pregnant with a youthful offender's child, are facing prison time amid allegations of sexual misconduct at the state lockup for troubled youths," reported Brandi Grissom-Swicegood and Sue Ambrose at the Dallas News.

And everyone who was around in 2007 drops their heads and thinks, "Oh no, not again."

These troubles mirror problems witnessed at the adult system, where sexual misconduct by staff at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) is a big source of federal Prison Rape Elimination Act violations. The Texas Association Against Sexual Assault has recommended the Legislature create an independent oversight mechanism at TDCJ comparable to the Ombudsman created for TJJD after the 2007 scandals.

Which brings us to the big difference between this scandal and the last one: The perpetrators were caught by the government itself, not by reporters following up leads given to legislative staff by family members of raped constituents. And the perpetrators were promptly arrested and prosecuted. The agency culture that tolerated such behavior has shifted dramatically. So that part of the system worked better than last time, one notices.

And to be fair, that's really all the Legislature's reforms after 2007 were supposed to do. As the agency reduced the population in youth prisons, it was pressed along the way for commensurate budget cuts, even though most of the facilities are chronically understaffed and suffer from among the highest staff turnover rates of any state agency. That's because of low pay, crappy working conditions, and the location of the facilities in mainly rural areas where the labor pool is either dissipating or otherwise occupied.

As a result, the agency has mainly improved the lot of youth under its care by reducing their number, with the Legislature financing (mostly cheaper) community supervision programming in lieu of housing them in state youth prisons. If those reductions had afforded  the agency a chance to improve staff-to-youth ratios more aggressively, or to invest the savings in programming, it would be easier to make a case for them.

But in their current state, it's hard to argue for keeping them around at all. When activists like Angela Davis talk about "abolishing" prisons on the adult side, Grits must admit I roll my eyes. But on the juvenile side, I'm all the way there. Funding community-based programs in lieu of incarcerating youth in state-run prisons empirically has worked. Youth crime in Texas plummeted at even greater rates than crime overall when Texas shifted most offending youth into local systems.

Expanding on that model for the last thousand-or-so kids left in Texas youth prisons would also afford the chance to shift to smaller-scale units run on a more treatment-centric basis. In an ideal world, the Lege would finance locally controlled facilities reconfigured according to best practices like those endorsed a decade ago by a "blue ribbon commission," whose recommendations the Legislature first eagerly commissioned and then, when they proved inconvenient and expensive, ignored.

The blue-ribbon panel recommended the state move to smaller facilities modeled after Missouri's juvenile system, and put the era of housing juveniles in large units with hundreds of bunkmates behind us. Instead, they depopulated youth prisons, but continued to run the ones that remained on the old, large-scale warehousing model.

The other option floated periodically is to hand the system over to TDCJ to run. But as noted above, TDCJ has trouble preventing inappropriate staff relations and contraband at its adult units, which fails to inspire confidence that they'd do any better running juvenile facilities. Plus, when TDCJ executives were brought in to run TYC after the original scandals were uncovered in 2007, their skill sets did not translate to the juvenile realm and their leadership was (if we are to be frank) an unmitigated catastrophe. So as solutions go, I see that one as a pig in a poke. It could invite new troubles and wouldn't necessarily solve anything.

Anyway, that's Grits' initial takeaway from this dispiriting news out of Gainesville: The mechanisms the Legislature created 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.

So we're better at catching and punishing predators. What hasn't worked is warehousing youth in large state facilities a decade after the experts recommended breaking them up. Texas was told ten years ago it needed to shift to smaller, treatment-based programs, locally controlled and located near their own communities. And with these problems recurring, maybe it's time state leaders finally heeded those suggestions.

Crime by 17-year olds plummeting; should they be charged as adults?

The House Research Organization's Kellie Dworaczyk has produced a useful research brief on the issue of raising the age of criminal responsibility from 17-18 years old, a move which would make it easier for state and local lockups to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Texas is one of seven states which doesn't treat the 18th birthday as the threshold of adulthood, as is the case under federal law. Six states have increased the age of responsibility in the last several years.

When the raise-the-age (RTA) issue was first raised, concerns were raised that the volume of offenders would swamp the juvenile system. But the numbers, especially regarding incarceration, are lower than I'd thought. In 2015, Texas cops arrested 22,065 17-year olds for all offenses combined. There were 8,066 people aged 17-20 who were on probation for an offense committed when they were 17, so clearly the overwhelming majority of those arrests are for very low level offenses. Just 46 17-year olds were housed in TDCJ as of Aug. 31st.

Among arguments in favor of the change: "about 44 percent of arrests of 17-year-olds were for theft, marijuana possession, drunkenness, and liquor law violations." And "The offenses and needs of 17-year-olds are similar to those of other teenagers in the juvenile system."

From a normative perspective, perhaps the best reason for the change is to match the law to public perceptions. Because of media and popular culture, nearly everyone including 17-year olds themselves who're not actually, personally involved in the justice system already believe the age of criminal culpability is 18, and most of those 22k arrested in 2015 (and their parents) were no doubt surprised to learn otherwise. Where possible, the law should match popular expectations because, when they conflict, kids absorb culture all the time and none of them have read the criminal statutes.

Statistics are not gathered - but IMO should be - about 17-year olds housed in adult county jails. "At a March 2014 hearing of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, the Office of Court Administration reported the estimated number of 17-year-olds in local jails on a typical day was 2,868 to 3,119. Most were in jail for misdemeanors. "

The cost estimated for raising the age in Texas, according to a fiscal note prepared in 2015 by the Legislative Budget Board, would be small at first but rise to almost $170 million over five years.

But that only considers costs to state government, which largely finances the juvenile justice system. It did not take into account possible financial benefits. According to HRO, "A 2012 report from the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs estimated that raising the age of jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system in Texas would result in $88.9 million in net benefits for each cohort of 17-year-olds. This takes into account costs and savings to taxpayers and the fiscal benefits resulting from better outcomes for youths and reduced victimization."

There was also speculation that the cost estimate may be overstated. "Costs of raising the age could be less than some estimates. Arrests of 17-year-olds have been dropping for years, with 46,173 arrested in 2008 and 22,065 arrested in 2015." Fewer than half as many 17 year olds were arrested in 2015 as 2008?! That's a remarkable stat. Even Grits hadn't realized the crime drop among youth had been so significant.

The paper discussed briefly the confluence of the RTA issue and the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).

Raising the age would help reduce costs to local jails and the state to comply with federal standards under PREA. Texas counties are incurring significant costs to try to meet the sight and sound separation standards. They report dedicating entire floors to 17-year-olds, which means leaving beds empty on those floors and having to move older offenders around a jail to meet recreation or medical needs of 17-year-olds. Counties also could incur costs if noncompliance with PREA were raised in a lawsuit against them. One large county is considering moving 17-year-olds from its jail to a facility hours away to comply with PREA

However, the report hinted at hidden costs to counties not included in the state-level fiscal note:

some estimates indicate the average first-year cost for eight counties would have been $2.2 million. Bexar County estimated an annual cost of between $8.2 million and $8.5 million to implement the change. Harris County estimated $50.1 million in the first full year of implementation and $18.2 million to $19.9 million annually thereafter. The Harris County costs included a new juvenile detention center

Here's why I don't buy those numbers: Why would Harris County need a new juvenile detention center if, when currently prosecuting these kids under adult law, only 46 of them are even locked up in TDCJ statewide in the first place? That rings false to me.

I agree RTA would cause counties to incur costs, but here's the rub: PREA will cause them to incur costs, anyway. Either one of two possible policy choices would cost counties. If the age of criminal culpability is left the same, adult county jails will have to undergo modifications to segregate 17 year olds in ways they haven't in the past. If RTA passes, juvenile systems will incur additional costs (even if IMO the Harris County numbers are inflated).

So pointing to juvie detention costs as a reason not to pass RTA ignores two questions: 1) Might renovating adult facilities cost even more? And 2) with the rest of the country moving toward an age of culpability of 18, should we sink costs into renovations to accommodate the old age regime when the long-term trend is clearly the other direction? Don't we risk having locals invest twice if, a few years down the line, the vicissitudes of fate and history end up forcing the RTA change, anyway? The tradeoffs involved in that choice weren't made as clear in the report as Grits might have preferred.

For my part, I'd rather Texas deal with the PREA issues once and be done with it, passing RTA so that Texas laws and regs better line up with the federal requirements, which treat 17-year olds as juveniles. From a managerial standpoint, it's cleaner, more efficient, and makes more sense. It would also have the added benefit of protecting those youthful arrests from future disclosure, making it easier for those kids to get a job, housing, credit, etc., down the line.

The cost makes this a tougher sell during a legislative session focused on budget cutting. But it's a pay-me-now or pay-me-later kind of deal.

News of juvie prison rape should cause Lege to prioritize PREA compliance

Grits experienced a terrible moment of deja vu upon seeing Brandi Grissom's report in the Dallas News that, "Officials at the state youth prison agency are investigating a suspected serial sexual predator among corrections officers at a juvenile lockup in Gainesville." For me, seeing the story brought me back to Nate Blakeslee's January 2007 investigative report in the Texas Observer about sexual abuse at what was then the Texas Youth Commission. His story set off a chain of events which led to the dismantling and renaming of the agency, which reemerged from a troubled conservatorship renamed the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.

Brandi attributed some recent problems to budget cuts and rising inmate numbers:

As the agency's population and facilities shrunk, so did the budget that lawmakers approved. But the population has begun to increase, and on Thursday the agency reported that it is housing 15.5 percent more youths than it has the budget to serve. Unruh said three of the five secure state facilities are short-staffed.

Grits is surprised to hear this because I was under the impression Sen. John Whitmire passed legislation last year aimed at shifting more juvenile offenders into community supervision, though the final version was much neutered from what he originally proposed. Still, this news runs counter to expectations set during the 2015 Lege session that more troubled youth would be supervised in the community. Instead, we're sending more to state youth prisons.

The agency says solving these problems will require a big investment:

While lawmakers told the agency to cut nearly $17 million from its budget for the 2018-19 biennium, the agency has said it needs nearly $170 million more than it is allotted to keep up with the growing population and meet federal rape prevention requirements, among other needs.

Decarceration of juvenile prisons in Texas has been a major success story of the last decade, and this news doesn't mitigate that. A 15 percent increase following a 80 percent reduction still amounts to perhaps 150 kids, so that doesn't explain a $170 million budget request, much of which likely stems from facility upgrades and other changes to comply with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

Indeed, given this unsettling news, compliance with PREA seems more important than ever for TJJD, so maybe the Lege should consider getting up off resources to help them make that happen.

So far, this hasn't blown up the way Blakeslee's story did back in the day, One wonders if the episode was uncovered because of reforms implemented after that 2007 upheaval that made it easier for youth to complain and more likely the agency would react when they did? It'd be interesting to see a comparison of the post-'07 reforms and the details of this case to see where changes either a) helped identify and remove the wrongdoer or b) failed to prevent his alleged misconduct as was hoped. Certainly hiring the guy after he left TDCJ under a cloud of accusations, which TJJD knew about, raises some red flags, which Brandi's story ably articulates.

The fact that the TYC transition went on for years and was such a mess for so long probably contributes to public officials' reticence to jump down the agency's throat, as happened ten years ago almost instantly when news of sexual abuse of kids arose near the beginning of session. Nobody wants to relive that leap-before-you-look fiasco (your correspondent included), which took years to resolve itself, so I'd expect state leaders to move more deliberately this time around. Still, it's pretty obvious such situations haven't been eliminated, so clearly more must be done.

RELATED: From the Dallas News editorial board.

Assault on youth by guard at Evins caught on video

As if state officials need another excuse to consider further downsizing of Texas' youth prison system, "A juvenile correctional officer at Evins Regional Juvenile Center was caught on video assaulting two youths that were in his care last fall" for taking a remote control, reported the McAllen Monitor (Feb. 2).

Regular readers know this is by no means the first episode at Evins. Honestly, it's seemingly always something.

Corrections Committee: Expand rehabilitation and education programs at TDCJ

The Texas House Corrections Committee this week put out its interim report (pdf) covering the following topics:

• Oversight of TDCJ, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and TJJD
• Review of mental health services in the justice system
• Evaluate 'pay for performance' model for privatizing juvenile justice
• School discipline and the criminal justice system

There's a decent overview of operations of monitored agencies, including a good discussion of administrative segregation (solitary confinement) in adult prisons. Notable recommendations on the adult side (just a few excerpts, there were quite a few more) included:

• The legislature and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice should look for more ways to focus a larger component of our correctional budget on rehabilitative investments, as opposed to simply inmate confinement.
• The legislature and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice should consider ways to expand inmate educational and vocational training programs within the prison system as a core component of effectively rehabilitating offenders.
• The Texas Department of Criminal Justice should explore new and innovative ways to increase access to prisoner visitation programs in order to fully prepare inmates for the re-entry process, including the potential use of teleconferencing as a visitation option.

Some of the recommendations regarding TJJD seemed oblivious to suggestions to further radically downsize or eliminate youth prison facilities. The report appears to assume they won't just continue to operate but may have programming bolstered - makes you wonder if the House and Senate are on the same page on that question.

On the mental health front, the suggestions seemed tepid and inadequate given the problems faced by the state in that arena. And the school discipline charge didn't result in significant recommendations.

These are just casual first impressions from initially skimming the document. Read the full thing (pdf) for more detail.

Juvenile crime, incarceration down; extra capacity at TDCJ?

Mistakenly thinking the Legislative Budget Board had finally released its much-anticipated long-term prison population projections, I clicked on this link on their site only to find myself staring at a routine Monthly Tracking Report for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD). Ho hum. Glancing quickly through it, I did see a couple of interesting items I didn't know.

Extra capacity at TDCJ?
From the bottom of page 1:

• As of May 2014, the agency had 1,473 beds temporarily removed from capacity due to staffing shortages.
• Also in May, 849 Substance Abuse Felony Punishment (SAFP) beds were temporarily converted into Intermediate Sanctions Facilty (ISF) beds. 

The report doesn't say which units shut down capacity because of understaffing, but 1,473 is a significant number. That makes me think the agency has yet more capacity it could shed, perhaps starting with units that can't keep their staffing up. TDCJ's monthly population reduced slowly over the last year, from 150,931 to 150,461, so basically flat.

That's where the long-term projections I was looking for come in. Sometime in June, LBB is scheduled to come out with an important set of official prison population projections on which legislative appropriators must base their various funding schemes. At a recent House Appropriations Committee hearing, LBB staff implied that the new projections would not show long-term growth in prison populations to the same extent as their last projection, which is now 15 months old. But we won't know for sure until the document is released.

If the downward trend continues, the Lege should cut more prison capacity and use the savings for treatment, rehabilitation and reentry programs.

Juvenile crime plummeted after Texas de-incarcerated youth prisons
Another fascinating tidbit from the tracking report: Despite having reduced the population of Texas youth prisons by nearly 80 percent after the 2007 sex-assault scandals and closed most of them, the average daily population of juveniles on probation statewide declined by 30 percent in Texas over the last five years, from 35,645 in 2008 to 24,896 in 2013. Referrals to probation fell over the same period, from 97,584 in 2009 to 68,386 in 2013, according to the report. And in schools, the number of Mandatory Attendance Days at Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Programs (JJAEPs) also went down, from 110,189 in the '08-09 school year to 73,227 in 2012-13. And that's despite the Legislature mandating that school police write fewer Class C tickets to students who misbehave.

Since juvenile incarceration fell almost 80% from its height after the Legislature first reformed, then disbanded, the Texas Youth Commission, what caused juvenile referrals (read: new offenses) to decline so rapidly in the years that followed? Many people associate incarceration with crime reduction, assuming prison keeps us safe from predators who would harm us if they were out. So how does the tuff-on-crime crowd explain such a radical reduction in juvenile incarceration corresponding to a 30-percent drop in juvenile crime over the last several years period?

Grits finds the rapid but inexplicable drop in juvenile crime one of the most remarkable, yet little-remarked stories in Texas criminal justice. A tremendous achievement. Too bad nobody knows what caused it nor how if at all it related to government policies, so it can't be readily replicated.

More turnover at TJJD top spot

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department will soon have its third executive director in less than a month, according to the Texas Tribune. Mike Griffiths, who'd been there about 18 months, recently retired, and "Linda Brooke, the current interim executive director, is leaving TJJD for a job in Fort Worth." Now:

A special board meeting is scheduled for Thursday to consider and possibly approve David Riley as Brooke's replacement.

If confirmed, Riley, who is currently chief juvenile probation officer for Bexar County, would start on May 12.

Whoever is the next E.D. at the agency, I hope they're given time to right the boat. More than anything at this point TJJD needs competent, stable leadership. Over the past seven years they've had incredible turnover at that top spot, as well as in many of the key leadership positions in senior management.

If Mr. Riley gets the job I wish him luck; he's going to need it.

SEE ALSO: Another private prison deal implodes; notes from Senate oversight hearing on TJJD

Another speculative private prison deal implodes: Notes from Senate oversight hearing on TJJD

Most of what little press coverage there was of Tuesday's Senate Criminal Justice Committee hearing exercising oversight of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department focused on Chairman John Whitmire's pronouncement that the agency  is "broken." Reported AP, “Juvenile judges have told me they’ve given up on this department,” Whitmire said. “They feel like they get better services for the youth in the communities they are coming from.” The thing is, Whitmire has made the same pronouncement so many times in the past, there's an extent to which it's lost its edge. We've long ago learned there's no short-term fix to the agency's ongoing woes and, as retiring executive director Mike Griffiths told the committee, the agency will need time and long-term stability of leadership to truly fix what ails it. (Go here to watch the hearing for yourself.)

To me, the more interesting development on Tuesday concerned the committee's squelching of yet another rural county's ploy to use incarceration - in this case, of juveniles - as an economic development gambit. In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission operated 14 secure juvenile detention facilities. Today they're down to five. The ones that remain are large facilities with antiquated layouts not conducive to what nearly everybody recognizes as modern best practices: Smaller facilities aimed at providing rehabilitation and education services as opposed to mere incarceration.

Local officials spent $700,000 rehabbing the old Crockett State School facility as a detention center, Crockett Mayor Wayne Mask told the committee. He expressly disagreed with the assertion by Whitmire, Sen. Juan Hinojosa, and others that prisons shouldn't be thought of as "economic development," declaring that in the "real world" that's exactly how local communities viewed them.

When the Crockett State School closed its doors in 2011, said Mask, the town lost one of its largest employers that had provided upwards of 300 jobs. The facility doesn’t lend itself to many kinds of businesses, he said, so they decided to turn it into a regional juvenile detention center to house delinquent youth from surrounding counties, contracting with a private prison company called Cornerstone to manage operations. The company held a recent job fair seeking applications for 40 positions and 400 people showed up hoping to fill them, said the mayor. But the economics of the deal won't work, the committee was told, unless Cornerstone can count on at least 70 youth detainees from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.

Chairman Whitmire and the rest of the committee put an end to those hopes on Tuesday, telling local officials and their legislator-representatives that the agency had not given Cornerstone any letter of intent or other official confirmation and, with 400 empty beds at state-owned facilities, would not be authorized to do so. Local media had already portrayed Crockett's reopening as a done deal, so this was quite a slap in the face to the area's officials, who clearly jumped the gun. Whitmire and other senators said that, if the agency were to open new facilities, they would be smaller units in Texas' largest urban areas that contribute the most youth to TJJD's secure facilities - most likely in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. The chairman compared Crockett's situation to Jones County, which built a speculative prison and contracted with a private firm hoping to secure adult TDCJ inmates to fill it. The project went bust when the inmates never materialized.

Outgoing executive director Mike Griffiths spent much of the hearing being berated for mismanagement, in particular for the supposedly high cost ($129K per student per year) of incarcerating TJJD youth. To me, though, the cost issue is a bit of a red herring.  First, youth inmates inherently cost more than adults to incarcerate because by law (and federal court mandates) the state must provide educational and treatment services that for the most part don't exist in the adult system. Moreover, in the wake of the 2007 sex scandals, the Lege installed numerous layers of oversight that must be staffed on the administrative side. Griffiths listed several of them: An auditor, the ombudsman, an inspector general, an administrative investigation division, a youth complaint hotline (euphemistically known as "blue phones"), a monitoring and inspection division, and youth rights specialists, among others. Couple that with 12-1 staffing ratios (quadruple that of county jails) and the agency's educational mission and it's little wonder TJJD has disproportionately more admin staff and higher costs the Texas Department of Criminal Justice pays to house adults.

The three year recidivism rate for TJJD inmates is higher than on the adult side, with 77% rearrested within three years of release and 48% re-incarcerated in either the juvenile or adult systems. OTOH, Griffiths pointed out, the three-year rearrest rate for similar classes of youth kept at the county level is 67%, so not that much lower. And it's possible the TJJD cohort represents, overall, a higher risk group of offenders than those who stay with the counties.

Griffiths also took a lot of crap for not having yet eliminated all staff positions at the Corsicana unit even though the last of the youth moved out of there in December. His reasoning, though, to me seemed sound. The agency was told in a budget rider to close a facility and chose Corsicana. But it cannot finalize that decision until it gets the go-ahead from the Legislative Budget Board, where the House and Senate have been unable to reach an agreement. (Speaker Joe Straus and others have voiced support for keeping the unit open.) Most of the staff positions at Corsicana have already been eliminated. Some of those remaining are trainers - the agency still conducts training in Corsicana for staff from around the state in conjunction with Navarro Junior College. Some are maintenance staff, some work for human resources, and five are JCOs who continue to provide security. (Until LBB pulls the trigger, it's still technically a secure facility.) Griffiths said as soon as LBB made its decision, those last 25 positions would be eliminated or moved to other locales. Until then, he didn't feel he had authority under the rider to shutter it outright.

The most damning indictment of TJJD came not on the financial side but as it relates to security, in particular at the Evins unit in South Texas which was the subject of a truly awful report by the Ombudsman after a December site visit. Grits asked for a copy of the Evins report under open records. I've uploaded the whole thing, for those interested, but here are some lowlights I pulled from the 8-page text:

"The culture on campus degraded." Many incidents were observed including a youth that took food off a staff's tray and staff did not react until I inquired; when staff reacted, the youth continued to eat part of the food he took; the same youth held up movement by refusing to leave the cafe."

"Numerous youths, and one in particular, cursed loudly at staff and visitors repeatedly. Few staff attempted to intervene and that consisted of only asking the youth to quiet down and identifying the visitors to the youth. Youths threw food and created a mess in the cafe by emptying food tray(s) onto the table and floor and completely disregarded staffs' instructions."

"Discussion with staff included that the facility was staffed at approximately sixty seven percent resulting in staff having to work consecutive shifts and being 'burned out' or tired."

"There were several additional incidents of staffs requesting cells be opened with multiple youths around the cells and staff walking away once the cells were opened leaving the youths unsupervised and allowing the youths to fight inside the cells. JCO VI on count was in the office performing administrative functions instead of supervising youths and the other JCO went off the pod creating the opportunity for four youths to assault another youth; male JCO left a cell door open and two youths went in to the open cell and fought, and a female JCO left a cell door open and did not supervise the youths. This resulted in two youths fighting in the cell."

"Some JCO staff reported that some staff had been known to minimize inappropriate staff behavior in reports. ... discussion with some facility management confirmed the allegation."

"Numerous youth complained about a lack of hygiene and clothing items. Discusssion with staff reflected that there had been some shortage and that one dorm lost both the JCO V and VI" (which are supervisory positions).

"A review of all eleven grievances entered this [fiscal] year reflects a lack of video review" by management.

"Educational services are suffering from a lack of teachers and teacher's assistants (TA), teachers' refusal to stay at work past 4:30 despite being exempt employees, and allegations that teacher's aides are performing full teacher functions without being supervised by certified teachers (according to some of the educational staff)."

"Numerous youths and staff complained that some of the teachers are not conducting classroom management except to refer youths to Security. Some of the instances noted were referral for cursing, not being in the right place because the youth was by the door, and not working." According to school staff meeting minutes, the Principal believed "there have been too many referrals to security which are minor and no interventions are being provided. Everyone needs to start utilizing the focus room and any other intervention possible before sending a student to the Security Unit."

The staff involved in leaving cell doors open so youth could fight were fired and some are being prosecuted, the committee was told. Still, the Evins report represents far more serious concerns, to me, than any of the financial critiques. The Ombudsman told the committee that some of the problems occurred because senior managers had been moved to other facilities and their replacements weren't up to snuff. TJJD has moved more experienced people into those positions since the report and she thought that had improved matters, though the problems weren't yet completely fixed.

It should be noted, Evins has long been a problem child for the agency and these sorts of allegations are not new there. For whatever reason, in the time I've observed the agency and its predecessor, it's never been run as professionally as the other four remaining TJJD units.

Several senators, most prominently Sen. Dan Patrick, expressed concern that TJJD classification procedures weren't sufficient to keep very young inmates away from older, more dangerous ones. Patrick was concerned that the sort of bullying of staff by older inmates witnessed by the Ombudsman at Evins might also be victimizing younger inmates. He seemed passionate about the question and it was a fair point.

 By statute, youth can't be housed with others who are more than three years apart in age, but there are moments during the day when they may still come into contact, particularly in educational settings where older youth may be in classrooms just a few doors down from younger ones, the committee was told. That's partly a function of moving from 14 to five units in a short span of time, cramming inmates of varying ages into just a handful of units. The 80% reduction in inmate numbers helped the problem somewhat, but it would be easier to segregate the youngest ones if TJJD operated smaller, regional units instead of larger, rural ones.

Regrettably, Griffiths told the committee, there are still counties sending 10-11 year olds to TJJD despite the 2007 reforms creating disincentives to do so. One thought occurred to me: Perhaps that's a good argument for increasing the minimum age at which counties can send youth to secure state lockups from the current 10 years old to, say, 13 or 14. Most counties already are dealing with those very young offenders on their own and it wouldn't be a great burden to just make it a requirement instead of a strong suggestion that the rest of them do so.

In all, my takeaway from the hearing was somewhat different from the Chairman's pessimistic conclusion that the agency is inherently "broken." The whole thing made me think back to the "blue ribbon panel" created in 2007 to make recommendations (pdf) on TYC reforms. From Tuesday's hearing, it sounds like where the Lege followed that panel's recommendations - such as keeping more juvenile offenders at the county level and reducing both the number of secure state facilities and the number of youth housed there - the reforms have been a success. The problems haven't all gone away but the oversight mechanisms seem to be catching more of them and staff are being held accountable to a greater extent than in the past. By contrast, where the Lege failed to follow the blue ribbon panel's recommendations - e.g., continuing to house youth inmates at larger, antiquated facilities instead of moving to smaller, regional units closer to the urban areas from whence the youth mainly come - significant problems remain.

Making some of those still-needed changes will likely cost more money, not less, so focusing on minimizing per-inmate cost in the short run probably isn't helpful. Anyway, the reforms keeping more offenders at the county level have coincided with a sustained drop in juvenile crime. So even if per-inmate costs are higher, overall costs to the state both for incarceration and from the cost of crime itself to the public are markedly less. In the end, the success or failure of the agency should be judged based on public safety, not cost-per-inmate, and on that score things look a lot better in 2014 than they did back in 2007, even if they still have a long way to go.