Denial not just a river in Egypt, but also the go-to move for TDCJ flaks

The habit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) issuing full-throated denials whenever reporters raise serious problems is beginning to annoy your correspondent (again), and I wonder if others have noticed?

For example, when an inmate at TDCJ's Youthful Offender Program (YOP) was molested by an adult prisoner earlier this year, TDCJ spokesman Jeremy Desel told Lauren McGaughy at the Dallas Morning News, “'Any characterization of the [YOP] program being systemically flawed is false.' ... 'This is an isolated incident in which TDCJ took swift administrative actions against all employees involved.'”

In reality, under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) - which Governor Abbott agreed Texas would follow, reversing Governor Perry's stance - 17-year old inmates were supposed to be kept completely separate from adult inmates, enforcing "sight and sound" restrictions so older inmates could never see or speak to them.

So, when an adult inmate stuck his finger up the behind of a 17-year old in the Youthful Offender Program (YOP) in Brazoria County, it demonstrated that TDCJ had never actually complied with the sight and sound restrictions under PREA!

No adult prisoner should ever have been within ass-fingering distance of those kids.

Which tells us that, while TDCJ's spokesman insisted that, "Any characterization of the program being systemically flawed is false," in fact the incident precisely demonstrated a "systematic flaw" that went well beyond any "isolated incident."

These deeper, underlying, systemic issues are why TDCJ fired the warden and most of the YOP staff, then moved the whole operation, lock, stock, and barrel, to a facility in Huntsville nearer central administration. That's definitely a "systematic" response that belied the phony-baloney, nothing-to-see-here commentary Mr. Desel tried to pawn off on Ms. McGaughy.

The warden and staff were scapegoated. This problem resulted from decisions to disregard PREA sight-and-sound provisions for 17-year olds that would have been made at the highest levels of the agency.

Similarly, when the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition issued a report criticizing disparities in work and education opportunities for women prisoners, Mr. Desel told the Texas Tribune's Sydney Greene that he "vehemently disagreed" with the report, but offered at most nitpicking rebuttals to their criticisms.

This is deflection. In fact, as we learned in the same story, the agency itself recognized the disparities and asked for money from the Legislature in 2017 to upgrade women's programming, but it was denied. If the agency really disagreed there was a disparity, why would they need to ask for that money?

Then, this week, Grits read Keri Blakinger's story in the Houston Chronicle about four prison guards being fired at TDCJ's Ramsey Unit for planting evidence on inmates, then filing grievances against them. Allegedly, this fraud was conducted to comply with a 2-grievance-per-day quota dictated by their supervisor, a major, who was also terminated.

Once again, Mr. Desel exclaimed that the planting of evidence was an "isolated incident." But it's not an isolated incident if four guards are involved and they were enforcing a policy laid out by their supervisor! That's pretty much the opposite of an isolated incident. Rather, it is an example of systemic injustice.

One guard planting evidence on a prisoner and covering it up may be an "isolated incident." Five doing so is a conspiracy.

The Dallas News story mentioned above quoted a whistleblower accusing TDCJ of a "culture of coverup," and that's certainly what's evinced in this pattern of denials. In each case, reporters came forward with legitimately newsworthy stories and the agency responded with minimizing comments or outright denials in the face of obviously true, contravening facts.

That's not just evidence of a bunker mentality at the agency, it's a piss-poor PR strategy, to boot. Failing to acknowledge true things sets the agency up for a long-term media mire on these topics, where denials are corrected with facts, the agency issues a new round of denials, then we rinse and repeat until there's some real-world resolution, as we saw recently with the Texas Supreme Court ruling the agency can't conceal information about execution drugs.

Speaking of which: Few outside the agency probably remember that TDCJ fired their former spokesman, John Hurt, because he'd spoken honestly and factually with the press about that topic. Here's how Mr. Hurt, a 20-year PR veteran from the Texas Department of Transportation, recalled his brief tenure at TDCJ:

"My last interview was with Time magazine about the expiring execution drugs. When they found out, they positively came unglued that I did what I was getting paid for. They even admitted the interview read well, they just didn't want the issue in the media. They just wanted to keep issues like the CO shortage and the outdated execution drugs as far out of the media as possible."  Mr. Hurt went on to explain, "The admin suffers from intellectual incest. They all live in a little town, went to the same little college in Huntsville and are terrified of new ideas." Mr. Hurt then offered his ideas on how to change the face of the public information office and the agency in general. "Moving the agency to Austin would be in everyone's best interest." "I tried to show them how to position themselves in a positive light and they didn't want any part of it. I've never worked in a stranger place."

Before that, Michelle Lyons was fired for treating bloggers on equal footing with MSM reporters when they (we) requested information or reactions from the agency. They trumped up phony allegations that she'd fudged her time sheets and she sued, winning a fat settlement.

So this practice of deflection and deception is not new and not just attributable to Mr. Desel. Well before he arrived, back in 2013, I'd written, "Lately, Grits has come to consider both the TDCJ and Department of Public Safety PIOs [Public Information Offices] basically worthless," and little has changed since then.

Rather, it's more about what that YOP whistleblower called the "culture of coverup" surrounding what's now the planet's second largest prison system (after the feds) here in Texas. It's an old and well-worn pattern. But it's a continually lamentable one.

Now in a dwindling minority, failure to "Raise the Age" creating problems for Texas all over

The Missouri Legislature recently voted to raise the age of adult criminal responsibility from 17 to 18 years old, beginning January 1, 2021. That leaves Texas one of only four states nationally that still prosecutes 17-year olds as adults, despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of GOP primary voters (86%) support changing the policy. This is becoming embarrassing.

Quite a few stories you see on Grits are byproducts of Texas' backwards, minority-view policy on who is a juvenile.

For example, yesterday in a roundup I'd linked to a Dallas News story about the Youthful Offender Program at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which manages incarcerated youth younger than 18. After an adult inmate engaged in sexual relations with one of the youth, the warden and most of the staff were terminated and the entire program was moved to a unit in Huntsville, closer to central administration. This program - and the scandals that come with it - only exist because Texas has refused to "raise the age."

Similarly, Governor Abbott wants to treat 17 year olds as children for purposes of their parents' gun-storage requirements, but I'd described how the exact same logic may be used to support prosecuting 17-year olds as juveniles. Indeed, if Texas had already raised the age for purposes of prosecutions, it's likely the gun-storage rules would have been updated in the process.

We've also discussed county jails having to pay to meet federal PREA standards because they must enforce "sight and sound" barriers between 17 year olds and adult populations. The Legislature has balked at the fiscal note on raising the age, but failing to adopt the policy has created unfunded mandates for counties which are shouldered by the same taxpayers in the end.

And, of course, treating 17-year olds as adults created all sorts of problems with Texas' capital punishment scheme, given that US Supreme Court rulings treat them as juveniles.

There are so many areas where updating this one policy would resolve issues and remove glitches from various justice-system conundrums that are caused, at root, by treating 17-year olds as adults for some purposes and children for others.

Indeed, Grits has argued that raising the age from 17 to 18 merely moves Texas from a 19th to a 20th century policy. But in the 21st century, modern brain science has shown youthful brains continue to develop well after that. Society already treats older youth as children for many purposes - buying tobacco (18), alcohol (21), renting a car (25), staying on their parents' health insurance (26) - and there's no reason to think criminal prosecution necessarily should fall on the lowest end of that range.

Things are changing fast. When the Texas Legislature last convened, there were seven other states which still prosecuted 17-year olds as adults. After Missouri, there are three. 

Texas has made such great strides on the juvenile decarceration front, even if it has further to go. It's a shame that, nationally, this issue continues to paint the state as backward and excessively punitive. It's such a pointless stance, and on the ground is creating more problems and costs than it prevents.

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.

Facility age, design, and programming deficit hinder success of youthful offenders at TDCJ

Over at The Back Gate, a blog run by TDCJ corrections officers, staff at the Clemens unit have many critiques of the Youthful Offender Program - which houses Texas youth certified as adults - that didn't show up in Mike Ward's recent Austin Statesman article promoting adult correction models for juvenile offenders. Said the blog:

What Mike Ward didn't get is input from some of the 300 plus employees assigned there regarding the program. Several Correctional Officers sent us input on the program, and how it works. The employees don't bad mouth the administration, and are generally satisfied with the support they get from the admin there. The objections from line staff centered more around the structure of the program itself, and the fact that it was centered on the Clemens unit to begin with. Through open records, and from Correctional Officers assigned there, we have learned the following. Some of which is contrary to what Mr. Ward presented in his story.

1. The Clemens unit is #1 in the state this month for discovery of contraband items, to include cell phones.

2. The Clemens unit, built in 1893, and the add on housing areas in 1972, is basically falling apart from the inside out in the South Texas salt air. Violent YOP offenders are housed in cells that frequently come open on their own due to being outdated and un-repairable, and staff as well as other offenders have been assaulted as a result.

3. YOP offenders must be kept separate from other offenders, and the design of the facility makes it nearly impossible to accomplish that feat on a daily basis.

4. YOP offenders are not assigned jobs, and therefore do not work in outdoor hoe squads or garden squads as stated by Mike Ward. But maybe some labor wouldn't hurt.

5. The program itself is poorly constructed and doesn't take into account that many of these teens have long (40+) year sentences and are housed with offenders serving 5 years or less. Any teen will succumb to peer pressure. The teens come from the streets, many are prone to violence and have no concept of the programs content. Many are continuing disciplinary problems, but cannot be sent anywhere else in the state due to the nature of the program. 

See also a slideshow of pics from the Youthful Offender program that accompanied Ward's article Monday, and Grits' own discussion of the suggestion to model youth prisons after TDCJ's Youthful Offender Program.