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.

Crime still plummeting; juvie arrests down 57% in TX since 2010

In May's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, we discussed the remarkable decline in DWI and public drunkenness arrests statewide in Texas over the last few years, but it turns out that's part of a broader trend. Arrests of all types have declined a lot.

DPS arrest data is only available through 2016, but from 2010 to 2016, the number of adults arrested  in Texas dropped by 26 percent, from more than a million to 759,000, falling more or less in tandem over the period with the reported crime rate.

Juvenile arrests in Texas declined even more, dropping an eye-popping 57 percent over the same period.

The percent reductions in DWI and drunkenness were even greater for adults, so those charges are a leading cause of the statewide decline. But the reduction in overall arrests tells us this is a bigger trend, not just an issue related to alcohol consumption.

As I'd mentioned on Twitter, polls show most Americans believe crime is increasing, despite these remarkable trends in the opposite direction. Indeed, not only have crime rates fallen since 2010, they were falling for nearly two decades prior to that. Arrests didn't begin to decline until much more recently.

This reduces pressure on cities to hire more police officers, on counties to expand jail capacity, and ultimately reduces the need for the state prison system to keep so many units open.

That's bad news for local probation departments, the bail-bond industry, and the criminal-defense bar, all of whom see their revenue decline as a result. But for everyone else, there's nothing but a tremendous upside.

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.

Texas' juvie decarceration provides example for adult side

This graphic from a recent Dallas News story (4/6) says nearly all you need to know about juvenile corrections in Texas over the last four decades:

The main thing to add is that juvenile crime increased during most of the period the curve went up and was (and is) decreasing on the downward side of the slope. For the most part, high incarceration levels have demonstrated little correlation with crime, with juvenile crime reducing drastically during the period the state decarcerated its youth prisons.

Juvie decarceration in Texas is arguably the most important accomplishment of the "Right on Crime" era among Lone-Star Republicans, even if the job remains unfinished. Texas launched its juvenile decarceration scheme just four years after the GOP took over the Texas Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction, and has now been sustained through successive governors, with reductions now accelerating again under Gov. Abbott.

Texas has proven the concept on the juvie side. Now the task is to convince those same leaders to apply the same lessons to the adult system, where our prison population remains the highest in the nation and the prison system releases some 70,000 people per year. Many of those people would be less likely to recidivate if they'd never been sent to prison at all!

Some days, your correspondent despairs that Texas' behemoth of a prison system can ever be successfully dismantled. This example provides hope. If juvie prisons can reduce their populations by three quarters and the public barely noticed, maybe state leaders will see that there's little political risk and a lot to gain by reining in a sprawling and outdated adult system. Indeed, as on the juvie side, adult decarceration should seen as something for which politicians can take credit, with failure to embrace it garnering blame.

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"

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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."

Lege to study what 'gaps in services' contribute to recidivism of young offenders

The Texas House Corrections Committee received several "interim charges" recently, including one directing them to study:

current Texas criminal justice system policies and practices regarding 17- to 25-year-olds, specific to probation, parole, state jail confinement, and discharge from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice or county jail. Review any gaps in services that may be causing this population to recidivate. Make recommendations to improve the state's response to the needs of this population in order to lower revocation, re-arrest, and reincarceration rates.

As the Legislature considers "gaps in services" which may contribute to unmet "needs" of offenders age 17-25 that "may be causing this population to recidivate," it's worth pointing out that Amanda Marzullo of the Texas Defender Service and I did a segment on this topic in August, and another in the November episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast, the latter of which for convenience I've excerpted here:


In addition, I was interested to learn this week that England and Wales have special youth prisons carved out for 18-20 year olds, and reformers there have proposed extending that to age 25, although those facilities have a record of abuse toward inmates that rivals some of the recent Gainesville allegations. Their main problems, as with Texas youth prisons, derive from understaffing.

I'd like to dig into the debate in the U.K. a little more to digest the arguments being presented on both sides. I thought this was particularly effective messaging from the above-linked article:

Alex Hewson, of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “A justice system which throws young people off a cliff edge on their 18th birthday, and expects them to fend for themselves in the adult system when they are still maturing and often vulnerable, is not one that is set up to deliver for offenders, victims or local communities.

Instinctively, based on my own life experience, what I've witnessed of young people in the justice system, as well as what I've seen of the relevant brain science (which admittedly is all second and third hand), the idea that special systems or rules might need to be created for this group to generate best outcomes doesn't seem far-fetched. I'm really glad the Lege will be studying it.

Related:

• New Republic, "Should 25 year olds be charged as juveniles?"
• The Hill, "It's time for criminal justice reform to focus on young adults"
• Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, "Raise the Age gets new look in Connecticut"
• Hartford Courant: "Connecticut opens prison for 18 to 25 year olds"

November Reasonably Suspicious Podcast: Let me be your lawyer dog, or I won't be your man at all ...

Check out the November edition of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, covering Texas criminal justice policy and politics. We're coming out a little early this month to keep things on the right side of the Thanksgiving holiday. You can listen to the latest episode here, or access it on all the usual channels: iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, or SoundCloud.


If you haven't subscribed yet, take a moment to do so now to make sure you won't miss an episode. Topics this go-round include:

Top Stories

• The Louisiana Supreme Court said a man who told police "Why don't you just give me a lawyer, dawg?" wasn't really asking for a lawyer. But this is common. A recent Texas case denied an attorney on the same basis.
• Risk assessments have come under fire from liberals for generating racial disparities. What are the implications for using them as part of Harris County bail reform?

Game Segment: Tea Leaf Reading
Looking forward to criminal-justice-related interim charges at the Texas Legislature.

• Appropriate treatment, services to offenders aged 17-25 to reduce recidivism, future crime. (See an earlier podcast segment on the topic.)
• Ineffective Assistance of Counsel: Front-end and back-end solutions.

Death and Texas

• US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Ayestas v. Davis, seeking funds for investigation into an ineffective assistance claim.
• A state district court considers Ex Parte Flores in which the key eyewitness was subjected to hypnosis before changing her ID of the suspect. She at first told police the suspect was a white man with long hair. Mr. Flores is an Hispanic man with short hair.

The Last Hurrah
Rapid fire quick takes:

• USDOJ deleted 70% of tables from the newest edition of the national Uniform Crime Reports.
• A new study says police bodycams haven't changed police behavior. Why is that?
• Rent to own furniture companies as modern debtors prisons.

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.

Natural experiment tests rehabilitation potential for teen killers

Source: TCJC Twitter feed.

Grits has been thinking a lot lately about the question of whether adult justice systems sufficiently address the needs or adequately assess the likelihood of rehabilitation for offenders in 17-25 years old range, particularly after our Reasonably Suspicious podcast segment on the topic last month.

During the 17-25 year old period, and particularly before age 21, neuroscientists now understand that young brains have yet to finish developing, especially as it relates to cognitive reasoning and impulse control. And some national experts have persuasively argued that the justice system needs to more effectively accommodate those differences in brain function.

So, in that vein, Grits was interested in this story out of the Phildadelphia Inquirer (9/7) detailing the fates of 70 released murderers who committed their crimes as young men and women. Like the defendant in Kentucky, they had served sentences for heinous crimes committed when they were teenagers. But they are now being released some two generations later. Here's how the story opened:

For the first time in a generation, Pennsylvania prisons are releasing convicted murderers by the dozen. 

In the last year, 70 men and women — all locked away as teens — have quietly returned to the community after decades behind bars. They're landing their first jobs, as grocery store cashiers and line cooks, addiction counselors and paralegals. They are, in their 50s and 60s, learning to drive, renting their first apartments, trying to establish credit, and navigating unfamiliar relationships. They're encountering the mismatch between long-held daydreams and the hard realities of daily life. 

These are the first of 517 juvenile lifers in Pennsylvania, the largest such contingent in the nation, to be resentenced and released on parole since the Supreme Court decided that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for minors are unconstitutional.

The struggles facing these parolees perhaps are to be expected. If you'd been incarcerated since Smokey and the Bandit was in theaters, you'd face difficulty adjusting to 21st century America, as well. Regardless, "So far, not one of the 70 has violated parole."

Perhaps that should be expected, too. As it happens, murderers have among the lowest recidivism rates. And the judge out of Kentucky whom we discussed in our podcast cited this study in his ruling to say that, "ninety (90) percent of serious juvenile offenders age out of crime and do not continue criminal behavior into adulthood."

This represents a lot of folks. This summer, the Urban Institute issued a study which, the Marshall Project reported, found that two out of five inmates serving very long sentences committed their crimes before age 25. (See Grits' earlier discussion.)

There are a few different ways one could take into account these differences in youthful brain chemistry, and likely more Grits hasn't considered yet. My old pal Vinnie Schiraldi has suggested creating a separate third system to deal with 18-25 year olds (it'd be 17-25 in Texas, where we have not yet raise the age of adult culpability to 18). Elsewhere, some states like Connecticut are considering expanding their juvenile justice system to cover offenders up to age 21. Alternatively, Schiraldi has privately suggested to Grits that perhaps certain enhancements, barriers to reentry, etc., could be eliminated or reduced for younger offenders since their likelihood of rehabilitation is so much higher.

I'm sure there are other ways to skin this cat. We're on the front end of a national conversation about these topics spurred by recent scientific advancements. The suggestions for how to accommodate this new information remain prefatory and barely formed. But over time, as scientists better understand the human brain - and as the justice system slowly but surely adapts that knowledge to inform its various functions - it's not difficult to imagine major implications for these observations about brain development in a justice system based on identifying and punishing bad decisions, even if we can't say for sure what they'll be yet.

That said, inevitably, someone's parole will be revoked among this Pennsylvania cohort. The road to reentry is too difficult (as this article effectively described) and the array of humanity caught up in the system is too diverse for it to never happen. But prisoners who've served decades until they're now old men (and to a less common extent, women), especially if they had good behavior records while inside, are remarkably safe release risks compared to many younger inmates convicted of less serious offenses.

Do brain-science advancements, death-penalty debates point to need for third path on young adults and crime?

Our latest "Reasonably Suspicious" podcast segment, Death and Texas, has sparked a number of lively, behind-the-scenes discussions, so I thought I'd pull it out as a stand-alone and provide links to a number of related, relevant resources. The topic: A ruling out of Kentucky finding that execution of defendants who committed their crimes before they were 21 years old violates the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, building on the holding in Roper v. Simmons. A majority of cases so situated come from Texas in recent years. You can listen to the full (5 minute) discussion here.

For context, here's the ruling by the Kentucky judge under discussion and some relevant media coverage.

Among states, Connecticut is considering extending the juvenile justice system all the way to age 21 because of similar considerations about youthful brain development.

In the podcast, I mentioned my pal Vincent Schiraldi's work suggesting the need for an alternative justice system for young adults. Here's what to my knowledge is sort of his "big paper" on the topic with Bruce Western and Kendra Bradner. See also this paper presaging the reform suggestions in Connecticut.

For more background: Here's a survey from last year of 10 state and local initiatives on these themes. And here's a law review article discussing the ideas of "extended adolescence" raised by Schiraldi's work and others.

Find a transcript of this excerpt below the jump:

Declining juvie crime, post-'07 reforms, make raise-the-age bill practical, feasible

(UPDATE-4/20: The Texas House approved HB 122 by an 83-53 vote on second reading. MORE: And on to the senate with 92 votes on third reading.)

It's that time of the year at the Texas Legislature where everything moves so fast and the politics are so fluid that horse race coverage (what will or won't pass) is basically meaningless. Now is the time for observation and debate on these topics, not speculation and prediction. At this point, soothsaying is beyond the ken of even grizzled professionals when it comes to legislative outcomes. For the most part, for bills moving through the process, nobody really knows what will happen, or can know.

Indeed this time of the legislative session is less like a horse race and more like a rodeo - a danger-filled spectacle ruled by clowns. And as our friends in the rodeo like to say, there's never been a horse that can't be rode, never been a cowboy can't be throwed.

So, when one sees articles like this one from the Texas Tribune's Jonathan Silver depicting the demise of Raise the Age legislation in the senate before it's even had a vote in the House, one may take it with a grain of salt. This sort of coverage too often substitutes for actual reporting on the subject matter being debated and allows politicians to make everything about themselves instead of the issues underlying important legislation.

And to be clear, HB 122, the raise-the-age bill, is important legislation. Most parents of 17-year olds don't yet consider them adults, even if their government does. Texas is one of only six states which still treat 17 year olds as adults for purposes of prosecuting them (though not for purposes of buying cigarettes or alcohol, for example).

Through this debate, we're learning a lot more about the types and scope of juvenile crime. Texas Appleseed recently published a report analyzing arrests by age category to discover the impact of HB 122. They found that arrests of 17-year olds declined every year since 2012, and 87 percent of crimes committed by this cohort were nonviolent offenses - mainly marijuana possession and theft.

Of 17 year olds convicted of drug crimes, only 1.2 percent were for dealing - nearly all of them marijuana. In general, "The rates at which they are arrested along with the offenses for which they are booked resemble the rates and offenses for 16-year-olds; yet their different treatment leads to very different outcomes."

Arrest rates for 17 year olds overall are declining, said the report, from 70 arrests per 1,000 in 2013 to 58 per 1,000 in 2015. Texas arrested more than double the number of 17 year olds in 2008 compared to 2015.

Texas juvenile probation directors are split on the question of raising the age, with Harris County's opposing the bill but others, including in Dallas, more supportive. Nationally, most juvenile-justice professionals consider the lower age inappropriate and lamentable.

Appleseed made an argument which your correspondent has separately made in conversations about the bill: That juvenile reforms since 2007, along with declining juvenile crime, have quite capably set the stage for this reform:

In 2007, the Texas Legislature began a process of restructuring the juvenile justice system, passing the first of several bills and budget initiatives that would move youth out of ineffective and expensive state secure facilities and into community-based alternatives. The process resulted in a 61 percent decrease in juvenile arrests between 2007 & 2015. At the same time, funding was shifted away from state secure facilities and into juvenile probation. A 2015 report published by the Council of State Governments (CSG) showed that per capita funding for juvenile probation departments increased 68 percent between FY 2005 & FY 2012. 

The same CSG report concluded that while the news was generally good for Texas reforms – with youth rehabilitated locally showing better outcomes than those committed to state secure facilities – there was room for improvement in recidivism rates by targeting resources and services on youth most likely to reoffend. Specifically, CSG found that the counties the researchers studied failed to “effectively target…[juvenile probation] supervision resources and services on those youth most likely to reoffend.” Instead, counties continued to place youth at low risk of reoffending in services and programs that they didn’t need – likely contributing to higher re-offense rates. 

Taken together, the large reduction in arrests, increase in funding for juvenile probation, and findings from CSG showing more opportunity to effectively utilize state taxpayer dollars indicates that Texas’ juvenile system is well-poised to absorb 17-year-olds.

That pretty much coincides with my view. In 2007, Grits might have agreed that the state was ill-prepared to make this shift. Today, after a decade of juvie decarceration coupled with double digit declines in juvenile crime, the system seems much more capable of handling an influx of 17 year olds. That's especially true if counties can more “effectively target…supervision resources and services on those youth most likely to reoffend,” which they ought to be doing already, anyway.

Texans can go here to send their state legislators an email supporting HB 122. Get it done before Thursday, when legislators take a vote. Or else go here to find your state representative's office phone number and call them before Thursday to ask that they support the bill.

Shackled to Debt, Forfeiture Fail, a Self-Interested Revolt, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers attention at the legislative session begins to heat up.

Rebellion of the Clerks: A self-interested revolt
There's only one real reason that clerks don't want a statewide database of court records, and it has nothing to do with quality control. They currently charge a dollar a page for records and don't want to lose the revenue. Their argument is the same as newspapers complaining about online competition from Craig's List for their classified ads. And yet, these are the most public of public records. And there's significant public demand for them. There's really no good reason not to make them available online, and the legislators lining up to stop the rollout of the new system are doing their constituents a real disservice, placing the interests of local elected officials over the public interest. Grits doesn't do oppo work for campaigns anymore, but there's easily an attack ad to be had aimed at anybody who supported a bill aimed at keeping public records from the public via unjustifiably high fees.

More critics denounce forfeiture fail
Momentum for reining in asset forfeiture continues to grow, with prosecutors going on the defensive. Go to the Just Liberty site to send a message to lawmakers supporting reform.

Union bashing bill leaves out law enforcement
Critics at a State Affairs hearing raised the same criticism Grits did about legislation by Chair Joan Huffman to eliminate union-dues checkoffs for public employees - why leave out law enforcement, which are the most powerful public employee unions in the state? The bill was voted out on a 6-2 vote with the disparate treatment intact.

TDCJ chief exec interviewed
See an interview with new TDCJ chief mugwump Brian Collier from the Huntsville Item.

Raise the Age!
Three different newspaper editorials this week backed so-called raise-the-age legislation:

• SA Express News: Adult prison is not for 17-year olds
• Star-Telegram: Criminal Justice Needs Age Adjustment
• Austin Statesman: Legislature should reform age of responsibility in Texas

For more background, see the House Research Organization's primer on the topic. Go to the Just Liberty site to send a message to lawmakers supporting this legislation.

If you've got the money, honey ...
As I write this, there are folks scouring the budget to find money to eliminate the Driver Responsibility surcharge. For their benefit, here's a presentation from the Legislative Budget Board last year with a great deal of seldom-discussed detail about the program. (Send an email to your legislators asking them to abolish the surcharge.)

Shackled to Debt
New report via Harvard's Kennedy School and the NIJ: "Shackled to Debt: Criminal-justice Financial Obligations and the Barriers to Re-Entry They Create."