Katner postulates that the post-Katrina New Orleans juvenile justice system required some new approaches in how the system is structured and utilized.  One approach he offers for consideration is to rethink the juvenile justice system in terms of a public health problem.  According to Katner, this may help to introduce intervention services for high-risk juveniles.  He also suggests adopting universal daycare to reduce delinquency and recidivism rates.

While these theories certainly have merit, can they be applied in the wake of Ike?  What is clear is that Galveston and surrounding municipalities have much to do to recover from Ike.  During this process of structural rebuilding, will the opportunity be taken to “rebuild” the current juvenile system?  Will the system take advantage of the proverbial “clean slate” and try to improve itself, or will it settle back into the comfortable, if not flawed, system for juvenile offenders?  Might Katner’s suggestions be put into practice?

It seems that the perfect time to take a good, hard look at a system that may be in need of repair, is when the city surrounding it is in the process of repair.  This requires some tough questions and a new perspective, but why not start with a clean slate?

In shifting responsibility to the counties for hundreds of California’s youth offenders, the state recognized that its juvenile justice system cannot be reformed without radical change.

Though prompted by cost concerns, the realignment of responsibilities to the counties was the right policy move, one previously recommended by this Commission and others. Many counties have demonstrated that they can provide programs and treatment to youth offenders who need to turn their lives around in settings that allow them to reintegrate more successfully into their communities.

Once [the 2007 court ordered] realignment is complete, the number of youth offenders in state hands will shrink to fewer than 1,500. The annual cost of providing services to each ward, however, next year will rise to $252,000. This startling figure reflects the overhead expenses of a system built to serve a far larger population, the cost of reforms required under a court-supervised consent decree and the complex needs of these seriously troubled youth. Californians may fairly ask what they are getting for this outlay and whether other strategies can better deliver public safety and youth rehabilitation. The state has made slow, yet undeniable, progress. Still, advocates for youth offenders, frustrated by the pace of reform, have asked a court to place the juvenile justice system in receivership.

Whatever the court’s decision, the state’s costs per ward likely will increase as juvenile programming and treatment services are expanded and its crumbling facilities continue to age. The state’s master plan for renovating or replacing its juvenile facilities, promised to legislators, is long overdue. The delay may mean that the cost of bringing California’s facilities in line with current programming requirements or replacing them is unaffordable, particularly in light of the current budget deficit.

The prospect of ever-higher outlays for an ever-smaller juvenile population in state custody should prompt policy-makers to extend realignment to completion. The Commission recommends that the state begin planning now to ultimately eliminate its juvenile justice operations and create regional rehabilitative facilities for high-risk, high-need offenders to be leased to and run by the counties.

Major efforts have been made to reform TYC. Below is a timeline of TYC events and an update on where TYC is today:
A Timeline

February 2005 – Texas Ranger sergeant began investigating allegations of sexual abuse at Pyote Facility involving Ray Brookins, former assistant superintendent, and John Paul Hernandez, former principal. (DMN 2/18/07)

February 2005 - Ray Brookins and John Paul Hernandez both resigned (DMN)

February 18, 2007 – News Media Reports about the sexual and physical abuses occurring at TYC (DMN)

March 2, 2007 – Allegations of sexual abuse at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Facility in Brownwood are reported in the media indicating that this was not an isolated incident (DMN)

March 2007 – State Auditor’s Office report identifies several issues (state auditor report)(PDF)

March 15, 2007 – DOJ reports findings from an investigation of the Evins facility. Finds the conditions unconstitutional because of the harm the inmates are experiencing. (DOJ report)(PDF)

March 15, 2007 – Between January 2000 and March 15, 2007 there were 16,310 allegations of incidents involving juveniles at TYC. 4,454 of those allegations were confirmed by TYC. (DMN)

March 29, 2007 – Texas Senate confirmed Governor Rick Perry’s appointment of Jay Kimbrough as Conservator of TYC. (press release)

April 9, 2007 – Brookins and Hernandez are indicted and arrested for “charges that they “sexually abused teenage inmates at the state juvenile prison in Pyote.” (DMN)

June 8, 2007 – SB 103 and companion bill HB 2807 were signed into law. The bills provide for reform efforts at the agency. (SB 103)

June 8, 2007 – Governor Perry appoints Ed Owens to replace Jay Kimbrough as TYC conservator. (Governor’s Website)

June 2007 – Dimitria Pope appointed as acting executive Director after spending most of her career working at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (DMN)

August 2007 – TYC announces new Pepper Spray policy. The new policy permits guards to use pepper spray more often than in the past. (DMN)

October 2007 – TYC ends contract with GEO Inc. for the Coke County facility. The 197 male inmates are immediately moved to the TYC facility in Mart, TX. (DMN)

November 2007 – TYC reverses its pepper spray policy (Texas Appleseed/Chronicle) (PDF)

December 19, 2007 – Governor Perry appoints Richard Nedelkoff to replace Ed Owens as conservator. (Governor’s Website)

February 12, 2008 – Dimitria Pope, the TYC acting executive director, announces her resignation (DMN)

May 6, 2008 – 70 inmates at TYC’s facility in Giddings broke out of their cells and started running around the campus and climbing into trees and onto the rooftops of the facility. (DMN)

June 12, 2008 - ACLU sues TYC for mistreatment of girls at the Brownwood facility (Statesman)

An Update on Reform

The Texas Observer Blog has had several posts recently describing how those involved with TYC reforms are feeling about the progress the agency has made.

Rehabilitating TYC

Perhaps the agency has been so hard to rehabilitate because its problems extend beyond a handful of troubled facilities or a flawed approach to juvenile justice. Mental health advocates blame public officials’ failure to recognize the importance of early intervention programs within the mental health system statewide as a key culprit.

Mission Redefinition for TYC

There was much talk of transitioning from large, rural TYC detention centers to smaller, urban facilities, which would keep youth offenders closer to their families, increase community involvement and allow for specialized treatment.

Trickle Down Reform

Despite the ACLU’s TYC lawsuit, many juvenile justice advocates assert that, while it’s slow-moving, there is progress at TYC — trickling down from the top.

What are you’re thought? Is TYC headed in the right direction? What should be done next?

On June 18, Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Herbert Kohl (D-WI) introduced legislation to reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), S. 3155. This much anticipated bill would reform and strengthen juvenile justice in a number of areas, including in cases of youth who come in contact with law enforcement and who have histories of abuse or neglect.

The bill urges states to make key improvements to juvenile justice systems, would prioritize and fund mental health and drug treatment for juvenile offenders, and encourages states to further address the overrepresentation of minorities in the juvenile justice system. The legislation supports the efforts of states that attempt to comply with the core requirements of JJDPA by making funds available through improvement grants to help bring states into compliance with the law.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to take up this legislation soon after the July 4 break. When a companion bill will be introduced in the House is not clear.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas Youth Commission on Thursday, accusing it of subjecting its female offenders to unwarranted solitary confinement, routine strip searches and brutal physical force.

According to the brief, incarcerated girls are “frequently subjected to punitive solitary confinement in oppressively cold, concrete and cinderblock cells containing nothing more than a metal slab intended for use as a bed, and in some cases, a metal toilet.”

The girls, many of whom suffered sexual abuse in the past, are also regularly strip-searched, the lawsuit alleges. Those who resist the searches are subjected to extreme force, including being pepper sprayed in the face or being bound in leather straps, the ACLU argued in its 19-page brief.

Constitutional rights

The ACLU filed its class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Texas on behalf of five girls currently incarcerated at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile facility in Brownwood.The ACLU accused the state’s correctional agency, which last year was rocked by a massive abuse scandal, of violating the constitutional rights of its minor clients, all of whom suffered sexual, physical or emotional abuse prior to incarceration.

Dismayed TYC officials charged the ACLU with failing to recognize the progressive reforms the agency’s new leadership has instituted as part of the shake up that followed last year’s scandal.

“It would be nice to work with ACLU as partners,” said TYC spokesman Jim Hurley, noting TYC has made some dramatic changes in the last year. “TYC is not the same TYC it was a year ago.”

Certain conditions common

But Hurley acknowledged that notwithstanding certain reforms, many of the conditions cited in the brief could be found on any given day at TYC units throughout the state.”If kids are on a work detail in the cafeteria, before they go back to their dorm, I’m sure they’re (strip) searched, to make sure there is no contraband, no weapons,” Hurley said. “These are things that are done across the board.”

He said he believes the lawsuit could have been avoided with a simple phone call from ACLU attorneys. “It’s likely there are things in there that are already on the board ready to be revamped,” he added.

Hurley said addressing the special needs of the 150 or so female offenders had become one of the biggest priorities of the agency’s new conservator, Richard Nedelkoff. He indicated that the agency might take a hard look at the practice of strip-searching females.

An attorney for the ACLU said that while the agency had taken some important steps, patience is running low.

“In the interest of our clients, we just felt we couldn’t wait any longer,” said Lisa Graybill, legal director of the Texas ACLU.

The agency became the subject of national news reports last year amid allegations that top officials turned a blind eye to evidence that youth had been or were being sexually and or physically abused by staff at a number of facilities around the state.

Source: Sandberg, Lisa. ACLU Sues State Juvenile Prison System. Houston Chronicle, June 12, 2008.

I’ve been a judge for 15 years in Miami Dade’s Juvenile Court. This is the most painful job I’ve ever had. I still lose sleep worrying I may have made the wrong decision. God, please give me the wisdom not to cause these children further harm.

I am a dependency judge in one of the most impoverished and beautiful cities in America. I’m a frontline observer of human misery. I take children away from parents who have hurt them. My job is to look a 7-year-old in the eye and explain why she can’t go home as her tears cascade down her already mature face. She asks “Why? My mom is a good mom.” The familiarity of home sometimes seems better than the unknown, especially for those children who think violence and neglect at home is normal.

• NPR: Painful Decisions in Juvenile Court (both audio and text available)

If you had visited the juvenile lockup in Pima County a decade ago — at the height of the adult-time-for-adult-crime campaign — you’d have seen young people sleeping in the cafeteria because of overcrowding. If you’d visited five years ago, you’d have seen nearly 200 juveniles held each day.
If you visited on Monday, you would have counted 78. In annual numbers, there were almost 3,500 youths detained in Pima County in 2003, a number that plummeted to 2,583 last year and is still dropping. In year four of a wide-scale transformation of Pima County’s juvenile-justice system, troubled kids are being diverted into other alternatives.

A staffing shortage at a local Texas Youth Commission facility should be alleviated by the state’s decision to shut down a program that isolated violent youths.

Effective this week, the state discontinued a program known as aggression management, TYC spokesman Jim Hurley said. It targeted youths who assaulted staff or other inmates while incarcerated, isolating them in individual cells for extended periods of time, he said.

The program was housed at one of the two TYC units in Mart, with youths being sent there from juvenile prisons all over the state, Hurley said. It had the capacity for 24 youths and required 40 staff members.

As TYC has continued to examine its practices in light of an abuse scandal that rocked the agency last year, it has the agency last year, it has determined the program does not reflect national best practices in dealing with youth offenders, Hurley said. So the state decided to discontinue it.

To fill the gap, TYC is revamping its “behavior management program, which is conducted at all TYC facilities, Hurley said. It will be called Redirect and will revolve around a specialized treatment curriculum designed to manage aggressive youths.

The revamped program will focus on getting inmates to recognize what triggers their violent behavior so they can stop it, Hurley said. He added that it will operate on a privilege system, rather than a punitive one.

Each facility will continue to have so-called security cells where violent youths can be isolated if necessary, Hurley said. However, the cells will be used only for short periods of time.

“It won’t be sticking a kid in there for months on end,” he said.

The 40 staff members who worked for the discontinued program will be transferred to other areas of Unit I at Mart, Hurley said. Since the facility has a shortage of juvenile corrections officers, the shift should ease understaffing there, he said.

Unit I at the campus serves as an intake unit for all males who come into the TYC system. Once they are processed there, they are sent to different facilities throughout the state.

Unit II is a regular correctional facility, serving youths from this region.

Source: Culp, Cindy V., “TYC Violent Youths Program Scrapped” (June 6, 2008). Waco Tribune-Herald. Available at: http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2008/06/06/wactyc.html

Children who are confined to adult jails are at greater risk of being raped, battered or pushed to suicide. They also are more likely to become violent criminals than children handled through the juvenile justice system. When Congress reauthorizes the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, it should press the states to end this barbaric practice.

The juvenile justice law provides federal aid to states that agree to humanize their often Dickensian systems — and to refrain from placing children in adult jails. The bargain worked well enough until the 1990s, when there was an outbreak of hysteria about so-called super predators and an adolescent crime wave that never materialized.

States classified ever larger numbers of young offenders as adults. Today, laws in more than 40 states permit adult courts to try children as young as 14. Perhaps as many as half the young people who are transferred into the adult system are never convicted as adults — and some are never convicted at all. But by the time the system is finished with them, many will have spent more than six months in adult jails, according to a report by the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group based in Washington.

Not surprisingly, these young people are much more likely to harm themselves in adult jails than in juvenile facilities. Those who survive often return to their communities as damaged people who are much more likely to commit crimes and return to prison.

The current system is counterproductive and inhumane. Congress could remedy this with one simple fix. It should require all states that receive federal juvenile justice aid to refrain from housing people under the age of 18 in adult jails, except for those accused of the most serious crimes like rape and murder.

“Children in Adult Jails” (May 23, 2008). N.Y. Times Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23fri3.html?ref=opinion

In a related article, the Washington Post recounts the case of Gary Durant in He’s a Man, as Charged. Durant, a Washington, D.C. youth, is being tried as an adult for conspiracy and murder for actions committed while he was still 17.

He was 17 the night of the shootout, a varsity athlete and a coach to youngsters in the city recreation department. A child under the law, he was charged as an adult with multiple counts, including conspiracy and murder, and taken to the D.C. jail. Sixteen months later — now an adult at 18 and, along with three other defendants, still awaiting a trial date — he idles behind bars with older inmates.

Laura Sessions Stepp, He’s a Man, as Charged: But Should Emerging Brain Science Affect Courts’ Handling of Young Defendants?, Washington Post, May 6, 2008 at HE01.