July 2007

We recently posted that Harris County is searching for juvenile detention beds as a result of a restructuring of the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). The County has authorized funding for leasing prison capacity from private lockups, and is considering buying a new prison over an hour away. This story once again emphasizes that local policies implemented by the District Attorney's office and law enforcement agencies are driving up incarceration numbers. As a result, county officials must rethink these policies and identify innovative solutions that don’t rely on adding new beds to the system.

I recently toured Harris County's Juvenile Detention Center in downtown Houston. The facility was at full capacity and was basically a prison for kids. County juvenile detention facilities are residential facilities that hold youths awaiting court decisions. The lockup held kids as young as 10 years old. That Harris County is considering obtaining additional capacity in a county more than an hour a way is seriously troubling.

As I walked the halls of the juvenile lockup, staff requested that I and the others on the tour volunteer to mentor kids in the lockup and show them the attention and care that many young people need and crave. As county officials consider placing these children in lockups away from their home communities they must also consider the impact on their behavior, their ability to undergo treatment, and their families.

In fact, during my tour, one of the young girls had been sentenced to a TYC facility a few hours away because of her behavior. According to guards this fourteen-year-old who had been previously placed in other residential facilities was acting out because her mother had not been able to visit her regularly during her detention stay. The guards emphasized that her original offense was not serious or violent, although they did not go into detail. She was sentenced to a TYC prison facility for a 9-month stay.

Residential facilities designed to incarcerate young prisoners in the juvenile system are either pre-dispositional or post-dispositional. Following adjudication, courts can set penalties such as probation, confinement, or community service for those found delinquent. Additionally, post-dispositional facilities accept youths placed with them by court order. These institutions vary in the degree of security, the length of stay, and the focus of programs they provide.

State law requires each county to have a juvenile board which consists of district and county judges and is responsible for overseeing the operations of the juvenile justice system in that county. The Harris County Juvenile Board sets policy for the county’s juvenile justice system and designates juvenile judges, appoints the chief juvenile probation officer, and manages the department’s budget.

According to Harris County officials, juvenile prisoners are serving shorter sentences. In 2004, the average stay was 58 days; this year length of stay decreased to 38 days.

Yet since the board continues to search for new beds, a lot of work could still be done to contain capacity and eliminate the need of Harris County to obtain new beds.

The board could work with law enforcement agencies and the district attorney’s office to rethink the way it deals with chronic misdemeanants who are being held for truancy and other nonviolent crimes. Rather than relying on incarceration, identifying ways to strengthen low-income communities in order to effectively structure the time of at-risk youth would reduce recidivism and improve public safety.

In today's Houston Chronicle article (also available here) about neglect, physical and sexual abuse in private prisons for youth, Paula Morelock claims problems have never resulted in fining TYC contractors because, "If it comes to that, we'd just stop the contract." Yet when Morelock was responsible for contracting at the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), one of the worst cases of prisoner abuse in the history of privatization in Texas resulted in rewarding the contractor with a larger contract.

GEO Group (then called Wackenhut) hired Rufino Garcia, a man who’d been arrested in 1974 for a sex offense against a child, to work as a "lead careworker" at its Coke County prison, which then held young girls.

When Garcia met Sara Lowe at Coke County in 1994, he was 39 years old. Sara Lowe was just 15. In 1996, when he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecency with a child and two counts of sexual assault of a child (all second degree felonies), Garcia admitted that two weeks after he first sexually assaulted Sara Lowe—touching her breasts and making her perform fellatio—he submitted a “level change” request slip for her, writing that “Ms. Lowe has been very positive and has been improving every day.”

After Sara was released from the Wackenhut lockup, Garcia began telephoning her at her home. He told her family that he wanted to know how she was doing. When asked about his calls, Sara confided to her sister that she had been raped and molested repeatedly by Garcia, who had threatened that he would kill her sister and her mother if she told anyone about the abuse. Her family went into action and contacted TYC, who investigated the charges.

Horrified to learn of the sexual abuse of their daughter by a Wackenhut staffer, the Lowe family filed a lawsuit against the company. Eventually Wackenhut’s executives decided to settle the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money. But Sara was highly distraught because Wackenhut’s top managers had been allowed to avoid any admission of responsibility for her rapes. The day the settlement was finalized, Sara committed suicide.

Even before Garcia was convicted for his crimes, auditors had catalogued serious program deficiencies at Coke County. They determined that Wackenhut had failed to meet standards for medical care, casework services, recreation, education, and therapeutic interventions.

Yet even after receiving evidence of shocking abuse and contract failure, TYC’s top managers never closed their contract with Wackenhut. They did not take conclusive steps to prevent the abuse of girls placed at Coke County until 1998, when they switched the facility’s juvenile confinement population from girls to boys. They increased the number of contracted beds at the Coke County lockup from 104 to 200.

Today's Houston Chronicle reported that the Harris County juvenile board authorized using millions of dollars to place youth in private detention facilities throughout Texas.

It seems the county is working hard to find new beds for juvenile prisoners now that the state's kiddy prison system -- the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) -- has changed its policy on which prisoners it will and won't accept, focusing on youth who have been convicted of serious crimes rather than misdemeanors.

According to reports, county officials could send more than 140 juvenile detainees to a Colorado County lockup as the Juvenile Probation Department tries to find a place for hundreds of young prisoners.

The lockup that county officials are considering is more than an hour outside of Houston and defeats the purpose of the juvenile detention lockups that are supposed to be near detainees' homes to keep them in their community in order to maintain relationships with families and friends. It ignores the lessons of California, which has similar youth crime rates to Texas but is using lock-ups far less than Texas for youth.

The fact that local officials primarily focus on building new prisons for youth is flawed and fruitless. Now they have plans in the works to ask voters for $76 million to convert an adult prison to a youth prison. If only officials spent the same amount or more on alternatives to incarceration, than surely we could get better results and safer communities.

We recently posted about Harris County's decision to transfer more than 400 prisoners to northern Louisiana -- about 6 hours away from Houston -- to deal with jail overcrowding.

The residents of Epps, Louisiana town are bothered by the recent transfers of more than 100 Harris County Jail detainees to a private prison. And they should be. Officials can't answer basic questions about the Texas prisoners that will be housed in a facility managed by the Emerald Corporation.

As a result, local residents are demanding answers that should have been answered before county officials agreed to the transfer. Epps residents recently questioned elected officials about the training standards for the private prison guards, the total number of prisoners arriving, and their risk level. It appears that city leaders could not answer those questions and put residents' fears to rest.

This latest story represents the poor policy decisions officials are making at all levels to control jail populations in the local jails. The Harris County Jail has experienced chronic overcrowding that in recent years forced as many as close to 2,000 prisoners to sleep near the floor in low-rider bunk beds. The county chose to transfer prisoners to the Epps lock-up because it could not comply with the 48:1 staffing ratios mandated by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards for safety of workers and prisoners.

According to a Houston Chronicle article, a 2004 Louisiana Department of Corrections audit of the Epps facility described its staffing as "adequate."

Before officials agree to such policies that bring in prisoners from other jurisdictions they should be able to answer basic questions.