The shocking conclusions of a state investigation into a Dallas County juvenile lockup have cast new light on the stubborn resistance of the county’s Juvenile Board to investigate or release records when concerns surfaced publicly last year.
While state investigators confirmed some allegations and ruled out others, its main findings validated what some of us feared: a cover-up that seems to have stretched to the top of the Dallas County Juvenile Department.
Over the course of several years, county officials skirted state rules by using a “Special Needs Unit” to keep youths secluded in cells for up to five days without due process, according to state investigators. The youths spent “the vast majority of their days” inside the cells — sometimes the full day — without access to education, showers or outdoor recreation.
State regulators called what was happening “systemic neglect” and stated that “multiple facility staff, educators, and administrators (past and present) were aware.”
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There are plenty of alarming lines in this report. This is, perhaps, the most disturbing: “There was pervasive falsification of documents regarding observation checks and school attendance rosters implying an intentional attempt to conceal the practice within the facility.”
Darryl Beatty, the former director of the county’s Juvenile Department, may not have had an active role in creating these policies and practices, but he should have been aware and had “ample opportunity to take action,” according to state investigators.
In our view, so did the Dallas County Juvenile Board, the governing body over the Juvenile Department. Allegations had been piling up for some time, from this newspaper and other quarters, about the treatment of youths in lockup. The Juvenile Board’s response all along: It’s the job of the state to investigate, not ours.
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“Neither the Board nor I ignored red flags,” Judge Cheryl Shannon, chair of the Juvenile Board, told us in an email. “The Board did not have direct information on which to respond. The Board was left to make decisions based on information received from the media. The majority of the Board decided that the best investigatory approach was to refer all allegations to the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.”
It’s curious that the board last year rejected requests from the Commissioners Court, the body that funds the Juvenile Department’s budget, to review anonymized “observation sheets” from the detention center at the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center. The majority of the Juvenile Board fought the request even though two members of the Commissioners Court who asked for records — County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins and Andrew Sommerman — are also Juvenile Board members.
We can’t say what the Juvenile Board knew. What we can say is that there was so much smoke that the board should have also investigated what was going on in its own house, if anything to put an immediate stop to any potential mistreatment or crimes. The state investigation took a year to complete.
We hope those found to have falsified records are fired and prosecuted. Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told us his office had received records of the investigation and is reviewing them.
The Juvenile Board’s failure to hold the Juvenile Department accountable for the care of young people in its custody is incompetence at best and gross negligence at worst. At any rate, it is inexcusable.
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