Despite red flags at Dallas County youth lockup, board looked the other way

The resignation of Dallas County’s embattled juvenile department director may finally force the Juvenile Board to reckon with shocking complaints about the treatment of youths in lockup.

A majority of the board appeared asleep at the wheel despite mounting allegations about teens being kept in their cells or in solitary confinement longer than appropriate.

Darryl Beatty resigned as executive director of the juvenile department after state regulators opened a second investigation into the juvenile detention center at the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center. State officials told us they went in for a surprise inspection this month following “[r]ecent reports, from various sources, alleging new instances of supervisory neglect.” The final report from a separate neglect investigation the state launched last summer is pending.

The Juvenile Board shouldn’t just wait for the results. The board clearly needs to conduct a broader review into the operations of the Dallas County Juvenile Department.

By law, it is the county’s Juvenile Board and not the Commissioners Court that oversees the juvenile department and its detention facilities. The Commissioners Court provides funding from its budget.

Yet the Juvenile Board so far has betrayed an astounding lack of curiosity about what’s going on in the county’s juvenile justice system.

Last year, the board pushed back against attempts by the Commissioners Court to obtain anonymized “observation sheets” that would show how long youths have been kept in their cells day to day, after a controversial third-party report found the Dallas County juvenile justice system is more punitive than those in other counties. A judge ruled that county commissioners were not entitled to the observation sheets.

Then came a state inquiry into allegations of neglect, soon after a June 2023 investigation by this newspaper highlighted concerns by multiple parents and staff whistleblowers who said children were being kept in their cells for up to 23 hours a day. Some of them also complained about unsanitary conditions in the cells and lack of access to medical care.

At the time, this newspaper reported a revealing exchange among members of the Juvenile Board about the isolation allegations. County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins and Commissioner Andrew Sommerman — the two members of the Commissioners Court who sit in the Juvenile Board and who’ve requested access to observation sheets — were chastised by family court Judge Andrea Plumlee for using the term “isolation.” Another board member, Juvenile Judge Andrea Martin, said, “We don’t just put kids behind doors when they shouldn’t be.”

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department disagreed. While the agency has yet to issue a final report on its 2023 investigation, it said in September that some children in Dallas County detention were held in isolation for disciplinary reasons for as long as five days, which is more than double the state limit of 48 hours.

The state hasn’t yet said whether teens have routinely been kept in their cells most of the day for reasons other than safety or discipline.

TJJD told the Juvenile Board that there were record-keeping gaps at the Henry Wade facility, with staff at the detention center unable to produce some observation sheets. That alone should have set off alarm bells for board members.

The state approved the juvenile department’s improvement plan, but now the public has questions about what actual improvements took place. An investigation by WFAA-TV last month exposed complaints similar to those illuminated by The Dallas Morning News’ reporting a year ago. Dallas pastors rallied to demand better treatment for the youth in county lockups, though Beatty categorically denied allegations of mistreatment.

Then came the unannounced inspection last week and Beatty’s resignation. Beatty didn’t respond to a text message from us.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who sat on the Juvenile Board until early 2023 and who defended Beatty from the Commissioners Court dais, said the right thing had happened with the Juvenile Board reporting allegations to state regulators and allowing the state investigations to play out. He noted that Beatty had dealt with high staff vacancy rates but acknowledged concerns with his performance. Price said Beatty had seemed paralyzed in the past six months and unable to move the juvenile department forward.

Juvenile Judge Cheryl Shannon, chair of the Juvenile Board, also rejected our criticism of the body’s handling of concerns about Beatty’s department.

“The media has chosen to present the Board as taking no action regarding the concerns raised about the Dallas County Juvenile Detention Center,” she wrote in an email. “This assertion is absolutely incorrect. Since the inception of concerns raised in early 2023, the majority of the Board agreed that the proper independent investigative authority is the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD).”

She said the board agreed that TJJD has the expertise required to investigate the detention center and that the process has worked “exactly as it is designed to work.”

That explanation rings hollow to us. The Juvenile Board is not powerless to investigate, and the abundance and severity of the complaints should have sparked an internal review. The state law that created the Juvenile Board plainly authorizes it to “make any special studies or investigations it considers necessary to improve the operations” of the juvenile department and county institutions under its jurisdiction.

Managing a juvenile department is a difficult and delicate task. Many minors in lockup are there because they have been accused of violence. Some of them also struggle with mental illness. Juvenile detention centers must balance safety with the need to offer schooling and recreational activities to youths in their custody.

No system run by human beings is perfect. But the difficulty of the job is no excuse to overlook so many red flags. The message from the Juvenile Board and the juvenile department all along has been, in essence, “nothing to see here.”

We await the report from the first state investigation into neglect allegations, which TJJD spokeswoman Barbara Kessler said is under legal review. An executive summary is expected in August.

Kessler said investigators spent months gathering evidence, conducting interviews and reviewing about 18,000 daily observation sheets. They put together a report that’s nearly 100 pages.

Nothing to see here, Juvenile Board?

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