Texas
Facing youth prison crisis, Texas lawmakers opt to build new facilities and funnel more kids to adult system
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The Texas Legislature convened this January facing a big task: fixing the increasingly unstable youth prison system.
Proposals on the table ranged from closing the state’s five remaining youth prisons and instead relying on local systems to rehabilitate children involved in criminal behavior to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build additional state lockups for juveniles.
Ultimately, lawmakers opted for the latter, passing a budget with $200 million set aside to build two or three additional state-run prisons to hold at least 200 more youth. Currently, fewer than 600 juveniles are imprisoned in the state’s prisons.
In a crucial bill that authorizes the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s continued existence after what is known as a sunset review, the Legislature also passed a provision requiring the transfer of some teenagers from TJJD into the harsher, more punitive adult prison system. Such transfers have already been increasing at TJJD’s discretion as the agency has sought to restore order within its prisons, including that of a 16-year-old who died by suicide shortly after he was sent to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The measures will go into effect in September unless Gov. Greg Abbott vetoes them this month.
The decisions are a stark reversal from more than a decade of Texas trending away from imprisoning children. With TJJD’s history of scandals, state and county officials have shifted toward keeping more youth who’ve engaged in criminal behavior under local supervision, where research suggests they have the best outcomes. Since 2007, the state has closed eight prisons and shrunk the imprisoned youth population from about 5,000 to less than 600.
The youth still sent to TJJD, however, are often the most difficult to manage because of violent behavior, severe mental health needs or both. Although the sunset bill requires the agency to come up with a plan to find more local resources to keep children closer to home — and the budget gives a boost to local juvenile probation departments and diversion programs — lawmakers also pushed to build more facilities after the state projected more teenagers will be sent to TJJD in the near future after a pandemic-era slump.
Social justice groups have condemned both the plan to build new facilities and the plan to send more youth to adult prisons. The advocates have viewed the recent increase in transfers as a way for the beleaguered agency to throw away the kids with the highest needs. Building more prisons, they fear, will exacerbate the already extreme short-staffing for officers and lead to the same dire situations current prisons have faced.
“The new facilities are problematic, especially given all the problems that have been documented in the current facilities,” said Brett Merfish, youth justice director for Texas Appleseed. “They made it easier to send the youth from TJJD to TDCJ, so that also concerns me. Given the depth of problems, I don’t think this really addressed them adequately.”
For years, TJJD, which is under federal investigation, has been entrenched in repeated scandals over sexual and physical abuse, and the agency has consistently struggled to keep officers on the payroll. Last summer, short-staffing hit emergency levels, leaving children locked in cells up to 23 hours a day, using water bottles and lunch trays as toilets. Self-harm behavior skyrocketed among imprisoned youth, nearly half of whom spent some time on suicide watch.
[Almost 600 Texas youths are trapped in a juvenile prison system on the brink of collapse]
The agency has since scrambled to recruit and retain more officers, largely by implementing an emergency 15% pay raise. By April, agency staffing had risen to nearly 60%, according to state reports. Although it’s still a dramatically low number, the agency had only 44% of its officer positions filled in August 2022.
The new state budget, which gives the agency a significant boost, will continue those increased pay rates for juvenile prison officers. It also sets aside the hefty investment for new facilities in populated areas, which have been touted as a solution to the problems plaguing outdated rural facilities.
“These facilities are needed, and we are grateful to the Legislature for this funding,” said Barbara Kessler, a spokesperson for TJJD. “We hope to see these modern facilities designed and sited as quickly as possible.”
With the Texas Facilities Commission, TJJD must submit its plan for the new units by August 2024. Kessler said in an email Wednesday the agency would begin working with its partners to determine the number and locations of new prisons.
The size and scope of the units, however, are still unclear. Lawmakers said the new facilities may be designed to serve specific populations, including those with acute mental health needs, the most aggressive or violent youth, or girls. But while lawmakers have touted the benefits of adding smaller, specialized facilities (“I think it’s going to be a game changer,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston), the only requirement put into legislation was for the agency to add a minimum of 200 beds.
Proposals from last year suggest about $200 million would cover two 100-bed detention centers, or three facilities with 40 to 56 beds. A House change to limit each facility to a maximum of 48 beds was stripped out in negotiations. Without specifics, advocates worry the new facilities will turn out to be two 100-bed units without specialization.
“To me that’s just perpetuating the problem and not fixing the ones we have,” Merfish said.
Opponents also worried additional prisons will lead to more children being locked up even if it’s not what is best for them.
“The more beds that we have, the more people we’ll find to fill those beds,” state Rep. Harold Dutton Jr., D-Houston, said in a March legislative hearing.
Outside of the budget, the key changes to TJJD come from the sunset bill. Senate Bill 1727 aims to reshape the agency’s board, and it requires the agency to come up with a plan to keep more kids closer to home by expanding funding to local services or using financial incentives to divert children away from the criminal system.
The bill would also require the agency to request transfers to TDCJ for many of its teens if they commit new crimes while in TJJD. Such crimes would include all first- or second-degree felonies, as well as the less severe but frequently pursued charge of assaulting a prison officer.
[“A way to throw kids away”: Texas’ troubled juvenile justice department is sending more children to adult prisons]
Senators have said such transfers are needed to restore order within youth prison walls and remove the most violent and disruptive kids.
“They’ve been sent for help and they’re preventing the other youth from getting help, so we’re trying to hold them accountable when they injure an officer or another youth,” Whitmire said in March when youth justice advocates pushed back on the transfers in a legislative hearing.
Kessler said the new requirement “codifies and strengthens what is generally existing practice” in TJJD, which sent significantly more youth to TCDJ last year than in previous years. She said it is difficult to predict how many more youth will be sent to TDCJ if the law takes effect.
“It supports our mission that youth assigned to TJJD be working toward better behavior,” Kessler said.
Youth justice advocates, however, fear the agency will wrongly push more of its most troubled kids off of its plate using the new requirement. They point to youth like Joshua Keith Beasley, the 16-year-old who died by suicide this year in TDCJ. Beasley had a lengthy history of mental illness and suicidal behavior and was first committed to TJJD at age 11 for kicking a school employee while on probation for vandalizing property. He was sent to TDCJ after hitting and spitting on a TJJD employee.
“When are we going to realize this isn’t criminal behavior?” Merfish asked. “First of all, they’re responding to trauma … but [also] if I’m grabbed by someone, I’m going to have a reaction. If they’re ‘out of control,’ then you’re not doing something right.”
Kessler said the agency will continue to work with youth to set them up for success within TJJD.
“The agency will continue to deescalate violent youths committed to its care, through treatment and programming, so they avoid additional offenses and have a chance at reform in the juvenile justice system,” she said.
Disclosure: Texas Appleseed has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Strong winds and humid conditions will make for an unusually warm Sunday in North Texas.
High temperatures are expected to reach 80 degrees in some areas, which is about 15 degrees above normal for this time of year. This warm weather will make for a balmy atmosphere for the Parade of Lights in downtown Fort Worth tonight, starting at 6 p.m.
However, the warm stretch won’t last. A cold front is expected to hit Monday morning.
Morning temperatures on Monday will start near what is typically a daytime high, similar to today. But as the cold front moves in, gusty winds from the north will cause temperatures to drop to the upper 50s by late afternoon – the first of two cold fronts expected this week.
So far, November has been remarkably warm, currently ranking as the fifth warmest on record from 1899 to the present. However, it won’t end that way.
The cold front arriving on Thanksgiving will drop temperatures down enough to require winter coats.
North Texas is anticipating a widespread freeze by Friday morning, with the Dallas-Fort Worth area forecasted to stay just above freezing during what is expected to be the coldest morning of the season. A First Alert Weather Day has been issued in preparation for the cold weather.
My Aggie loyalty started in high school, when my future alma mater mailed a poster of Bonfire to a ZIP code at the very top of Texas. That was about all the recruiting I received from Aggieland, but it was enough. That poster hung on my wall (between Michael Jordan and a Porsche) and I memorized the only words on it:
Some may boast of prowess bold,
of the school they think so grand.
But there’s a spirit can ne’er be told.
It’s the Spirit of Aggieland.
My enrollment at what was then the third-largest university in the nation was a sea change for me, and a culture shock. It’s when I stitched the High Plains together with the rest of Texas and started to get perspective about the history, personalities and traditions that shape our state. One of those traditions will be renewed Saturday when maroon and burnt orange take the field together, for the first time in 13 years, below the roar of the 12th Man.
This rivalry started in 1894, and was renewed 97 consecutive times from 1915 to 2011. Altogether, the game has been played 118 times. It used to unite the state, and it used to divide families. In recent years, jokes about tension over Thanksgiving dinner because of the A&M-UT game have been replaced by dread of Thanksgiving dinner over political talk. With the election behind us, it’ll be good for Texans to get back to the old ways.
This rivalry has created our state’s own version of mixed marriages. Kevin Scheible, one of my closest friends from college, married a member of the Longhorn Band. Kevin and Sharon live in San Antonio now. They’ve somehow made it work, though it’s an arrangement I would counsel most young lovers to avoid.
A dozen years ago, right around the time the rivalry was being suspended, my Aggie wife and I found ourselves in a Bible study group that was evenly split between Aggies and Longhorns. It included two mixed marriages. Those people are still some of our closest friends. Only the supernatural bonds of the Holy Spirit could have kept us from cracking in half. That, plus we don’t watch the game together.
College football has changed enormously since this game was played last, let alone since it was played first. The crowds are larger. The record size of the 12th Man is 110,663; this game will almost certainly surpass that.
The payouts are bigger too. The era of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) sponsorships has created a breed that would have been unthinkable in 1894: millionaire college athletes.
Two of the 10 highest paid college athletes in the nation are Longhorn quarterbacks Quinn Ewers and Arch Manning, according to Yahoo! Sports.
In the new Aggie tradition of paying football personalities not to contribute, benched quarterback Conner Weigman will earn his $628,000 NIL valuation from the sideline.
But at least the venue will be simple. The Aggies play at Kyle Field, the state’s largest stadium, named after Texas A&M horticulture professor E.J. Kyle, who created the school’s football field in 1904.
In contrast, the name of the Longhorns’ haunt is something like Campbell-Williams Field at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium presented by Bud Light in association with Hemp-It-Up-America Political Action Committee.
Both schools have storied programs. The Longhorns have Darrell Royal, Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams and four national championships if you include the one in 1970 when they lost to Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl but United Press International writers awarded them the title anyway because the media loves them. Some things never change.
The Aggies have Bear Bryant, Gene Stallings and Jackie Sherrill (for the purposes of this column, please forget the state of Alabama exists), as well as Heisman Trophy winners John David Crow and Johnny Football Manziel. When I was a student, Aggies claimed just one national championship, back in 1939. But then other schools started putting such achievements in big letters on their stadiums and we demanded a recount. Now, Aggies include the undefeated seasons in 1919 and 1927 under Coach D.X. Bible who later coached at, you guessed it, UT.
The rivalry has included its share of pranks. The official story (and by “official” I mean made up by Aggies) of how UT mascot Bevo got its name is that a group of Aggie students snuck over to Austin one night, long ago, after the horns had lost to A&M 13-0, and branded the cow with the score. In a mascot cover-up, UT students converted the 13 to a B, the – to an E and added a V before the 0 to create the name.
It is true that A&M beat UT 13-0 in 1915, and it’s true that some Aggies branded the mascot. But the brand-conversion part remains unconfirmed and Longhorns refuse to admit the obvious: that this is a terrific story that should live long in Texas lore.
For all the differences between these schools, there is still more that unites us than divides us, as it’s popular to say these days. Both institutions are doing important work in research and molding the next generation of Texas leaders. Aggies and Longhorns love their state. We love our schools. And we would love to see our rivals lose. Both school’s songs mention the other.
That poster on my bedroom wall would be as close as I would come to the real Bonfire until I stood on Duncan Drill Field watching it burn in the fall of 1991. My unit in the Corps of Cadets was known for building Bonfire. We had spent thousands of man hours in exhausting manual labor kindling Bonfire’s purpose: the burning desire to beat the hell outta UT.
I remember watching the news just a few years later, heartbroken by the loss of 12 Aggies who were making their own Bonfire memories when tragedy struck. Aggies everywhere remembered them this week.
Longhorns did too. I’ll never forget how Austin dropped the rivalry taunts and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with grieving Aggies in the wake of that tragedy. UT showed its class that year. The school canceled its Hex Rally, the ritual that traditionally preceded the game. The UT Tower went dark and the Aggie War Hymn was played there — the one that derides the “orange and the white.” It’s the only time in UT history that has happened, I’m told. At the game, the Longhorn Band played Taps, a fitting salute at a school with military roots.
Longhorn coach Mack Brown offered to postpone the game and he said he has shed tears over the loss of those 12 Aggies. His staff organized a blood drive. Brown was a great coach whose players would have run through a wall for him. In November 1999, I think a lot of Aggies would have too.
Two weeks ago, Mrs. Aggie and I attended a gathering sponsored by the Coppell Aggie Moms Club where we got to meet the Texana artist Benjamin Knox. Knox was in the Aggie Cadet Corps just a few years before I was. He went on to paint the school spirit at several Texas institutions, including commissions by the State of Texas, and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Knox showed us a new painting he created to mark the revival of this Texas Thanksgiving tradition. And because I accosted him after the meeting, he agreed to let The Dallas Morning News reproduce it here.
From a folded poster hung with thumbtacks to a work of art by one of Texas’ great painters, this rivalry has produced a lot of memorable images. If the Aggies don’t run out of time, I look forward to treasuring the image of the Kyle Field scoreboard Saturday, and sharing it with a few of my Longhorn friends.
Editor’s note: Over Sanders’ loud objections, this column was edited for a variety of blatant biases and subtle but consistent grammatical slights (such as the use of “tu”) that did not meet our editorial standards.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com
A common theme for No. 22 TCU has been their complete dominance on their home floor this season. The Horned Frogs finished the year 14-1 at Schollmaier Arena. On Friday night, in front of over 3,000 fans, TCU swept Texas Tech (25-14, 26-24, 25-11).
The four seniors honored by TCU were Melanie Parra, Cecily Bramschreiber, Stephanie Young and Ashlyn Bourland. All four players found ways to contribute as Parra finished with 14 kills and seven digs. Bramschreiber filled up the stat sheet with four kills, four aces and seven digs. Both Young and Bourland got an ace.
Both teams traded points in the early going, but Bramschreiber sparked a 7-2 run to give the Frogs a 16-9 lead. TCU hit .417 in the first set and dominated the first set capped off by a Becca Kelley ace.
In set two, Texas Tech made things much closer jumping out to a 8-5 lead. A 4-0 run from TCU put them back in front. This set included multiple runs and it was Tech that got it to set point leading 24-22. TCU was able to end the set on a 4-0 run courtesy of kills from Jalyn Gibson and Parra paired with aces from Bramschreiber.
Trying to keeps things alive, TCU wasn’t met with much resistance from the Red Raiders in the third set. The Frogs kept up the pressure with multiple runs to build a massive 17-8 lead. Bourland picked up her first career ace and an attack error ended things.
It was a fun night for the seniors that played in front of the TCU crowd for the last time. The 14 wins at home tied the school record for most wins at home in a single season. They also picked up the most wins in a season since 2015. What Jason Williams has done for this program in such a short time has been remarkable to watch.
The Frogs move to 19-7 overall 11-5 in conference. They still are fifth in the Big 12 standings with two games to go. They will travel to Morgantown on Wednesday to take on West Virginia at 6 p.m. and then to Cincinnati on Friday at 1 p.m.
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