Burning Down the House : The End of Juvenile Prison (9781595589668) (20 page)

“The abuse was real,” Blakeslee wrote. “Internal agency documents describe in considerable detail numerous incidents of sexual misconduct that TYC [Texas Youth Commission] administrators were able to confirm at the facility. The story of how the scandal in Pyote unfolded—or failed to unfold—raises a number of troubling questions, among them how these two men avoided prosecution and how the story has stayed under the radar for so long.”

The answer to these questions is tragically familiar. After receiving multiple complaints and warnings from other staff and administrators about the two men, facility superintendent Chip Harrison responded by “admonishing” and “counseling” them—suggesting, for example, that they do their best to avoid spending time alone with their young charges in unsupervised areas.

This low-key approach did not prove effective. Eventually, two students approached a volunteer math tutor and told him that Brookings had victimized them and other students.

Alarmed, the tutor made a call to the Texas Rangers. “Within three weeks,” according to Blakeslee,

TYC administrators in Austin had documented the following allegations, according to internal agency records: that Brookins had performed oral sex on an 18-year-old student; that he had watched another student masturbate; that he had inappropriately touched at least two other students; and that he talked to students about sex toys,
penis pumps, and masturbation. They also learned that Hernandez was alleged to have had numerous sexual encounters with at least four students, aged 17 to 20, and that he had allegedly performed oral sex on each of them. . . . It seemed that the abuse had been going on for quite some time. The boys apparently did not come forward sooner, agency investigators concluded, because of the control the two men had over their release date and access to privileges within the facility. By early April, the inspector general of the agency had determined to his satisfaction that each of the allegations against the men was true. Hernandez was informed that he was about to be terminated, and he resigned. (Brookins had resigned almost immediately after his suspension.)

With that kind of evidence in hand, Blakeslee wrote, it looked like the two men were headed for prison, and the state toward a major scandal. “Instead, the case disappeared. The two suspects were never arrested, and details of the investigation were never reported in the papers. Hernandez and Brookins quietly left town.”

The state may have been done with the unpleasant business at Pyote, but the media were not. After Blakeslee's story broke in February 2007, the
Dallas Morning News
jumped on board with a series of its own, starting at the West Texas State School and moving on from there “as the scope of the scandal expanded to the entire agency and its prisons throughout Texas.”

What had happened at West Texas, it turned out with a little digging, was far from anomalous. The Texas Youth Commission had received 750 complaints of sexual misconduct since 2000, most of which had garnered no response.

Texas offers a particularly sweeping example not only of the ubiquity of sexual abuse inside juvenile prisons, but also of the indifference and impunity that foster it. According to the
New York Review of Books
, the 750 incidents that were reported were

generally thought to under-represent the true extent of such abuse, because most children were too afraid to report it: staff commonly instructed their favorite inmates to beat up kids who complained.
Even when the kids did file complaints, they knew it wouldn't do them much good. Staff covered for each other, grievance processes were sabotaged, and evidence was frequently destroyed. Officials in Austin ignored what they heard, and, in the very rare instances when staff were fired and their cases referred to local prosecutors, those prosecutors usually refused to act. Not one employee of the Texas Youth Commission during that six-year period was sent to prison for raping the children in his or her care.

Texas also offers a particularly vivid example of the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of reforming one aspect of a system without addressing the culture as a whole. The state did eventually respond to the wave of sexual assault allegations. Texas Rangers, investigators from the Attorney General's Office, and officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice were dispatched to every Texas Youth Commission facility. The commission established a twenty-four-hour abuse-reporting hotline.
Thousands of calls came in.

The reforms that followed the sex abuse scandal in Texas appeared as sweeping as the scandal itself. Prior to the revelations,
Texas had been neck and neck with Florida for the dubious distinction of the nation's most prolific jailer of its children. Today, the juvenile justice systems in both Florida (which went through a series of sex scandals of its own) and Texas are in a state of flux.

Within days of Blakeslee's story, Texas governor Rick Perry dismissed Texas Youth Commission chairman Pete C. Alfaro and called for the resignation of the acting director. In March 2007, Perry signed Senate Bill 103, which spawned various new offices and entities, each charged with keeping state employees from raping the youth in their care. So it was that Texas found itself with a new Office of the Inspector General, an Office of the Independent Ombudsman, a Release Review Panel, a treatment program, a Parents' Bill of Rights, and a new special master to oversee the besieged commission.
Employees were required to go through training on how to create an assault-free environment, and thousands of cameras were installed in state facilities.

Finally, the state—which had already granted counties incentives to keep low-level juvenile offenders in their communities—passed a slate
of reform bills that abolished both the Texas Youth Commission and the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission and transferred their powers to a newly created Texas Juvenile Justice Department and an independent ombudsman.

The population in state facilities plummeted, from three thousand in 2007 to about twelve hundred in 2011, and
nine state facilities closed their doors entirely. Texas—so recently a glaring example of a system run amok—now seemed the very model of a modern justice system.

Then all hell broke loose again.

It is hard to argue with the drop in population that was triggered, at least in part, by the revelations of sexual abuse. But by 2012, the system appeared once again in shambles, with reports of chronic violence and chaotic conditions at the state's remaining facilities.

In the five years since lawmakers approved sweeping reforms, youth-on-youth assaults have more than tripled at state-run juvenile prisons, to fifty-four assaults per one hundred youths in 2011. Youth assaults on staff have more than tripled as well, to thirty-seven confirmed assaults per one hundred youths.

At the Giddings State School—lauded in John Hubner's 2008 book
Last Chance in Texas
for what he described as a groundbreaking therapeutic program—youth-on-youth violence increased by 145 percent between 1997 and 2011, to eighty-one assaults per one hundred youths. The number of youth-on-staff assaults resulting in injury skyrocketed at Giddings as well, from eighteen in 2007 to seventy-two in 2011.

The staff at Giddings responded by breaking out the pepper spray: 216 documented uses in 2011, compared to 74 in 2007, at a facility that had recently been touted as the crown jewel in the Texas system.

“It's nuts that it's taken us five years just to go from one broken system to another,” Senate Committee on Criminal Justice chairman John Whitmire—an architect of the original reforms—told the
Austin American-Statesman
.

The collapse of the Texas reforms may be “nuts,” but it is also instructive. While all the ingredients for change appeared to be in place—scandal, advocacy, litigation, media pressure, new leadership, and of course the budget crunch affecting legislatures nationwide—one key element was missing: a genuine shift in values.

The lengthy and concerted effort to hide the sexual abuse plaguing the system rather than address it offers a powerful clue that the eventual reforms were rooted first and foremost in political embarrassment. That these reforms so quickly unraveled reveals a central challenge to reforming a system built on secrecy, impunity, and an abiding disregard for the children in its care. Reforms that are not built on a foundation of values—of
valuing
the children in whose name they are enacted—may help some of the children some of the time, simply by reducing the number subjected to the trauma of incarceration. But without a deeper shift in the way these children—and our obligation to them—are perceived, not only do those who are behind bars remain in danger, so do the reforms themselves. An uptick in the economy combined with a newsworthy crime by a young person under community supervision and the pendulum could all too easily swing back once again.

In 2008,
Cherie Townsend took over as the Texas Youth Commission's executive director. Townsend was well regarded within the reform community, and her appointment raised hopes for the state's beleaguered system. She lasted four years before retiring in 2012. By that time, she was under fire for everything from rising levels of youth violence in Texas State facilities to continued allegations of unsafe conditions.

Two years after Townsend came on board, the federal Department of Justice released its report on sexual abuse in juvenile facilities. Along with its survey of abuse nationwide, the report homed in on a handful of facilities identified as best and worst. Two of those on the “worst” list were located in Texas. At the
Corsicana Residential Treatment Center, the sexual victimization rate was a stunning 32.4 percent: one in three kids at the facility. The
Victory Field Correctional Academy in Vernon was the third worst, with one in four youth reporting sexual assault at the hands of a staff member.

Townsend told the
Texas Observer
she was “disappointed” in the federal report, which did not reflect the changes that had taken place since she came on board with what she called a “zero tolerance” approach to sexual abuse.

Fair enough—the report was based on data from 2008. Far more troubling is Townsend's assertion that because the federal survey was anonymous, many of the kids were lying—and that many of those who called
her own newly installed hotline (part of the “zero tolerance policy”) were also making things up.

“We know that when you install phones, kids give hotline tips all the time, and they'll often [make an allegation and then] say, ‘No, I'm just kidding,' ” she told the
Texas Observer
.

“It's a way of getting attention,” deputy TYC director of youth services James Smith alleged, calling the claims of abuse “overwhelmingly” false.

Smith's testimony before the federal panel placed the blame squarely on the kids. For example, the training his staff received around “professional boundaries” focused, by his description, on protecting naive staff from the predatory youth in their care. “While initially to the staff it's flattering or it sends a sense that they are developing a good relationship with the kid, unfortunately for the kid, it's a door opening for them to maybe perhaps take advantage of the staff or create a situation.”

Because of young offenders' tendency to “create situations,” Smith explained, the training was needed to help staff understand that “there [are] traps that you need to be aware of and while it may be well-intentioned on your part, it could certainly be perceived on the youth's part as an opportunity. And so we are looking to enhance our training, especially for our female staff, because we do have some young men who are very sophisticated.”

The “traps” set by wily youth, according to Smith, included nefarious maneuvers such as using a “pet name” or referring to a favorite staff member as “mama.”

Both Townsend and Smith continued to advance this bizarre line of reasoning in interviews with the
Texas Observer
. According to the
Observer
, Smith advanced the argument that “some young men from urban areas are so ‘sophisticated' that they may have skills in ‘grooming' female guards to be sexual partners. Staff members have to learn, he says, how ‘kids can sometimes try to manipulate them.' ”

Townsend was equally sympathetic to her easily manipulated staff, explaining to the
Observer
that it is “not about staff who are predators and intending to harm. It's often about crossing boundaries. . . . [Staff members] get into what they think is a positive relationship, and it crosses a line.”

Corsicana superintendent Laura Braly stuck to the party line—the kids were to blame. “Almost every kid you talk to here has some sort of sexual victimization in their past,” she told the
Observer
. The result, she explained, is that “they are highly, highly sexual. . . . You don't know how to express yourself any way other than through sexuality, and you interpret everything as being sexual.”

“If somebody walks by and touches them on the shoulder,” she continued, “they go, ‘I've been sexually assaulted.' ”

The problem with this argument (beyond its eerie echoes of the victim-blaming,
she asked for it
attitude that shamed and silenced rape victims on the outside for decades) is that it makes no sense. Experts say that false testimony or “misunderstandings” at the level documented at Corsicana would be extremely unusual. On top of that, across the nation, juvenile facilities hold large numbers of young people who enter with a history of sexual victimization. While further abuse is far too common at a large number of facilities, few have a rate of reported assaults that tops 30 percent. Even accounting for an excess of “low self-esteem” among TYC employees (one of the qualities Smith said makes his staff so easily “groomed” by the sophisticated youth they are tricked into violating), the argument that cadres of teenage seducers are luring trained staff into sexual encounters for their own unnamed purposes borders on the laughable—if the consequences of this attitude were not so tragic for the youths who are abused and assaulted inside Texas facilities, then blamed by top administrators for their own victimization.