TYC facilities are dangerous for guards and residents alike

Scuffles with juvenile offenders send worker compensation claims soaring for TYC staff.

Published Sunday, March 18, 2007 in the Austin American-Statesman.

Mary Vargas-Ybarra hurt her back in a fight at the Texas Youth Commission's juvenile center in Edinburg. At the TYC's San Saba facility, Mark Tribelli says, he sustained back injuries, torn knee ligaments, an amputated finger and a broken hand.

Neither was an incarcerated youth, though; both were correctional officers.

The Texas Youth Commission, which has custody of the state's worst youthful offenders, has been rocked by claims that some staff members sexually and physically assaulted children they were charged to watch while administrators hid the problem.

Yet, according to various state records, it's only part of the story: On both sides of the TYC's bars, more and more people are becoming victims of violence.

Kids are fighting more among themselves, and employees are using force more often to try to stop them. Because the majority of TYC staff injuries occur while restraining students — scuffles that guards say typically end up in a chaotic pile on concrete floors — more officers are getting hurt.

TYC employees claim work-related injuries more often than at any other state agency, by a staggering margin: four times the rate of Department of Criminal Justice employees, who guard adult prisoners.

TYC employees filed workers compensation complaints at a rate of three a day in 2005. Their pain is costing taxpayers millions of dollars in disability payments and lost hours at work as they recuperate.

No one is saying the guards are faking it. Rather, those both in and outside the TYC say the alarming on-the-job injury rate suggests a dysfunctional agency struggling with wider problems, including a poorly trained work force with high turnover and a culture of violence that hurts children and adults alike.

And the problem appears to be worsening. The TYC reported just under 11,000 youth-on-youth assaults in 2002. The past two years have averaged 12,000.

Physical confrontations between the TYC's incarcerated youth and correctional officers are also soaring. Between 2003 and 2006, the incidents in which staff forcibly restrained a student jumped by a third. Last year, it happened 12,800 times, or 35 per day.

National averages compiled by the Massachusetts-based Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, which supports executives who run detention centers, show that large juvenile detention facilities should expect five or six physical altercations a month. Last year, the TYC's McLennan facility, in Mart, averaged 14.

"When I started working, in 1997, we'd get 'man-down' calls about three times a week," said Tribelli, who quit in 2005 after his back was injured while he restrained a student. "When I stopped we could have six per shift."

That's a bright red flag to those who study kids in detention.

"Restraint is a last resort," said Kim Godfrey, the Massachusetts council's deputy director. "If staff is restraining kids, it shows that their behavior management program is failing."

No 'Boys Town'

Youth correctional facilities can be rough places. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice cited pervasive violence in declaring that conditions at the Evins Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburg violate the constitutional rights of youths incarcerated there. A few days earlier, staff at the John Shero facility in San Saba used pepper spray to subdue 30 students in a large uprising.

"This isn't 'Boys Town,' and we're not Father Flanagans," said Elizabeth Tribelli, Mark's wife and a former guard herself, referring to the movie in which Spencer Tracy plays a priest who rehabilitates wayward kids.

But other states don't have a Texas-sized workers comp problem. Michigan juvenile corrections officers filed about one workers comp claim per 11 students last year, according to Leonard Dixon, that state's director of juvenile justice. TYC employees filed at double that rate.

The TYC explains the problem as one of simple numbers.

"With the increase of youth population, the number of incidents of physical restraint has increased over the years, increasing the risk of injury to staff and youth," a recent unreleased report concludes.

Yet the TYC's population is smaller now than it was five years ago.

"When you see assault after assault after assault, something's going on that enables kids to attack staff," said Bruce Chapman, a crisis intervention specialist in New York state whose "Handle with Care" restraint method has been used by the TYC since 1995.

Guards say the frequency of their injuries signals a dangerous shift in control between staff and students, exacerbated by staff shortages that have forced the TYC to make bad hires.

"There were days when I was afraid for the staff because there'd be so many inexperienced officers on a shift," said Vargas-Ybarra, who worked at Evins for 15 years.

To those who study juvenile justice, however, the numbers suggest even bigger problems, including unprepared officers who are too quick to fight and a daily regimen that leaves kids at loose ends and itching to relieve their boredom.

"Staff can't just say it's because of violent kids," said Edward Loughran, executive director of the Massachusetts center. "If kids feel safe and they're interacting well with staff, you don't have this issue."

Expensive injuries

The TYC's soaring injury rate is expensive. Last year, Texas juvenile corrections officers collectively missed more than 6,000 days on the job because of injuries they received at work.

The state provides its own workers comp coverage, so taxpayers foot the bills. In each of the past three years, TYC workers injured at work collected an average of about $6.2 million.

But money is only part of the cost. Morale suffers. Worse, experts say, both children and adults start expecting violence and believing that anyone can be hurt at any time.

"If staff is not safe, students are not safe," said Elizabeth Tribelli.

"At some point you have to ask: Why is it that all we're getting from these kids is bad behavior?" said David Roush, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University who also directs the Center for Research and Professional Development, which studies juvenile justice.

One explanation for higher-than-expected rates of violence is too few guards. Roush says the latest research recommends one guard for every eight offenders in juvenile facilities. The ratio of kids to corrections officers in Texas is about 18 to 1 and in many instances as high as 24 to 1. Michigan, by comparison, has a 10 to 1 ratio.

Once hired, many TYC officers don't stay long; the turnover rate was nearly 50 percent last year. The resulting combination of inexperience and constant staff shortages puts officers at even greater risk.

"If we cannot retain Texas Youth Commission employees by protecting them, we cannot feasibly expect to hire new qualified staff," Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, who represents the San Saba area, said last year when several TYC employees appeared before the House Committee on Corrections to plead for help.

The TYC has asked legislators for $47 million to hire more staff members and lower the ratio to one corrections officer per 12 juveniles. But low pay — guards start at about $22,400 a year — and the isolated location of many TYC facilities has made it difficult to recruit officers.

"When you're out halfway between the moon and Midland, there's no one to hire," said Gail Lutz, an attorney at the University of Houston's Juvenile Dependency Clinic. "How on earth are you going to get counselors and psychologists, never mind correctional officers?"

That gap was demonstrated in 2005, when a state law required sex offender treatment clinicians to be licensed. None of the 24 counselors working at the TYC's sexual offender programs met the qualifications, and the agency was forced to ask for an exemption from the law.

Limited training

Once they are hired, Texas corrections officers' training goes by in a blur. New hires receive less than half the classroom instruction of adult corrections officers, despite the fact that juvenile justice itself has become vastly more complex. Gangs are a growing problem, and the percentage of kids sent to juvenile facilities with mental health problems is exploding.

The design of many TYC buildings seems to contribute to a volatile atmosphere. Originally built for adult prisoners, open-bay dormitory facilities house as many as several dozen students in a single room. Staff members can't defuse tension by removing a kid to his room, and fights break out more often. The TYC's open-bay buildings report higher levels of injuries and days missed among its correctional officers.

Subduing kids is different than controlling adults, and the profession is still struggling with how to prevent out-of-control kids from hurting themselves or others while at the same time protecting staff. TYC officers say they receive one day of training each year on how to manage confrontations without force. If all else fails, they are to slip behind the subject and apply a full-nelson-like "skeletal lock."

Corrections officers say it works only in theory, however.

"Basically, you knock the kid down any way you can and wait for security to show up," Elizabeth Tribelli said.

Mary Vargas-Ybarra agrees.

"You grab, you bear-hug anything you can, and then you usually end up on the floor," she said.

'It's not safe'

Vargas-Ybarra started working at Evins in 1990, when it opened as a 48-bed community facility. It was a good job in a place where work is hard to find, and, as a former psychological technician in the Navy, she had experience.

In the mid-1990s, the center expanded to a 240-bed lock-down facility. That meant a sudden demand for corrections officers, and Vargas-Ybarra says the green staff and the more hardened offenders were often a combustible mix.

"It was a nightmare," she recalled.

She says she could tell immediately which new TYC hires would wash out: "You need a certain type of personality. Not abusive but someone who can stand his ground. You could tell when we hired men who were overly aggressive or people who'd be eaten up alive."

Training for the new hires, she said, "was minimal. And it was more like learning CPR and how to fill out incident reports. It's just not enough to know how to deal with this type of population."

She says she and others complained to TYC for years about the need for more training. Requests for kneepads — proper restraint technique calls for guards to drop to a knee after grabbing the student — also went nowhere.

"I was injured many times," she recalled.

In January 2005, she jumped into a large fight and tried to restrain a juvenile who was attacking another guard. When she fell to the ground, both the kid and the guard fell on top of her, wrenching her back.

Back, neck and leg pain forced her to quit the TYC seven months later. Unable to find local work that paid close to her $37,000 salary, Vargas-Ybarra filed for disability benefits, which she now receives.

Elizabeth Tribelli, who stopped working at the TYC in 2004 after an inmate assault, says it's a common story.

"Don't let anyone you love work there," she said. "It's not safe."

edexheimer@statesman.com; 445-1774