Texas Youth Commission's culture resists change

As lawmakers move to clean up mess, new signs of trouble arise

Nearly 30 years have passed since the four "participant observers" took up residence inside Texas' troubled youth lockups, but Steve Bercu clearly remembers their shocking discovery.

Back then, Bercu was the lead attorney in Morales v. Turman, a federal lawsuit seeking to reform the state's juvenile detention system and end the physical abuse of incarcerated youths that went on there. The observers went in to monitor conditions, with the result that everyone was on his or her best behavior — at first.

"It was incredible. Within days, the culture inside the institutions reverted to what it was before," recalled Bercu, now an executive with BookPeople in Austin. "They were beating kids up, doing bad things just like before, like (the observers) weren't there.

"The culture of the system, an ingrained, entrenched, institutional culture, simply took back over."

That culture is being blamed for yet another scandal that put the Texas Youth Commission back in the spotlight this spring after published reports that allegations of sexual abuse by two administrators at the West Texas State School had been investigated but never prosecuted.

Enraged lawmakers began an inquiry that turned up numerous other reports of abuse and inaction by higher-ups. Gov. Rick Perry named a former aide, Jay Kimbrough, to take charge of the agency.

This week, Kimbrough issued a 35-page report that made 56 specific recommendations aimed at changing an agency he described as "unwilling or incapable of taking action" to fix itself. He declared that the new oversight is already working.

But even as the report was being distributed, there were signs of continuing problems:

•On two recent occasions, legislative investigators have complained of resistance from Youth Commission employees as they carried out audits. At the same time, officials have stopped making reports of abuse public — not to cover them up, they say, but to follow a state law that mandates that those records be kept secret.

•After weeks of headlines about a crackdown on illegal sexual encounters between agency employees and their charges, a halfway house employee in Fort Worth was arrested April 25 after being accused of trying to entice a girl to perform oral sex on him.

•In an April 30 report, health services auditors disclosed that a rape at a state youth lockup had not been properly reported or followed up, amid myriad other problems ranging from delayed treatment to lack of psychiatric care. At a public hearing on Friday, lawmakers were displeased with the news.

Perhaps most telling: Despite vowing to get to the bottom of what went wrong at the agency, despite Kimbrough's finding that the head office failed to do its duty, state officials have stopped short of detailing the extent of malfeasance by individual administrators in Austin. From Perry on down, the mantra is to move on.

"We know what happened. It's time to move forward, and that's what we're doing," said House Corrections Committee Chairman Jerry Madden, a Richardson Republican who is co-chairman of the special legislative committee empaneled to investigate the scandal. "People are gone. Significant structural changes are being made. This is a major, possibly historic shift in how the agency will do business."

Most of the agency's top officials — more than a dozen in all — have retired, resigned or been fired since the scandal erupted. More than 50 other lower-level workers were cashiered because they were found to have felony records. Nine current and former employees and four youths have been arrested.

Said state Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, an author of the key reform bill: "The old culture operated behind closed doors, swept everything under the rug. The changes will pull the shade up, pull the sheets back. We're going to keep a lot of outside people in TYC's business, people who can blow the whistle about wrongdoing and abuses."

Jobs are at stake

Weeks ago, the West Texas State School in Pyote, about 50 miles west of Odessa, looked like a goner for sure. The site of the sex abuse allegations that sparked the current scandal, it's near the wind-swept town of Monahans (population 6,800), which has a small pool of job applicants and limited social and medical services. The 240-bed unit was targeted weeks ago by state auditors for possible closure.

Legislators at first agreed. But that was before West Texans protested the impending loss of 228 jobs. So the Pyote school may not be closing any time soon. And it's unclear whether the far-flung dispersal of the state's delinquent youths will ever change.

Bercu, the former Morales litigator, said reformers always deemed the remoteness of state schools the most objectionable aspect of the Youth Commission's operation. The two most notorious facilities — Gatesville and Mountain View — were closed in 1974, on orders of U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, who determined their brutal culture was beyond repair.

In the conservator's report, Kimbrough laid most of the blame for the agency's "fundamental lack of accountability" on an organizational structure that bred nearly autonomous fiefdoms at isolated outposts while administrators in Austin looked the other way when problems arose.

"What happens there can tend to stay there, and that can let allegations of abuse be covered up," Kimbrough explained in an interview. "That's not a good way to operate any system such as this."

He recommends evaluating all remote youth lockups, with an eye toward moving them nearer to urban areas. That's where most of the incarcerated youths are from and where family and friends can easily visit. And it's where a larger pool of trained staff members and counselors resides.

Two already have been identified in the proposed state budget for conversion to adult prisons: the Marlin Orientation and Assessment Center and the John Shero State Juvenile Correctional Facility in San Saba, both of which began life as adult lockups.

Officials confirmed the latest targets for closure could include the remote Sheffield Boot Camp, 100 miles south of Midland, and the Victory Field Academy near Wichita Falls, a site whose two-story design has drawn complaints that it is unsuited for use as a prison. As a replacement, legislative leaders are privately discussing the possibility of opening a lockup near Houston, home to nearly one in four of the state's incarcerated youths.

Some say the remote lockups have benefits, if they are managed properly.

"The pay for correctional officers is low, but folks can live on that in rural areas. If you moved these facilities to urban areas and didn't raise the pay considerably, you wouldn't be able to hire anyone at all," observed former Republican state Rep. Toby Goodman of Arlington.

"Most all these facilities are remote. They were built there because no one wanted them in their backyard. They still don't. And if the state doesn't have the money to raise (guards') salaries, they don't have the money to move these facilities. That's a fact."

Hinojosa and Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat who is co-chairman of the investigating committee with Madden, said lawmakers now want to slow the pace of some changes to measure what works best.

"TYC is coming under sunset review during the next two years," Whitmire explained, "so we have a chance to stay on top of all this as it rolls out."

Still, reform advocates such as Isela Gutierrez, coordinator of the Texas Coalition Advocating Justice for Juveniles, believe that remote institutions have had their day. She noted that other states are abandoning them in favor of regional programs, a stated goal of legislative leaders.

"It's time for Texas to do the same," she said.

Back to future again

When it comes to the Texas Youth Commission, history has a way of repeating itself.

Bill Bush, a University of Nevada at Las Vegas visiting assistant professor who has researched the history of juvenile corrections in Texas, notes that the system has faced scandals since its inception, involving many of the same issues each time: Abuse of youths, lack of central control and failure to check wayward employees, too much focus on punishment and too little on rehabilitation.

The Morales case, he said, uncovered "a system of don't ask, don't tell" as far as top administrators were concerned — a way of operating that arguably has continued to the present day.

For instance: When a correctional officer at the Brownwood lockup reported seeing a male co-worker taking incarcerated girls into a closet for sex, she reported it to her bosses — and was told to shut up, she told a legislative committee, because she had no corroborating witnesses. She was later fired, in what she contends was retaliation by supervisors. Investigators recently filed charges against one former guard and are looking into allegations against at least two others.

Similar episodes, which occurred for years, have surfaced from most of the Youth Commission's 13 secure lockups. The question is often asked: Why did it take so long for the current scandal to break? Frequent answer: The culture.

"The culture was not to find problems. Not to deal with issues," Kimbrough said.

According to his report: "We know that some reports of abuse were modified once they reached headquarters. . . . We know all reports of abuse and neglect were sent to Austin. . . .The smoke signals were clearly visible. The dots should have been connected."

Just as lower-level supervisors appeared to drag their feet in investigating reports of staff abuse, so did the agency's top officials. Minutes of the meetings of the two management groups — the Executive Management Committee and the Executive Council — contain no mention of the abuse investigation, even after it became public in February 2005 or after legislators adjudged the Youth Commission guilty of "gross mismanagement" in March. Minutes of the agency's governing board, seven citizens appointed by the governor, also indicate little awareness of the explosive problems.

Goodman, chief architect of juvenile justice reforms in Texas in 1995, when he was in the Legislature, said of the board members that he "never saw one of them, talked to one of them" in the 12 years he led the House panel overseeing juvenile justice. "That says a lot right there."

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle's office is investigating instances in which abuse investigation reports were changed or altered to remove information that top officials ignored or did not respond to repeated alerts that sexual abuse of youths was occurring.

Earle declined comment on his inquiry, but investigators privately said the culture of cover-up — intentional or unintentional — appears to have been pervasive. As an example, they note that a key piece of evidence in a grand jury investigation of the Brownwood lockup — a videotape showing a guard going into a closet with an incarcerated girl — sat in a Youth Commission file and was not forwarded to prosecutors until after the grand jury completed its review of the case.

In another case, investigators discovered a surveillance video in which a teacher can be seen putting a tape into a VCR as one student performs oral sex on another, in full view behind her. Yet the video prompted no action on the part of Youth Commission supervisors, according to investigators.

"The culture thought if you looked away long enough, the kids would stop complaining, the problems would go away," said Marc Slattery, a Midland math tutor at the West Texas State School who reported suspicions of abuse to Texas Ranger Sgt. Brian Burzynski and was subsequently terminated by the agency.

To Bush, the Las Vegas history professor, the culture stems from a mind-set that pervades every aspect of the state's juvenile justice system. "The problem has been that the kids are not viewed as juveniles," he said. "They're seen as adult criminals, a lock-them-up-and-warehouse-them mentality."

Given the agency's history, can the latest efforts produce lasting change?

"Some of the root causes are still there: remote facilities, inadequate staffing and training, a flawed system for handling grievances," said Bercu, the former lead attorney in the 1971 lawsuit. "Unless someone corrects those root causes, really changes the culture, it'll just be a matter of time until it happens again."

mward@statesman.com; 476-3445