TEXAS YOUTH COMMISSION

SWAT-like inspections of juvenile facilities ordered

Texas Youth Commission want on-site visits of 17 other contract-care programs

Burned by substandard conditions at a privately run West Texas youth prison, Texas Youth Commission officials on Thursday ordered a special inspection of 17 other contract-care programs — the second such SWAT-like sweep of agency sites to curb potential abuse in seven months.

The move came as Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, announced a Senate investigation of all state corrections contracts held by Geo Group Inc., which until Monday ran the controversial West Texas lockup in Coke County, between Abilene and San Angelo.

"Foster homes, residential treatment, we're going to review all of them," said Jim Hurley, spokesman for the juvenile corrections agency that has been ensnared by scandal and bureaucratic missteps since last spring.

"We thought we could trust our monitors, but in light of the Coke County situation, we obviously can't," Hurley said. "So we're going to cast a suspicious light over everything and do on-site visits to make sure the conditions are meeting standards."

Monday evening, Acting Executive Director Dimitria Pope, after consulting with Gov. Rick Perry's office, ordered about 195 incarcerated youths removed from the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte because of alleged squalor and safety problems.

Citing "deplorable conditions," Pope also canceled the state's contract with Geo Group — an action that triggered a political firestorm. Local officials complained that the closure was an overreaction and a stunt, while Youth Commission officials continued to defend the move as necessary to protect the youths' safety.

Hurley said Thursday that seven employees had been fired and at least one other resigned — Elizabeth Lee, the agency's director of contract care.

Separate criminal and legislative investigations are under way into why agency officials in Austin were unaware of the severity of the problems until last week, the same official disconnect that was disclosed during the abuse scandal months earlier.

Last spring, amid a sex-abuse and cover-up scandal, top state officials dispatched teams of Texas Rangers and law enforcement officers to investigate the agency's 12 state-run lockups and halfway houses as a safety net to ensure that the youths housed there were protected. But most of the contract centers were not so inspected.

Hurley said the latest sweep will not include the state-run centers.

Included in the new inspections, which begin today, will be residential centers in Austin, Houston and San Antonio, apartments and a group home in Houston, the Brookhaven Youth Ranch in West, the Garza County Regional Juvenile Center in Post, a trades center in Cisco and a facility for new mothers in Marion.

In a related development, Whitmire said Thursday that he has directed a review of Geo's nine other state corrections contracts, all to incarcerate state prisoners, as a prelude to Senate hearings. Seven were signed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and and two were signed by two counties.

"Based on their documented substandard performance and horrible conditions in Coke County, and their spin and cover-up since that came out, it's time to review everything they do in Texas," he said. "From what I've seen, I think they've got some serious compliance issues — especially at the (Intermediate Sanction Facility) in Houston where they had 138 deficiencies out of 395 items on the checklist.

"That's terrible." The facility is a type of parole lockup.

An internal report on Geo's contract compliance, made public Wednesday by the department, shows that those "significant" deficiencies were noted during a June 2006 inspection. They ranged from maintenance problems to paperwork mistakes to security breaches to unclean kitchen equipment.

All were soon corrected, the report shows. And 11 subsequent inspections have turned up no major problems, according to the report.

Two other Geo-run facilities also had issues. Six logged no major findings.

At a Fort Worth halfway house, several incidents of "offender/officer inappropriate relationships" were reported, and four convicts died there in just four months earlier this year. Investigations showed the deaths to be of natural causes, "due to the poor medical condition of each individual offender," and the inappropriate relationships were fully investigated and addressed with personnel actions, according to the report.

At the Jefferson County Jail, which houses state inmates, significant contraband smuggling was found. A new administrator corrected the problems, according to the report.

Whitmire said he is not convinced that the problems have been corrected.

"How do TDCJ officials know they can believe what the monitoring reports are saying?" he said. "TYC thought they could believe theirs, and we know now that was a big mistake."

Michelle Lyons, a spokesman for the criminal justice agency that operates the 143,000-bed adult prison system and oversees those Geo contracts, said the answer is that in addition to on-site monitors, her agency also uses independent monitors that do nothing but double-inspect contract lockups run by Geo and other vendors.

"We are confident that the issues found in that June 2006 inspection have been corrected," she said. "Eleven unannounced visits have been made to that facility in 12 months since then, and they have not turned up again."

Geo officials had no comment Thursday.

mward@statesman.com; 445-1712