Historical Tidbits
by DONN BROOKS
Juvenile justice in Texas is in rotten condition. Texas has finally awakened and reopened the Mart confinement facility that has bars and protects inmates from violence from one another.
I worked with junior high and high school students for more than 40 years. I do not recall a single student who was sent to what we euphemistically call reform school. I have known lots of kids who got in trouble with the law. I have known many who were on juvenile probation. But in the last 40 years I do not think I can remember one of them sent to the reformatory.
That means that society makes many efforts to keep students out of long-term incarceration. It also means that those who are locked up represent the worst of the worst. Can they be rehabilitated? I would suppose so, but the odds are not good. These are tough customers.
We lock people up as punishment, not for punishment. What has happened, due to draconian budget cuts, is that inmates in these juvenile lock-ups are subjected to a horrible scenario incorporating fear and abuse of the worst kind. Society has no right to lock somebody up only to have them picked on by other prisoners. If society locks these kids up, it must protect them.
The closing of facilities and reduction of staff has not been done without a price – an increase in violence against both inmates and staff.
When federal district judge William Wayne Justice ordered the closing of the Gatesville State School, he blew it. He let sociology trump law; he shut down a facility that was designed to give inmates a measure of security. Now we have open dormitories that cannot be managed.
Rehabilitation is important, but it cannot – it must not – trump security. I have had several acquaintances who worked within the Texan prison system. These people, universally, explained that they were to have no personal dealings, and that includes conversations, with prisoners. The logic was that prisoners were continually looking for “chinks in the armor,” and that friendliness was taken as a sign of weakness and an invitation to exploitation.
I have sympathy for these poor kids who cannot cope with society. But a society that believes we can warehouse these children where they become victims and predators with no responsibility beyond keeping them away from us is irresponsible.
Everything I have learned about corrections suggests that prisoners spend all their time looking for a way to vex the system and when they can do so they achieve a sense of satisfaction. Most people love kids and see them as aggravating at times, frustrating frequently and altogether alarming, but it is hard to see them as totally hard and calculating with no regard for society. That said, those people exist and they are dangerous. Nobody who is locked up by society should be victimized by one of these misguided unfortunates.
That’s right, nobody.
