Legislators demand juvenile justice reforms

‘It’s still broken and out of control’ after hundreds of millions are spent

AUSTIN — A decade after Texas reformed its programs for juvenile offenders, state lawmakers are poised to do it all over again.

The state’s juvenile justice system is failing, some lawmakers say. Facilities still are plagued by reports of assaults and bullying. And too many kids who are released fall back into trouble as spending per teenage offender is spiraling upward.

“After all the hundreds of millions of dollars we’ve spent since 2007, it’s still broken and out of control,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, an architect of many of the previous reforms and a member of the Senate Finance Committee that is now considering reforming the reforms.

Several legislative leaders are exploring restructuring the Texas Department of Juvenile Justice to improve conditions and programs within the five state-run lockups.

The juvenile justice department has about 1,000 kids in its care, more than half of them 17- or 18-yearolds who have committed serious crimes. Lawmakers say the agency should be getting more from its $650 million budget and annual spending per youth

of $161,000.

Juvenile justice officials counter that they are making progress to improve care and results, emphasizing recidivism rates and assaults within the agency’s lockups have decreased in recent years. Further, they say, new treatment options are leading to broader rehabilitation for a challenging population of teenage lawbreakers.

“We’ve had a number of really positive outcomes and successes,” said Jim Hurley, the agency’s communications director.

Ten years ago, a sex-abuse and cover-up scandal sparked top-to-bottom reforms of Texas’ juvenile-justice system, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding touted as a fix-all by state leaders. Every two years since, lawmakers have tweaked those reforms to address gang violence and disturbances in the state-run lockups that have forced cancellation of school programs and caused one of the highest turnover rates among employees at any state agency.

“The agency has done a lot to improve the system, and while they have a whole lot of challenges ahead of them, it would be completely counterproductive to solve those problems by starting over,” said Michele Deitch, a University of Texas juvenile justice expert who has been involved in reform policy issues for years. “The Legislature needs to invest in the best practices, not look at ways to cut funding to programs. That will turn the institutions into warehouses.”

Looking to cut costs

Whitmire and other members of a special budget work group created last week to consider changes to the system said they are looking at limits on how many youths can be housed at each state lockup. Capping the population would help curb violence, allow staff to assert better control and could reduce the costs of incarcerating youths for taxpayers, they said.

At $161,000 a year, it now costs more than seven times as much to house a juvenile offender than an adult prison inmate, according to Legislative Budget Board figures.

Whitmire, the veteran chair of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, also wants to cut the size of the agency’s central office staff, which he said is too large for the size of the agency.

The debate on the possible changes could thwart a push by criminal justice advocates to raise the age of adulthood in Texas from 17 to 18, lawmakers suggest. Though most of those 17-year-old are now in probation programs, such a change would move those that end up in a specialized adult prison, where assaults and recidivism are low, to the youth lockups where Whitmire and others say those rates are much higher.

Members of the Senate working group said this latest review of juvenile justice is intended to better focus taxpayer dollars on programs that get the best results for incarcerated Texans. Senators said Tuesday their intent is to put any savings back into specialized treatment initiatives.

For several years, other advocacy and parent groups repeatedly have complained that state youth lockups need to provide better security, closer supervision of youths and better treatment and school programs to combat the influences of gangs, bullying and aggressive behavior that plague several sites.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, said enough questions were raised during an initial hearing on juvenile justice spending to warrant a deeper look at more significant changes to correct issues.

She said the work group is to “develop recommendations to make sure we are making the best use of funds and achieving good outcomes. She said the members “are to look at everything,” and will make recommendations in the coming weeks as part of the budget-writing process.

Half of lockups closed

At present, the state houses just over 1,000 youths in five youth lockups in Gainesville, Brownwood, Giddings, Edinburg and Mart, near Waco, far fewer than the 5,000 that were in state lockups in 2007. More than half of those lockups have been closed.

State statistics show while the recidivism rate of the youths who go back behind bars within five years has dropped from 45 to 41 percent, problems with the growing population of violence-prone offenders continue, a significant change from years past when youths served time for misdemeanors and property crimes.

Those youths now are sent to community-based programs operated by local probation departments, where the recidivism rate has dropped from 29 to 22 percent in five years.

Agency officials attribute the high cost-per-youth to an employee pay hike approved by the Legislature and to high staffing levels and the downsizing of the number of lockups mandated by lawmakers several years ago. Instead of operating more than a dozen lockups in 2007, the state now has five.

Lawmakers in the House have indicated they want to study many of the same issues to see if workable improvements to the system can be incorporated into legislation this spring.

“From where I sit, the problems we’re looking at now are the same ones we had two years ago and two years before that,” said Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, a member of the work group.

“The real issue with juvenile justice is that either we pay now or we pay later. Do we do more for prevention and intervention to keep these kids from ever coming into the system, or do we continue to spend on money after they get in trouble? We know what causes the problems — single head of households, dropping out of school, things like that — and those are the issues we really need to address. But that’s going to require additional money.”