Arrests made in lockup scandal
Juvenile justice workers charged on tail of ouster
It’s been a rough month for the state’s scandalplagued juvenile lockups.
The string of shake-ups at the top. The flurry of concern over moving kids to adult prison. The cloud of concern from the sex abuse scandal.
And on Thursday, the Texas Department of Public Safety announced the arrest of four current and former juvenile justice employees accused of tampering with records and using excessive force in handling jailed teens.
The arrests came amid a governor-ordered probe by the Texas Rangers, touched off by last year’s revelations about alleged sexual relationships between employees and youth at the Gainesville State School.
Following more than a month of investigation, 56-year-old Derrick Goodman and 41-year-old Shannon Hoaglen were both arrested at the Gainesville facility where they were still employed. They’ve since been booked into the Cooke County jail.
Meanwhile, former employee Derrick Day, 39, was picked up elsewhere in Gainesville and 31-yearold Morsello Hooker was taken into custody in Brownwood. A fifth suspect is still at large and may have fled the state, officials said.
“We are grateful for the valuable assistance of the Texas Rangers in the joint effort to bring these people to justice,” juvenile justice Executive Director Camille Cain said in a statement Thursday. “There is no room among us for those who dishonor themselves and violate the public trust. These arrests improve the safety of the youth we serve.”
The charges came just a
day after the surprise replacement of the independent watchdog who some reformers credited with exposing the sex abuse in the first place. After seven years on the job, chief ombudsman Debbie Unruh was ousted this week and, in her place, Gov. Greg Abbott appointed retired Texas Ranger J.D. Robertson to handle oversight of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department.
Role of ombudsman
The move brought mixed reactions from juvenile justice advocates.
“I think that this new appointment is going to present him with a challenge,” said Lindsey Linder, a policy attorney with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition. “The independent ombudsman to me is not so much a law enforcement position as it is a service provider position.”
Michele Deitch, an attorney and criminal justice consultant who teaches at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, echoed her concerns.
“I worry that this may reflect a misunderstanding about what the ombudsman is supposed to be,” she said, noting that the role was never intended to be investigative and was instead created to provide oversight and monitor conditions in the wake of previous TJJD scandals.
But some expressed optimism about working with the new appointee from Hays County, who is a former special ops commander with experience in special weapons and tactics, bomb squad, reconnaissance, crisis negotiations and border security.
“We look forward to getting to know the new ombudsman and talking with him,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of Texas Appleseed. “I hope to have the same kind of working relationship we had with Debbie Unruh.”
Retaliation concerns
Others — in some cases, poetically — voiced concerns about the optics of Unruh’s removal.
“There was an Ombudsman named Unruh, Who reported on bad things that staff do,” Scott Henson of the non-profit Just Liberty wrote online. “Newspapers reported. Her data exported. And so Debbie Unruh is now through.”
Linder offered a more sober take.
“This is a really sad day for youth in Texas,” she said. “This certainly feels like retaliation. It looks like she was punished for doing her job too well and effectively reporting on the issues going on in TJJD.”
A few hours after news of the replacement made the rounds online, Gov. Greg Abbott took to Twitter to address the changes.
“If there’s a problem at a state agency I’m going to clean house & shake things up like I have by appointing a Texas Ranger to help fix things at the Juvenile Justice Department,” he wrote in response to the Chronicle’s coverage. Robertson will finish out the term set to expire in February 2019.
Other changes
Just two days earlier, Abbott announced the appointment of a new juvenile justice board chair, Wes Ritchey, who’s taking over for Scott Fisher.
And earlier this month, Cain took the reins as the agency’s new executive director following the retirement of former leader David Reilly. Though she came in without any apparent background working directly with incarcerated youth, state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said he had “confidence in her.”