Texas’ juvenile prison system is nearing total collapse.
Its five lockups are dangerously understaffed, an ongoing problem that worsened dramatically last year when its turnover rate for detention officers hit more than 70%. The state has desperately tried to recruit employees, but most new hires are gone within six months.
Teachers and caseworkers routinely work in security roles so the prisons’ nearly 600 youth can get out of their cells to go to the bathroom or take showers. Still, children have reported being left to use water bottles as makeshift toilets.
On weekends, youth are often locked alone in cramped cells with only a mounted bookshelf and a thin mattress on a concrete block for up to 23 hours a day.
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And more and more, children are hurting themselves — sometimes severely — out of distress or as a way to get attention in their isolation. Nearly half of those locked in the state’s juvenile prisons this year have been on suicide watch.
The emergency is the predictable result of a state agency that has been entrenched in crisis for more than a decade. The Texas Juvenile Justice Department is under federal investigation for an alleged pattern of mistreatment and abuse, and it has gone through several iterations of major and moderate reform following scandals marked by sexual abuse and violence, including a full restructuring in 2011.
But the agency has never escaped its problem of chronic understaffing, exacerbating systemic failures and spurring a vicious cycle of worsening conditions for imprisoned children, as well as more difficult work and longer hours for the staff that remains. The agency consistently loses detention officers at a faster rate than any other position in Texas government, outpacing other hard-to-fill jobs like adult prison officers and caseworkers for Child Protective Services.
The staffing crisis only worsened following the pandemic and the subsequent wave of resignations throughout the country. And although agency leaders believe the flood of departures has eased, they are left clinging to startlingly few workers. In June, less than half of the agency’s officer positions were filled by active employees.
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But while the governor and lawmakers have denounced agency failures, replaced leadership and demanded change after abuse reports in recent years, their outcries are not typically reflected in the budget.
Unlike adult prisons and Child Protective Services, TJJD was not spared from a 5% budget cut ordered by state leaders at the beginning of the pandemic. As a result, the agency said it temporarily eliminated prevention and intervention services that juvenile justice experts say are the best way to keep children out of the criminal justice system.
The Legislature last year also rejected agency requests to, among other things, fund more services for detained children in suicidal crises or with other emergency mental health needs. And four times during the pandemic, Gov. Greg Abbott and the Legislature have taken away money the agency received in federal coronavirus relief funds to spend on other state expenses, including Abbott's ever-expanding, multibillion-dollar border security mission.
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