They climbed the walls, threw food, joined gangs and beat each other up. Some said they were sexually victimized, and others refused to leave their cells out of fear.

At one lockup, teens challenged visiting officials to a fight. At another, a suicidal boy tried to hang himself twice in roughly an hour before the guards paid close enough attention.

Seven months after efforts to close “out-of-control” youth prisons failed in the last legislative session, the five Texas Juvenile Justice Department lockups are still in disarray, and state oversight reports indicate few signs of improvement. The problems range from basic supervision issues — such as failing to intervene when one teen tattooed a penis on another’s forehead — to maintenance problems, such as power outages and a leaking natural gas pipeline. But records obtained by the Houston Chronicle show guards sometimes add to the chaos, threatening teens, choking them and in at least two cases allegedly sexually assaulting them.

“The startling thing is that it’s been this way for the last 12 years,” said Deborah Fowler, executive director of Texas Appleseed, an Austin-based justice advocacy nonprofit. “I’m frustrated imagining another generation of lost kids, and I don’t understand when is going to be enough.”

State Sen. John Whitmire, the Houston Democrat who chairs the Criminal Justice Committee, was similarly exasperated and suggested a receivership take over the troubled agency.

“The place is a jungle,” he said. “I would be scared to death to be a youth in the juvenile justice system here.”

Problems at Gainesville

The scandal-plagued Gainesville State School in North Texas has been one of the most troubled youth lockups in the state. Dallas Morning News reporting in 2017 helped shed light on a sex abuse scandal, which sparked a probe by the Texas Rangers and multiple arrests.

Last year, the facility weathered a six-day mass disturbance stemming from gang tensions, and teens escaped from their cells, planned “hits” on guards, hid in trees and assaulted each other. Four top officials at the unit were fired, the equine therapy program shut down and more than two dozen teens were arrested. During the 2019 legislative session, one lawmaker floated a budget amendment to close the facility, while another suggested consolidating all of the state’s secure juvenile lockups.

But both those measures failed, and instead officials have drastically reduced the facility’s population, from 201 in fall 2018 to 109 two months ago.

Still, the facility is troubled. During an October site visit by workers with the Office of the Independent Ombudsman, a group of teens bullied the oversight officials, blocking the door while raising their voices and declaring, “Nobody’s leaving here.”’

In a written response to the ombudsman’s report of the incident, agency officials minimized the outburst, which they said lasted just over 30 seconds.

“The youth did not appear to be aggressive,” officials wrote. “The staff were able to keep physical safety on the dorm during this incident, and intervened to redirect the youth and allow staff to exit the dorm.”

In other site visits this year, officials spotted gang-related photos in some kids’ cells and heard from others who did not want to leave their rooms for fear they’d be assaulted. They discovered teens had been removing bricks from cell walls and found guards were leaving spotty documentation as to kids’ whereabouts and progress.

But there’s been some improvement; with fewer kids, the facility is more adequately staffed and reports fewer gang incidents and uses of pepper spray per month than the same time last year. Now, though, some of the other facilities are seeing an uptick in disruptions.

Spreading concerns

Though it is less remote than some of the state’s other lockups, the McLennan County State Correctional Facility outside Waco is suffering the staffing problems familiar to rural prisons. In September, guards told officials they were often forced to work 12-hour days and had trouble finding relief to take bathroom breaks.

“Through interviews with staff it appeared staff morale is low,” ombudsman representatives observed. “Many staff state they are just trying to ‘survive’ their shift.”

The facility has been dealing with maintenance issues — including leaks and hot water outages — and is still grappling with violence, gang tensions and ongoing contraband problems.

Earlier this year, three youth were caught on camera brutally beating a fellow inmate for nearly 20 minutes, and in September, teens told oversight officials about their involvement in the 59 Piru and Southside gangs. Some kids reported that within a week of arriving at the facility, they’d been approached by gang members and ordered to carry out multiple “hits” or be assaulted themselves.

The agency said in a written response that they were taking gang issues “very seriously” and that they were relying on daily room checks to combat contraband.

But despite those efforts, one teen managed to gets his hands on the tools needed to tattoo another youth’s forehead, after telling the boy he would ink a Latin King crown on him. The agency is having the tattoo removed, officials confirmed.

More prisoners, more problems

While oversight officials in recent months also flagged issues at the facilities in Giddings and Brownwood, it was the problems at Evins Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburg that sparked the most questions.

It was there that one child tried to kill himself twice in roughly an hour, records show. On Aug. 13, staff failed to check on one teen for just over 21 minutes, and when another child alerted them to a possible problem, officers realized they couldn’t get into the cell because they didn’t have a key. When they finally got in, they found the boy unresponsive with a ligature around his neck.

After they cut him down, the youth went to the infirmary and was sent back to his dorm — where officers found him wrapping a shirt around his neck 15 minutes later. At that point, he was put on one-to-one observation.

“Why would youth that just made a serious attempt at suicide be placed back in his room ... with items that he could use to try to hurt himself again?” oversight officials wrote.

TJJD downplayed the incident.

“The internal agency review has concluded this incident was not as close of a call as the OIO is reporting,” it said, alleging the teen never lost consciousness and noting that the staff who failed to do room checks had been “appropriately disciplined.”

Reports show other evidence the facility has been struggling with supervision, as demonstrated by a seven-fold increase in the use of pepper spray, a five-fold increase in the youth-on-staff assaults and a 10-fold increase in gang-related incidents reported in July 2018 versus July 2019. TJJD chalked the increase up to a sizable uptick in the facility’s population, noting that the rate of such outbursts hasn’t increased when controlling for the number of kids there.

Staffing issues

The staff poses its share of problems as well. A 22-year-old guard in McLennan County was arrested in October after he allegedly had a teen boy perform oral sex on him.

Two months earlier, Daniel Holmes was fired and arrested in August for allegedly having sex with a teen girl who’d been locked up at the Ron Jackson facility near Abilene. A few weeks ago, records show he was also charged with possessing child pornography.

And earlier this month, a U.S. Department of Justice report found that 10 percent of youth in Texas lockups said they’d been sexually victimized.

Records also show that over the past two years, dozens of juvenile prison workers have been fired for violations that include failing drug tests, choking teenage inmates, falling asleep and letting kids fight without bothering to intervene.

A guard at Giddings taunted one youth and called his mother names and then “side slammed him to the ground while his arms were restrained behind his back and laid on top of him,” according to records the Chronicle obtained.

Two months earlier, at the same facility, when a teen came in the office asking for a ball, a different guard said she would “kick his ass,” adding, “It’s not a threat, it’s a promise.” In other instances, she threatened to break kids’ arms and hands and gave one youth permission to knock another out.

‘The model is flawed’

To advocates, the ongoing problems are a source of disappointment and evidence that it’s time for a different approach.

“Each time a new administrator says they’re going to turn around those facilities,” Fowler said, “they can’t because the model is flawed.”

State Rep. Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat and attorney who practices in juvenile courts, pushed for more services and interventions to keep children out of state facilities in the first place.

“Just sending kids away is not a solution,” he said. “I really want for Texas to have a system of dealing with juveniles where we don’t make them worse, and so far TJJD seems to be a system where we send kids to basically learn how to be better criminals.”

Whitmire, meanwhile, worried that the ongoing chaos would escalate and said that the system is so unsafe some judges are refusing to send kids there.

“It’s the worst agency in the state,” he said. “It’s not just one campus, it’s all of the remaining campuses — and it needs nothing short of a receivership to put someone in charge.”

Agency spokesman Brian Sweany offered a more optimistic take, noting that 6 percent fewer kids were referred to juvenile prisons this year than in 2018 and touting the Legislature’s decision to fund additional resources for local probation departments as “one of our big wins” this year. Those moves together, he said, can help make the facilities less dangerous and keep kids out of the state system.

“We know that smaller secure facilities are safer and easier to manage, which puts the focus on treatment and recovery and allow us to make sure the kids are getting what they need when they need it,” he said.

keri.blakinger@chron.com

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