Part Two: The Child Prisons of Texas

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's fucked my home state? Yea, this is Behind the
Bastards podcast Bad People tell you all about him. We
have an opening schema that I used in the last
episode that dates back several years, where I would I
would essentially say, what's xing my wise. It started with

(00:25):
generic introduction, you know, what's cracking my peppers and stuff?
And now it's become completely atomized from its origins and
probably makes no sense to people who are just like
hopping into an episode, But that's how we introduce you sometimes.
So hello, it's quite a joy, man. I'm not gonna lie.
And we don't usually introduce ourselves, and sometimes we forget
to introduce our guests. Yep, our guest who is of

(00:47):
course Prop. I will not be saying your your your
government name. Appreciate that. It's all yeah, yeah, um Prop.
How do you feel about Texas? How truthful do you
want me to answer this? It's fine, it's fine. I
can't stay in this place. Yeah, I couldn't, like you know, now,

(01:11):
there's things about it that are nice. Yeah. Now, as
a caveat, there are plenty of lovely people that I
adore that live in Texas, one of which is my grandmother,
you know, was from Sulfur Springs and moved to Dallas,
and my father was born into big d you know
what I'm saying, And like, so I got some I

(01:32):
got some some roots out there. That being said, I
don't know nobody in my family that still lives there
because pretty much strange from that side of the family.
That being said, the ones that were from Texas that
I do know, all came to California in the sixties.
So in my mind that Californians. So I moved from
Texas to California. It was one of the best decisions

(01:53):
I ever made my family, just like my great grandma. Yeah,
let's see, there's a thing that you get. I mean,
I say, it's about half of the people that I
love in the world still live in Texas. There's wonderful
things about it. There's still only Texas has but like
there is a feeling a lot of people get living
in Texas that more or less I would sum up

(02:15):
as I gotta get the funk out of here, out
of this place. One of my d j's from San
Angelo that I worked with, the same thing. He was
just like, I'm a Texan, but I cannot wait to leave. Yeah,
and it is indelibly printed on my soul. There's all
sorts of things about me that are very deeply Texan.
But like, well, I just at a point where I

(02:35):
was like I'm going, yeah, I gotta get out of here.
And yeah, David, Um, I like I like a lot
of West Texas. Um, had some real good times in
Hill Country. Um. There's kinds of freedom that you can
have in Texas. If you're a white person, I should
I should stay. Yeah. If you are a white person, yeah,

(02:59):
um that you you don't often find other parts of
this country, even as a white person. There's like things
that you can get up to in Texas that are
absolutely nuts. Um. But it comes with a couple of caveats,
one of them being the fact that Texas has probably
the most nightmarish juvenile justice system in the entire United States, which,
as we have discussed a number of times in this podcast,

(03:20):
including earlier this week, has a pretty shitty history with
juvenile justice. Texas is unquestionably the worst. Like the state
that is the has the worst history with juvenile justice,
and that's Texas is winning in a contest that includes
fucking Florida. It's crazy like, do you know how much
Florida hates kids? Yes, Florida really really hates keys Texas.

(03:44):
Oh boy, Yeah, that's what we're about to talk about today.
Um So, in our last episode, I opened by giving
a history of the term super predator, and while that
specific term was the creation of a single man, he
was simply the latest in a line of men who
have spent generations building and reinforcing an area if that
some children are inherently dangerous and must be policed brutally
for the safety of all. William S. Bush is a

(04:08):
PhD u S History professor from the University of Texas
at Austin. And he's a good guy. I introduced him
after you're talking about the super predator thing. No, he's
he's he's a he knows his ship. He wrote a
book that is one of the major sources for this episode,
with one of the most chilling titles for a book
I've ever heard. It's called Who Gets a Childhood? And
it is about the criminal justice system in Texas. Yeah. Yeah,

(04:33):
it's It's interesting, dude, because it's like one of the
things among like black activism is the idea that like
black and brown children are forced to be adults in
the eyes of the law, way before we're ready to
be it. So, yeah, okay, this is crazy and bull
boy he does focus a lot of it is about
racism in the Texas criminal justice juvenile justice system. It's

(04:55):
a good book. I recommend it. It's very readable. It
is kind of an academic text, but it's a very
readable one. Um now, Bush and it, folks, this is
a book about Texas specific. Bush notes that historians of
childhood claim that the or tend to agree that the
concept of of what they call protected childhood started in
the United States around the eighteen twenties. Obviously, this is

(05:17):
the thing happening in different parts of the world in
different ways. But like we now see childoo was like,
you have to not just that, Like you have to
protect children, which is the thing people have always done,
but you have to protect children from certain things like
understanding and interacting in the world the same way in
adult That's right, kids don't work, they shouldn't. We most
people agree on that now, like like kids should not
recent labor like adults labor. Kids should not be subject

(05:40):
to some of the realities that adults are subject to.
These are we can always debate some of this stuff,
like particularly hiding certain realities of the world from kids,
but these are things society broadly agrees upon. Now, this
is what a protected childhood is, right, the idea that
you protect kids from some of the things that adults
have to deal with. And no, the movement towards this
concept for protected childhood in the United States, and again

(06:02):
we're talking in the U s. Here, it happens other
places different ways. There's a lot of academics here. Please,
I'm not trying to this is this is a broad overview.
This movement starts with the free school and Sunday school
social movements, which again kind of the eighteen twenties come down.
As we've talked about actually in a couple of recent episodes.
These all start in like the Northeast and kind of
spread to the rest of the country. These ideas that

(06:23):
like school should be free, every kid should get an
education and it shouldn't cost them anything. And also the
idea that like Sunday school is a is a thing,
which is you know, tied to religion, but also also
tied to this idea that like this very new idea
that like education is a thing that every kid deserves.
So people died all the time back then for basically
no reason, which also meant that like in this period,

(06:44):
there's a ton of orphans, you know. Um, And so
when people started this kind of long process of giving
a ship about childhood's for children, um, it leads to
a bunch of facilities getting opened, not just to deal
with orphaned kids, but to deal with like kids were
delinquent kids who have various kind of behavioral issues. They
all kind of get shoved into the same place. These

(07:05):
these are generally called houses of refuge. And it's a
mix because obviously they are saying like well, if you're
homeless or or if you're a kid committing petty crimes,
you belong in the same place, which is not great, um,
but also it is it is good, and that it's
kind of as a society people being like, well, even
though they're not my kid, I as a member of

(07:25):
society have some responsibility towards And that's just a fun
this facility, which is not a bad development. Again, it's problematic,
but yeah, but it's a communal understanding that like the
children are ours, yeah, not just yours, they're ours, and
like we and if we want to like live in
a community that we enjoy, Like I should invest in

(07:48):
your the other things around me, you know what I'm saying.
I think often when we talk about movements like this,
it is easy to focus on like the horrible negatives
which we'll be talking about. Everything today we're gonna talking
about comes from this. But it's not one thing or
the other entirely it is. There's a lot that's sucked
up about this. It also is coming from this place
of like, oh, there's all these children on the streets
and like maybe we have a responsibility to them some

(08:12):
money here too. Wait, You'm I mad? Yeah, what what
are you doing? People? What you're doing on the quarter
three years old? Yeah? Yeah, I would even say this man,
Like even just going through as a parent, like I'm saying,
as like a now a parent is like even when
going through just the history of the decisions other parents

(08:36):
or societies have made for their kids that obviously that
weren't preposterous, but ones that are like the reality is
like there's no this a whole last human and you're like,
there's nothing more terrifying than the idea of like their
life is in my hands and I don't know what

(08:57):
the funk I'm doing? Like that that existential dread. I
feel like, if you're going to be a good parent,
you have felt that fear where you're like, I don't
know what I'm doing, YO saying, You're like, where do
what do I I can't I don't know what I'm
I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to

(09:18):
fund this kid up. You know what I'm saying. And
you know, you're like, well, I'm fucked up, you know
what I'm saying, Like, I mean, I don't know. I
just I think, like I think you're like, I don't
know what I'm doing, but at least I know you
should live on a damn streets man, Like there needs
to be some sort of adult in your life, right,
like you know, I mean, yeah, yeah, and that that

(09:40):
that's kind of happening on a really broad scale here,
and a lot of it's made possible because of industrialization.
Both there's a lot more people from industrialization kind of
all the sources and so like these facilities kind of
grow in size and pop up, start popping up all
over the United States throughout like kind of the mid
to late eighteen hundreds. Now at the same time, all
this is happening, and part of why it's happening is

(10:01):
that the US is creating its middle class um and
in fact the very concept of a middle class. Parents
start having fewer kids and devoting a lot more time
and attention to the development of the kids that they
do have, and the idea starts to spread as a
result of all this that children not not don't don't
just deserve maybe to be house but deserves to learn
and play um and not to die in coal mines

(10:22):
are like bang drums, Well, don't shoot rifles at each other,
right at Like, maybe you shouldn't be doing some of
the things we're doing with kids. At some point you
said to yourself, you know, my childhood was trash. You know,
I didn't really get to that. Look, I wish I
could have been able to you know what when I
have it's I'm gonna let him play outside. You don't
need to go to no coal mine and die. Yeah, yeah,

(10:44):
yeah yeah. And so that that's happening in this period
and the kind of the people who these early advocates
of the concept of a childhood, these early like people
who are are supporting the idea that there should be
restrictions on like what we can make kids do. UM.
They're generally called child savers, and most of them are
middle class moms. UM. And it's from them in this
advocacy in kind of the late eighteen hundreds that we

(11:05):
get stuff like age of consent laws, child labor bands,
and compulsory education. That's all good stuff broadly speaking. UM.
But these positive moves occur along more muddled developments too,
because these women are also responsible. These activists are also
responsible for the concept of youth curfews, the idea that like,
we shouldn't let kids out at night sometimes and they

(11:25):
should be punished if they are out at night, um,
and the juvenile justice system, which is a very mixed bag.
William Bush writes. Many of these reforms were aimed at
extending the protections of childhood to working class and poor children. Moreover,
they sought to broaden the years of protection and semi
dependence on adults upward into the adolescent years, a reflection
of the slowly spreading idea of adolescence itself at the

(11:48):
turn of the twentieth century. One of its leading proponents,
the Clark University psychiatrist and child study movement leader Grandville.
Stanley Hall described the life stage of adolescence famously as
a time of storm and stress, a time of risk taking, rebellion, awkwardness,
and self discovery. Adolescence he and other psychiatrists such as
William Healy proposed uh needed to be treated individually, especially

(12:10):
when they ran a foul of rules, as seemed almost inevitable.
Early juvenile court judges such as Denver's Ben Lindsay helped
popularize the idea of the tough but fatherly juvenile justice official,
for whom understanding his wayward charges was a specialty. Meanwhile,
courts for delinquent girls, headed by matronly figures such as
Mary in Barthelm of Chicago, preoccupied themselves with curbing the

(12:30):
precocious sexuality of working class girls, whose families were often
recent arrivals in American industrial cities. So again, a lot
going on here, you know, still products of your your time,
of its time. But yeah, this is this is kind
of how this starts to look. Um. Yeah, and it's
it's important to note that, like, because we're talking about
how bad the juvenile justice system, the idea that we

(12:52):
should have one came from a really good place, which
is that like kids as adults when they grownups. You
should be in prison with the grown ups. You shouldn't
be judged by the same judges who judged grown ups,
like we should have a separate thing for you, in
part because kids are gonna funk around and like they're
like the finding out part of that shouldn't be as
brutal as it is for adults. Judge Lindsay even complained,

(13:16):
quote this business of punishing infants as if they were adults,
and of maiming young lives by trying to make the
grizzle of their unformed characters carry the weight of our
iron laws and heavy penalties. Um, yes, yeah, yeah, there's
there's some people who are saying really good shit now.
In Texas, juvenile and adult offenders were first separated in

(13:37):
eighteen eighties six after protests from the local women's Christian
Temperance Union, which is right around the same time it
starts happening in a bunch of other places. The next year,
the legislature in Texas passed a bill approving a dedicated
house of correction for children. Gatesville opened in January of
eighteen eighty nine, and it was one of the first
dedicated juvenile attention facilities anywhere in the United States. It

(14:00):
was followed later that year by facilities from in Virginia, Kentucky,
and Alabama. Gatesville opened with eighty six inmates. It was
immediately popular with the locals, who saw rightly that it
would bring a lot of jobs to their town. Local
residents actually raised money so the state can't pay, like
their budget runs short and they can't pay for all
the land they need to buy this facility, and people

(14:22):
who live in the town nearby raise the money to
buy it for the state because they're like, well, this
is going to provide us with jobs forever if we
have a child prison in town. Oh my god, why
is that? Their first thought was like everybody's first thoughts,
like spoilers, that's where this is going for the next century.
That's why I went. What it's like. I thought they're
gonna be like, oh that's cool man, you know, yeah, kids,

(14:44):
I got it. You shouldn't have to go to jail.
There's money in this ship. Wait, we can buy some
money off you hit the lip bro like yeah, yeah,
it's great. Um. So, the boys who were interned in
Gatesville were overwhelmingly city dwellers. And there's this idea at
the time that Texas never gets past that kids who
are juvenile delinquents, most of whom are urban kids, need

(15:06):
to be put in prisons far away from their families,
in isolated rural communities. Um basically, all of these kids
were poor to One survey of early Gatesville inmates found
that a hundred nineteen out of a hundred ninety five
listed their mother's occupation as housekeeper, while the leading descriptions
of their fathers were unknown railroad men, laborers, and farmers. Unknown.

(15:31):
Being up there is to tell you something about what's
gone on. Two thirds of these boys had lost one
of their parents, and slightly less than half of their
parents had criminal records themselves. William Bush goes on to
note that the racial disparity and who went to Gatesville
was pretty blatant. African Americans comprised forty six of the
first forty of the first sixty eight inmates, all of

(15:52):
whom were transferred from the adult prison system. Although Gatesville
admitted inmates regardless of race or ethnicity, it's strictly segregated
every aspect of daily lives, housing, schooling, dining, and religious services.
As a result, by nineteen seventeen, about two hundred and
fifty black inmates crowded into Harris Hall. The Jim Crow
Congregate Dormitory built a house about half that number. By contrast,

(16:13):
when the state opened its first and only training school
for girls before World War Two, it excluded black females altogether.
Black girls charged with committing a crime in this period
may have had their cases heard in local juvenile courts,
but the available remedies were limited to the county jail
or released back into the community. So nothing new. Yeah, yeah,
I mean not exactly news that Texas in nineteen seventeen

(16:37):
was pretty fucking racist. Um, but it's good to have data. Yeah, Like,
I'm still like trying to picture of Juvenile Hall in
the eighteen hundreds. Oh god, right, and I'm just like spiral,
Like it just got me spiraling and thinks, like, I
just don't know how anyone survived the eighteen hundreds. Yeah.

(16:57):
And one of the worst things to think about is
the degree to which maybe it's it wasn't much worse
than it is now, at least in a lot of
these facilities in Texas. Um. But that's a that's something
we can talk about. So the fact that Texas would
go on to lead the nation and juvenile incarceration had
a lot to do with the fact that Texas was
the only southern state to see a net gain in

(17:19):
its black population during the first half of the twentieth century. Right,
That's part of why they're building these facilities is they
have this huge influx of black UM and Hispanic citizens
moving to the state. UM. And so you've got, well,
the Hispanics were already there, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yes,
but but yeah, you do have more like coming in
from Mexico and stuff. And you also have, um, you

(17:40):
have a huge number of poor, non white kids moving
into Texas cities, UM, a lot of whom don't have parents,
UM for a variety of horrible reasons. UM. And this
causes a backlash from white Jim Crow supporting citizens who
don't like seeing all of these kids who are not
white and what they think of as their cities up.
Police do the thing that police do, which is responds

(18:02):
to the demands of middle class white people, and they
start sweeping juke joints, which is generally how the places
they sweep to to arrest black kids are described I
think it's like, you know, it's like a dance halls.
Like that's just like the club was, like the time joint.
Yeah yeah, great music came out of here. Yeah yeah. Um. Now,

(18:24):
the nation's first juvenile court was was established in Chicago,
and the focus of this court was, at least on papers,
supposed to be rehabilitating the kids that got interned in
the system. Texas though, and obviously Chicago like that system,
you know a lot of flaws and a lot of
things that they could be criticized. Could probably do an
episode about that. But it's worth noting that the first
juvenile court in the nation is in Chicago and it's

(18:46):
supposed to be focused on rehabilitation from the start, because
Texas follows soon after. Their juvenile justice system from the
start very openly is not about rehabilitation. They specifically say,
that's not our goal here. We are here to punish kids.
Gatesville became what one activist group described as an instrument

(19:07):
of torture. In nineteen twelve, a new superintendent for the
facility ordered the banning of several forms of corporal punishment
that had started in the late eighteen hundreds, and these
sound somewhat tortury. I'm gonna read a quote from Who
Gets a Childhood if you want. This will give you
some context on what it's like being in a juvenile
prison in Texas in the late eighteen hundreds, and start
with the nineteen hundreds, Adams outlawed pulling toes and which

(19:30):
boys were forced to stand holding their toes with their
hands indefinitely, and bustings, and which boys were made to
stand with their arms held over their heads while a
guard flogged them with a bat. I think that's flogging.
That's just that's not flogging, flogging something soft, right, it's
pretty ugly too, but like, that's just hitting a kid

(19:50):
with a bat. Flogging not flogging, that's just beating a
child with a heavy stick. I was like, the images
egregious and the sentence for which you used to explain
the images egregious because that's not flogging. Now. So in

(20:12):
nine twelve, this new superintendent orders these things banned, and
the guards revolt. Um. They initially express their displeasure by
allowing more than two dozen kids to escape over a
three day period. Right, so they just stopped doing their
jobs kids, put them on the streets. You'll see you know,

(20:33):
um and yeah, they eventually they walk off the job,
just completely strike, which forces the superintendent to recruit local citizens,
most of whom supported the guards, to serve in their place,
and obviously very little gets actually changed because in this
will be a pattern. These trends will continue through the
rest of the story. Oh my god, why someone in
this case, the guy running it like recognizes a problem,

(20:56):
tries to change it, and a mix of the guards
working at the facility and the local citizens say absolutely not,
you ain't improving shit, and nothing gets done. Can you
imagine that you're unionizing and somebody's like, why you are
using unionizing because they won't let us beat the kids
with bats. Yeah, imagine like a couple of like, well,

(21:17):
we're unionizing because we're all going to die from the
black log and we'd like our families to get slightly
more money and maybe have weekends off. Oh, well, we're
unionizing because people keep burning to death in garment fires.
They won't let me hit kids with a bat anymore. Yeah,
you're like, yo, your struggles are the same, solidarity forever.
Who's man is this? Like? Who invited these foods? Who's

(21:39):
written I gotta go It's very funny that right around
the same time, like miners are fighting with machine guns
and rifles for the right to have a life outside
of the job and not be beaten by mine by
the boss's guards, the other guys are striking for the
right to beat kids with bats. Listen. That is the point, essential,

(22:01):
the absolute, the perfect example of yo, whose man's is this? Like? Yo,
who who's man? Who? Who let them in? That's not
We're not the same fan. Yeah. Well, and probably a
bleak story is how many of those other union men
would see this as the same struggle because a lot
of racism struggle. So, you know, not in favor of

(22:28):
flogging children with baseball bats. Let me tell you who
not products and services that support this podcast, unless it's
the Washington State Highway Patrol. Oh no, yeah, the FBI,
or I gotta tell you man that they look the island.
Ain't no game. They're often called the Washington State Highway
Patrol of the food box industry. Listen, I am team,

(22:52):
that's right. Oh we're back, um prop Yeah. Juvenile detention
facilities spread across Texas throughout the first half of the
twentieth century. They came to be known as reform schools
or training schools, even though neither of those things was

(23:12):
ever Yes, we will call it a school school. Hard
knocks this school in the sys that we got some desks. Yeah,
fucking dude walks in with a baseball bat, slams it
on the table. Who's ready to learn calculus? Car the one, Martinez.

(23:37):
It's a kid with a bat, Like, you get this
one wrong and I'm gonna bunt you. Yeah. Yeah. Gatesville
remained the most brutal of the juvenile prisons in Texas.
It was so bad that it had to build a
cemetery on its grounds because so many boys were dying

(23:57):
in custody. Yeah, yeah, when you cemetery, maybe maybe we
got a problem guessing the kids who wind up there,
Like they don't have any parents left alive or something. Right,
maybe they're kids that are total awards of the state
or whatever, and so it doesn't matter what happens to
them in the eyes of the state. You can just
throw them in an unmarked grave. There's One of the

(24:18):
worst cases of this occurred in nineteen one, when a
guard strangled a fifteen year old named Dell Timm's to
death in front of two other boys, so not good
places ninete. Eventually, all the stories of abuse led to
enough outrage that in nineteen forty eight, the state legislature
appointed a special commission to study these schools. So the
State of Texas boy kids are twenty years later could

(24:41):
get strangled to death, right, Like, Yeah, it takes a while,
stuff builds, there's other deaths. There's a lot of a
lot of complaints. But eventually the State of Texas is like, well,
it's our duty. We gotta get in there and really
look at these these facilities. Um, one guy dies, you know,
two guys dies. Hey, maybe they were together. Damn guys die.

(25:01):
Maybe we said, cool, we'll have a guy look into it.
Like ten kids getting beaten to death is like, that's
the equivalent of like when you're washing machine floods the
house for the third time and you're like, all right,
I gotta call fucking dude. You probably call somebody, right, yeah.
Um So, The Washington Post reports quote when experts and

(25:22):
reformers visited the facilities, they recommended placing them entirely with
it within, with smaller facilities located near metropolitan areas. In
addition to removing the stigma of prison. Such facilities would
place youths closer to their families and enable the state
to bring in professionals from the fields of childcare, education,
and mental health, a community based division similar to today's

(25:42):
group homes and halfway houses. So that's not that's pretty
good advice given the state of things. That seems like
an improvement, But the legislature rejected this advice absolutely not. Yeah,
what is the most sensible humane like kid should probably
be near their parents and experts and stuff who can help.

(26:03):
Maybe we should get somebody to understands kids around here
that there was riots when they tried to stop the
baseball bat beatings. Of course they're not putting these kids
in a different facility. It's perfect heating the demands of
the politically well connected leaders of the states youth prisons,

(26:24):
who used the specter of black and Mexican American criminality
to insist that young people required imprisonment. Texas instead expanded
its construction of ever more sprawling prison like facilities, sometimes
strategically located in the electoral districts of keyge legislators. Abuse
scandals continued to surface, and television and newspaper reports in
nineteen fifty two, a Houston lawyer filed an appeal on

(26:46):
behalf of a sixteen year old girl who had spent
nearly two hundred days in isolation in the Gainesville State
School after being held down by mail guards and forcibly
sedated with barbiturous Another girl who escaped the same facility
told a reporter for the Austin and Statesman, I'll kill
myself before returning. I'll let you know how it's going
in there. So we've had two attempts to reform things,

(27:08):
first in nineteen twelve and in nineteen to big attempts,
uh so far. They both met with massive protests from
the people who lived in and around and also protests
from lawmakers who know that if you put a child
prison in a town where maybe you don't have a
great electoral ledge, suddenly all the people who get jobs there,
that's your voting base and you can like lock that

(27:29):
ship down. It's like, I can't believe what I'm saying this,
but like, yeah, in Texas defense, they tried at some
point to do some reasonable and it was like, well,
Texas going Texas. There was Texas that stopped anything reasonable
from happening. So I don't know about in the defense
of the individuals who tried to reform fifty people that

(27:52):
flew in. Yeah, those folks were at least on the
right track because oh well, never mind. Yeah. By Night
Seen sixty four, things were bad enough that a mix
of parents and former Gatesville employees wrote a letter to
President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Governor of Texas UM.
They described the kind of abuse we've discussed already in
this episode at length and compared the training school to quote,

(28:15):
a concentration camp, um and man. Statistically, at least one
or two of those people had to who have known
what a concentration right. Some of them were World War
two vets or something like we're talking about. Yeah, Yeah,
there was somebody in there who was like, I've seen
a fucking concentration camp on. This place doesn't look good.
I was there, bro, I was there. So this leads

(28:35):
to the biggest flurry of investigations yet. The FBI and
the Texas Rangers both launched investigations into these facilities, Gatesville
in particular, but also the juvenile justice system in like
the juvenile um incarceration system in Texas UM, and also
both Houses of the Texas legislature lawns investigations. You've got
like four big investigations going on, right, one of them federal. Um.

(28:57):
And when the FBI starts investigating stuff like this, for
all of the good triaks we have them, they always
find ship. Right. Yeah, you're gonna the most, the most
detailed documentation of a number of different law enforcement agencies
crimes comes from FBI investigations. Now here's another fun question.
Doesn't ever lead to anything? No, no, no, no. I
was like, no, they find a guy, nothing happens, but

(29:20):
they find him. Um. Like in in Oregon right now,
the Portland Police are currently in contempt of the Justice
Department for repeatedly refusing to reform their use of force
policies and being unconscionably so brutal that these federal criminal
justice system says, you guys can't do this, and currently
they've just said, yes, we can, and we'll see if
anything happens. Yeah it's fine, Yeah, absolutely fine. And of

(29:44):
course in this case, nothing happens. All of these investigations
start um and there's like there's again sweeping reports of abuses,
horrible details about all the bad ship that's happening. The
FBI is like, yeah, bad shit's happening. Texas Rangers are like, yeah,
bad ship's happening. Both Houses of Legislature and Tech they
are like, yeah, bad ships happening. Um, No, very little
reforms happen. Attempts to make serious reforms are shut down

(30:07):
at every past by again local and state elected leaders
who had training schools in their districts and didn't want
to lose money. By nineteen seventy four, the reform movement
was desperate enough that a bunch of former inmates, parents
and activists launched a class action lawsuit in federal court.
This case, Morales v. Termine, brought another wave of psychologists,
social workers, and prison consultants to not just Gatesville, but

(30:30):
other juvenile detention facilities. Now, the guy who winds up
in charge of this big investigation is a dude with
the incredible name Judge William Wayne Justice. Dest have boys
name Judge Justice. That's right, yeah, Judge William Wayne Justice,
incredible Texas judge name. Yeah, he only had one choice

(30:51):
for his career. That's that. You will never convince me
that's not the name of the judge in the best
little horehouse in Texas. Yeah, that's what you call all
that guy like retroactively put a judge in there. Make
that his name, William Wayne Justice. What an incredible name
for a judge to Um. Yeah, it's everything everything is
in that name. Um. So he takes this very seriously.

(31:15):
He tours the Mountaineer School for Boys and he finds
as he does a surprise inspection of this facility that
the children there were like this judge is walking around,
he sees children caked in old blood, like, oh my god,
like just left on their bodies, covered in bruises, and
like whenever he tries to talk to them, they like skirt.
They're terrified just of his presence, like they've been trained

(31:36):
to just react with like unthinking terror to the presence
of an adult. M. Howard Omart was also there. He
was an expert. He was from the LBJ administration. He
was an expert LBJ sent along Uh to like look
at things while Judge Justice was there. Um and Howard
Omart later said, quote, we have never seen anything quite

(31:57):
as depressing, so deliberately designed to humiliate, to degrade into debase.
It is surely oppression, and its simplest and most direct
form that is the worst man. Yeah. Yeah, designed to humiliate, degrade,
and debase. That's that's lbj's man. And Judge Justice comes
to the same conclusions. Yeah, And I mean it's not
like LBJ is like the greatest dude, but for him

(32:19):
to be like, yo, this is wild. Yeah. I showed
my dick to a secret service agent this morning. But
even I think this is beyond this, totally made on
my own body. Yeah, you have any idea how many
people I've killed? Yeah, I ordered the firebombing of a country. Yeah,
but this isn't right. Yeah, but that's wild dog. Yeah.

(32:45):
So the extensive investigation sports spurred by the Morale v
term In case revealed regular use of isolation in Texas
juvenile criminal justice facilities, um forced psychotropic drugs on children,
and also rare forms of torture. Among other things, investigators
found that children were being punished physically for speaking Spanish.
So called punk dorms had been created for juveniles the

(33:08):
guards decided, we're homosexual. By this point, a state had
overcome its squeamishness and incarcerating women, and in one facility,
guards were found to have forced abortions on pregnant inmates.
Uh yeah, Oh my god. A boy at Gatesville told
a judge about a hazing ritual. Told the judge Judge
Justice about a hazing ritual he'd been forced to undergo,

(33:29):
where a group of boys beat him unconscious while guards watched.
To his credit, Judge Justice, I don't know about the
rest of his career judge in Texas in the seventies,
maybe he got up to some fucked up shit. But
in this case he is as good as his name,
and he issues a sweeping ruling that outlaws all of
the fund up ship found at the facilities and requires medical, psychological,

(33:50):
and educational services to be made available for any children
in a Texas juvenile justice facility or juvenile detention facility.
The entire leadership of the state agent see that oversaw
these facilities was forced to resign. Texas put money into
probation and other preventative measures, and the juvenile inmate population
declined rapidly. So this is this is the first time

(34:11):
to like real ship does have the right thing. This
is a this makes the situation better. Judge Justice gets
credit in this. He's a big part of like why
less kids are in this system. However, as the Washington
Post reports quote the impact of Morales and other important
federal court rulings was blunted by the persistence of structural
racial disparities and renewed fears of violent juvenile crime. And

(34:35):
while the Federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquent Delinquency Prevention Act
of nineteen seventy four provided even more funding for state
and local reforms these kind of like prevention measures and whatnot.
Historian Elizabeth Hinton has noted that it also labeled quote
economically vulnerable youths, most of whom were black or Latino,
as potentially criminal. That's the term used, potentially criminal. Um. Yeah,

(34:57):
while removing white middle class offenders from the formal justice system.
And that's why the juvenile inmate system to clients, right,
it's because they put less white kids there. Like that's
the big which is good, right, It's like, no kid
deserves to be in a lot of it's lesser been there.
But it doesn't fix anything, you know, No, you don't
want nobody in that system, like nobody should be displayed.
The numbers and that is that is the main thing,

(35:20):
is that the criminalization of white and mainly white middle
class because I think some white poor kids still white
up in these places. Yeah. Um, but the criminalization of
like white middle class kids stops to a large degree. Um,
they're good. Yeah yeah, there's boys being boys. It's like
a racist firefighter who only rescues the white kids. And

(35:42):
it's like, well, it's good that less kids died in
the fire, but you shouldn't be a firefighter, like you
pat you on the back for that. I mean, I
guess that kid's happy. Yeah, Like I still feel like
you shouldn't be doing this job. Yeah. Yeah. So in

(36:08):
the late seventies and early eighties, things where though trending
in a better direction. Um. And again the decline in
the prison because it is I should be fair. There
is a reduction in the number of of of black
Gaspanic kids who are sent to these facility that does
go down, Like it's not complete, but it is largely
the number of the kids who don't who stopped going
these facilities are largely white, right, it is largely based

(36:30):
on race. Not to because again I don't want to.
I also don't want to be like completely shipping on
the people who achieved this because it's good. Um yeah.
And the idea that like you can't beat me with
a bat. No, more like the fact that a judge
was like, well drop, a judge did say that it
does not stop, but just say like let me at

(36:52):
least give him that. You. Yeah, know that they do
not get they put less kids in these facilities. No,
they keep beating, they keep right the hell. It was like, no,
we're worried about volume, like quality was different. We want
like a more boutique experience where we really give each
kid the beating they deserve. You know, our guards were

(37:13):
just hitting too many kids. They were losing their passion
for it. You do you did you watch uh, did
you watch the Dave Chappelle Show when it was all oh, yeah, absolutely, okay.
Do you remember the the Gay Clansman. Yes? Yeah, it
was just like words like the clan We're just a
little nicer. Yeah, so we'll just we'll just ask you
to leave, probably back to Africa, like got it. Yeah,

(37:38):
that's kind of what we've done here, um now in
the late yeah, so again, the things are getting a
little bit better in the late seventies and early nineteen eighties,
like there are improvements, but then, like we talked about
in our first episode, that's when crime really starts to
rock it upwards right and all crime, but that it
does include juvenile crime, and the panic over super predators

(37:58):
hits the media. Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety six,
forty states expanded the number of juvenile cases that could
be tried an adult court and given adult punishments, and
no state went harder than Texas. When he ran for
governor in nineteen ninety four, George W. Bush campaigned with
a promise to lock up more children. In nineteen after
he won, the state legislature passed an omnibus Juvenile Justice

(38:22):
Reform Bill, which brought even tougher sentencing for kids accused
of crimes. The state budgeted another two hundred million dollars
for facilities, which was enough to triple their capacity to
incarceraate children. So like Texas is like, we gotta have
at least three times as many kids locked up in
this fucking state. Yeah, that opening my job. It is
worth noting. We forget sometimes because the crimes against humanity

(38:45):
he committed as president were so extreme. He did some
of that while he was governor. To his mix tastes
were pretty crazy, Like y'are only looking at his major
albums oh, his mix tastes were pretty crazy. It's also
remember like how odd this is tied to like crack.
Oh yes, and that's that's too much to tell them. Yes,
that is a and I'm like, let's not let's not

(39:09):
forget how we got crack. So let's just put that
on the side. So like, yeah, it's funny how crime
went up? Well you I mean, well there's well, there's yes.
We like with every evil thing in American history, the
CIA is involved, just not directly in this part of
it though. Yeah. Yeah, and that that is a big
part of like why there's all of this, like terror

(39:31):
over juvenile offenders and a big thing that like Bush
and the Republicans campaign on absolutely. Um So we'll do
we'll talk, We'll do a Crack episode at some point.
We really got to get it with me too. It's yeah, yeah,
it's there's we need to do a whole thing. I
ran conscious scandal like crack in his three Nicaragua everything. Anyway,
that's all the other things I'm saying it right now. Yes,

(39:54):
we'll get a couple of parts in there. Um So
this period um the nineties, kind of the the mid
nineties when Bush gets elected and you've got like this
omnibus Juvenile Justice Reform bill. It's noteworthy in Texas because
it's when they really everyone stops. It has kind of
been trending this way, but they this is when people
really stop calling these places training schools and reform schools,

(40:16):
those terms die. The idea of like trying to hide
what these places are dies because the people who want
more of them just call them youth prisons, and they're
proud of that. They love the idea that they're making
youth prisons like they don't want to hide that ship
because like you get elected for being like, oh, hell yeah,
we're gonna throw a bunch of fucking kids and lock
them up. You think we got youth prisons. Now, when

(40:36):
I'm governor, way more youth prisons. I'm gonna put all
your kids, Wayne, I'm gonna put all eight kids. And
while they tripled their capacity to lock kids up, Texas
also doubled the number of kids they were executing. Now
in the United States, prop from n to two thousand five,
twenty three children were executed. Thirteen of those were in Texas.

(40:58):
Are you serious? Yeah, Texas fucking loves executing children. Oh yeah,
we are Look, the United States has an executing children problem,
but it's also largely a Texas problem. You know that
is that's a lot. There's a bunch of other states.
I don't know if you're aware there's like forty nine

(41:19):
of them. Yeah, I did not know that. In Shock
and Awe, Yeah, we are huge fans of executing children. Um. Yeah,
I can't get enough of it really now. This all
continued swimmingly until February six, two thousand seven, when The
Texas Observer published an article about a horrific sex abuse

(41:40):
scandal and a juvenile correction facility near Odessa in West Texas,
and I'm gonna quote again from Who Gets a Childhood
News reports revealed that the school's assistant superintendent Ray Brookins
and its principal John Paul Hernandez had coerced sexual favors
from several juvenile inmates over a period of at least
two years. Compounding the alleged crime was an inexplicably slow

(42:02):
response from authorities between December two thousand three. In February
two thousand five, staff complaints about Brookens and Hernandez a
suspicious behavior had fallen on deaf ears in the Upper
echelons of the Texas Youth Commission t y C, the
agency charged with administering the state's juvenile facilities. Finally, in
February of two thousand five, Mark Slattery, volunteer math tutor

(42:22):
from nearby Midland, was approached by two students who wanted
to confess something ikey. As Slattery later told a reporter,
I knew it must have been something bad if they
had no word for it. Slattery Is soon discovered that
boys were being led into the administration building each night
for forced encounters with Brookens, who had used his power
to unilaterally lengthen or shortened youth sentences to exact sex

(42:43):
from inmates. He can make you stay longer if you
don't fuck him, and that's what he does. Oh this
just yeah, oh my god. Yeah yeah, it's bad as
bad as it gets right there. Oh man, yeah. Um
shout out though to Mark Slattery. Uh, it is important
to note that like, this guy clearly cares about these kids.

(43:05):
Is volunteering to teach like not getting paid, volunteering to
teach math to incarcerated kids because it's important for them
to learn and they clearly it says a lot about
him that these kids know we can trust mrs. We
can tell him this and he'll he'll do something about it.
By god, he does. Yum, so fucking give this guy something.

(43:25):
The house whatever is a mixed bag this episode where
it's like some dudes are dope, some dudes are like
actual bastard. Yeah, you do have to like this is
an overwhelmingly bleak story. But whenever you get those those
little heroes, you've gotta like acknowledge that ship because most
people clearly didn't do what Mark did. Um. So, uh,

(43:47):
it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And again the Texas
Rangers get involved, and this time they were a little
more effective than they had been last time. Brookens and
Hernandez are charged with a bunch of crimes. Both men
are forced to resign, but the criminal cases against them
grind to a halt in the local county prosecutor's office
and the U. S. Attorney's office in San Antonio refuses

(44:08):
to get involved. What is like again, why do you
like this? Is? This is bad for business. It's bad
for everybody if this becomes a bigger thing that it
needs to be. And this is thankfully where journalists come in,
so obviously this gets out. This is a fun as
everyone's reactions, this is a fucked up story. The Dallas
Morning News is is like, all right, well, let's do

(44:28):
a journalism here, because if if this is happening, there's
probably some other ship that's going on. If there's one,
there's four. Yeah. Yeah. So they carry out a huge
investigation which concludes that the Texas juvenile justice system had
created quote a culture in which prison officials were free
to abuse their power and punish children who tried to
complain about them. So this story goes viral. National news

(44:52):
starts to get on the trail left the Dallas Morning
News covers gets pretty big paper. Um, the big guys,
the really big guys, start to get in there. Follow
Up investigations would eventually find more than two thousand confirmed
allegations of staff on inmate violence between two thousand three
and two thousand six, including more more than sixty cases
of kids with suspicious broken bones. To try and quiet

(45:14):
up outrage, Texas launched an abuse hotline for their child prisons,
which racked up eleven complaints in its first month. So
you know, it gets big. It reveals a bound. The
tip of the iceberg is revealed. Obviously, I'm gonna guess
more than two thousand times staff beat kids in a
three year period in all the Texas prisons, probably a

(45:35):
couple of times. I'm gonna guess more than sixty kids
had broken bones, more than sixty, because you know these
are also kids, their teens. There's a lot of oppositional definance.
I'm sure there's some kids who get bones broken and
don't want to tell anyone because like I don't want
you to know you, I don't want you to know
you hurt me, you know, or I don't want anyone
like you know. And obviously ship gets covered up, it
gets hidden. Um, I'm sure it's a lot higher the

(45:56):
actual umber. They started releasing child prisoners. Tech this did,
and in March of two thousand seven, a Department of
Justice investigation concluded and found that conditions in the Evans E.
V I. N S. Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburgh, Texas
were bad enough that they had violated the constitutional rights
of imprisoned youth to be protected from harm while in

(46:16):
state custody. Evans had an assault rate five times the
national average. Once this news broke, there were more stories
about the horrific conditions in the facility, William Bush writes.
One of the most watched cases was that of Chakwanda Cotton,
a fifteen year old African American girl from the East
Texas town of Paris, who received an indeterminate terminate sentence

(46:37):
an indeterminate sentence up to age twenty one for shoving
a hall monitor in school. Portrayed in the net. Yeah,
she shoves a hall monitor and she gets an open
ended sentence. We can keep you up until you're twenty
one if we want to end sentence. Yeah, this happens
a lot. So because of the way the Texas juvenile
justice system gets a lot of these are for like

(46:59):
up to five years. Again, that's why those that's what
we talked about, Like those people, those are the superintendence
of those facilities, of that facility being like, hey, if
you don't fuck mail, keep you here longer. That's why
they can keep them here longer. They have they get
to decide how long the sentences up to this long
in prison. That's the difference. Okay, now I'm seeing like
difference between California and because I'm like eighteen, you like

(47:24):
it gets your record sealed, like when you're a juvenile. Yeah,
it's I mean it's it's fucked up. Um. I mean
you could get transferred to the like the adult prison,
but like dang for them to be like, no, I'll
keep you to one because hey crazy, So Chakonda Cotton,
this story goes really viral. People are horrified, The national
press covers it. Um. It gets looked at as a

(47:46):
victim as like racially motivated um, and she gets a
release in March two thousand seven. She becomes kind of
a cause celeb for how like racist the Texas juvenile
justice system is. Um. She subsequently described conditions at the
Ron Jack's and State Juvenile Correction Complex in Brownwood, UH,
during an interview in seventeen magazine. Quote. Seeing the barbed

(48:07):
wire fences and guards terrified me. I was given an
orange jumpsuit and socks and taken to my quarters, a
tiny room that had only a bed, a bookshelf, and
a desk. Some of the other inmates had committed serious
crimes like murder. This was wait, you said seventeen magazine. Yeah,
she does an interview for seven seventeen. That's kind of wow,
But yeah, good for seventeen. Yeah, I don't know seventeen

(48:29):
was left some teen Vogue ship right there. Yeah, or
guess Team Vogue is doing some seventeen ship. I don't
know that's really because I'm like seventeen pre dates them.
I remember. I remember seventeen magazine running around the hood
and it was just the stuff that like for the
for the little girls, and like, dang, I didn't know
they was about it like that. What year was this?
Um god, this is like two. It's a little more

(48:52):
recent than Yeah, yeah, the internet kind of. I mean,
they're still body shame and girls, but at least they
doing these articles about girls and HSIT did this so
people start to care again about abuses in Texas state facilities,
whistle blowers come forward. Randall Chance, a former inspector for
the state's juvenile correction facilities, says in an interview that

(49:15):
quote and this is him, Randall Chance, like works for
the state Juvenile Correction agency and he's in he inspects facilities.
He gives an interview where he says, staff are being
paid your tax money to rape your children. Oh my god.
Oh not very scary, straight shot, no chaser, homie, he
cut it very clean for you. That's what's happening. He

(49:38):
describes t y C, the agency he works for, as
a dynasty of corruption that condone condones the mistreatment of
youth and its care. So again, reforms are demanded. The
t y C governing board is overhauled. They throw out
the old guys running it, bringing new ones. A state
investigation is ordered, and as you'd expect, it found a
lot of evidence of individual wrongdoing. The blame was placed

(50:00):
on the culture of the agency, which was described as
having somehow become uniquely toxic. Little discussion focused around the
fact that Texas had been this bad for two thirds
of a century. So again, this keeps. This is what
happens every time when they're when something gets done, it's
we're gonna arrest and charge these individual guys who committed
crimes um and we've got to you know, there's a

(50:22):
problem with the culture. We have to fire these dudes
at the top, and we have to reform the agency
to fix the culture because it's a culture problem. And
I think at this point in the story it should
be clear it's not a culture problem. It's a child
prison problem. This is what happens when you have them.
They keep trying to reform the culture, and the exact

(50:42):
same thing happens over and over again. Reforms are fought
by the people who live there because there's money in there,
and by local politicians because that's where they get voters
and and fucking campaign donations from UM. And the abuse
continues because the kind of people who are going to work,
the kind of jobs that are available at these facilities
in the middle of o or which don't pay well.
Are people who get UM are willing to take a

(51:04):
pay cut to get to hit kids or molest them. Like,
it's not a culture problem. It's a child prison problem
with the god thing staff. Yeah, it's that the culture
of this toxic planet. Yeah, it's the fact that you're
on a toxic planet. It's a culture in that. Like
if you design a gun that can only shoot seven
year olds and the people who buy them, Yeah, there's

(51:26):
a culture problem among the people who buy the guns
that can only shoot seven year olds, Like, but I guess, yeah,
they're probably all very unpleasant people. But that's not really
the problem, is it. It's that we built a gun
to shoot seven year olds. Yes, the issue is is
is not the people buying these are bad, like they are, sure,

(51:47):
but that's really not where the problems started. As both
in situation here, guys, do we need these things? Yeah,
it's not either or I feel like it's a both
end Yeah. Um, but you know who doesn't shoot seven
year olds? Prop unless it's the Washington State would patrol again,
in which case they do. Um, but probably not unless

(52:08):
it's also unless it's then potentially yes, uh we're back.
So if you were an optimistic type, you could be
forgiven for looking at the fallout from the two thousand
seven revelations of horrific abuse in Texas facilities and thinking,

(52:29):
like ship things are headed in the right direction again,
like this might, we might, we might fix a lot
of stuff, and a lot of good stuff does happen.
I should say that Texas closes more than half of
their youth prisons. They gut the juvenile justice system. They
dramatically reduced the number of incarcerated kids, and resources are
diverted from incarcerating kids to programs to try and prevent

(52:50):
youth crime. This is great, Like again, this is a
big deal. But it's a big deal because it removes
kids from the system. Um. Journalists and politicians who demanded
change and brought out this information improve material conditions for
the kids who get released and the kids who don't
go to juvenile prison because that becomes less common. That

(53:11):
is undeniable. But it is not a reform of these facilities,
because if it was a reform, it would mean that
the facilities themselves are getting better, and that's not what happens.
The facilities continue to be a fucking nightmare. There's less
kids in them. Again, that's huge, really big deal, but
for those inside, it's a lot of basically might I

(53:32):
don't have a way of claiming this in any objective
sense because again, our data is always imperfect here, but
like the same problems continue to persist. Yeah, so it's
like the statistics go down because there's just less humans. Yeah,
the reform is we've got to take kids out of
this thing, which might suggest that, like, if we really

(53:52):
wanted to reform it, we would not let any kids
be in these places. Yeah, we can close it forever,
I mean, then would be no kids in it. That
might work, That would be my argument um. And again,
obviously the people who succeed in this, it's not abolition,
but it's a lot less kids in prison. That's great.
But again the facilities stay exactly the same as they've

(54:14):
been for a century. So fast forward ten years, two
thousand seventeen, the Dallas Morning News publishes a blockbuster investigation
into abuses at the Gainesville State School, which, despite its name,
is a child prison. It just happens to have some desks.
Here's how that article opened. Proper. Youths at the Gainesville
State School say staff paid them with drugs and cash
to assault one another. A psychologist at the campus gave

(54:36):
pornography to a boy there to encourage the young man
to masterbait. In front of him, youth attacked a guard
and stole his radio so he couldn't call for help.
By the time he had the help arrived, the officer
had a broken nose and needed four stitches over his eye. So, wow,
West and there, Yeah, it's the wild West in there,
and like the same abuses are happening, And like that
staff paying kids with drugs and cash to assault each other,

(54:58):
that's bounties. It's like there's this whole system where the
guards when kids will like funk with them. Sometimes it's
cases like this where they beat up a guard, but
oftentimes it's just a kid they find annoying. They will
pay other kids with drugs, but like give kids cocaine
and heroin to beat the ship out of kids who
annoy them. That's an endemic problem in this facility. That's unfortunately,

(55:19):
well yeah, rant not not common normal, Yeah yeah, yeah,
it's everywhere. Um, but it's usually not kids. It's usually
not children, is yeah to um. But again Texas doesn't
really see the need to treat them as children. Uh.
Now that article had a lot of really good stuff
in it, very important piece of journalism, um, but it

(55:40):
still contains some of the same problems we've seen over
and over again. Here's one line I found particularly frustrating.
It's a bad culture, said Debbie Unrah, an independent watchdog
charged with ensuring the safety of youths in the Texas
Juvenile Justice Department's custody. It's a dangerous culture. And again
that's true. It's a add culture. The culture of like

(56:01):
guys who were guards and child prisons is bad. Um,
But that's not the central problem. Um. The claim that, like,
it's a problem with the culture at this prison might
hold water if we didn't have a century of documentation
that this happens in every one of these facilities the
state of Texas operates. It's constant, and it's for generations. Um.

(56:22):
The article quoted juvenile justice advocates who once again complained
that part of the problem was locking kids in remote
rural facilities far from home. UM. Which is absolutely absolutely true. Right,
if you are looking at ways to minimize harm, don't
put him so far away where there's no services. Yeah.
And like the um frequency of your family visiting, Yeah,

(56:44):
it's going to be yeah. Yeah. Now that article also
contains more detail about the staff psychologist who gave a
child pornography so that he could watch that child masturbate. Um.
And I'm gonna read a quote about that now. Vincent Rager,
now third one, began working at Gainesville in two thousand fifteen.
His online resume indicates he provided individual psychotherapy to boys

(57:06):
at the school. Rager resigned during the investigation. Officials said
records show he resigned in lieu of vault of involuntary separation,
so he resigns in order to avoid being fired. Reached
my phone earlier this week, Ranger said he resigned because
he wanted to move to California. Ranger now works as
a clinical psychologist treating male prisoners at current Valley State

(57:27):
Prison in Bakersfield, California. Now they're adults. Well they're grown up,
so that's better. Oh my, I might say you should
never get to work as a clinical psychologist, like like
that might that might disqualify you for doing that. Ever,
you should you should not have a license to do

(57:48):
any of this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so again we should
consider perhaps the possibility that like this is not just
a problem with like Texas, it is also an American problem. Right,
he goes right away and gets a job, and fucking California.
You like, are we that hard pressed for people to Yeah,

(58:09):
like we're that hard pressed for like employment. Yeah, these
facilities are in the middle of nowhere. They pay for ship. Um,
it's not enjoyable work. It's not very well respected, respected work.
So like there, I know there are good people doing
that job in in the system, but like a lot
of bad people get that because it's like you're not

(58:29):
getting the very best generally. Yeah, you have to be
mission driven, Yeah, if you're going to stay in the
that work because the work is trash. Yeah, it's it's
like you obviously you get great teachers in these juvenile
facilities sometimes like the guy we already taught, Marked Slattery,
the guy we talked to. I'm saying, like, that's where
I started teaching. I started teaching in juvenile facilities. I

(58:50):
was like, but also, you're gonna get a bunch of
basket cases who this is the gig they could get
because they did something. Yeah, and it's not if it's
easy to not like you're as this whole episode is.
It's easy to not care and still get away with
it because you're just from a teacher perspective, It's just

(59:13):
a couple of packets. It's like continuation school. If anybody
ever been to that, It's like it's packets. You just
felt the packets. And I just make sure you guys
don't hurt each other. And the way that I'm sitting
right now, y'all can't see this listeners, but like my
feet are like leaned up against the wall. I'm leaning
back with the mic and I don't have to care
about I can sit like this for the thirty minutes
of class and just make sure you don't stab each other.

(59:35):
And if you do, all I gotta do is call
the p O and he comes in. Yeah, and then
you'll have then you'll go, you know, to a worse
place potentially. Yeah, basically like don't have to, so you
have to you have to care if you're gonna be
in it. Yeah, and you get in these places special
that isn't all that different. You get this mix of
like the most dedicated, wonderful, caring people, imaginable and every

(01:00:00):
like people who are either just waiting out a clock,
and then a tiny number of people who are sucking
monsters and know that that's where the least lies are
eyes are on them, you know, um, and perhaps more
could be done to make more caring and wonderful people
able to do that job. And few were at least
few were monsters. I'm not gonna say like, look, you're

(01:00:20):
always gonna have some people waiting out the clock, but
you don't have to have the monsters exactly. We can
avoid having we can avoid like, let's set hire few
monsters and as much as you can. Yeah, you know,
because some people get through the cracks, Like, yeah, I
go a lot. I know personal information about that, but
like people get through the cracks. Sure, you know, some

(01:00:43):
lies obviously a monster maybe like that's maybe don't hire Yeah,
maybe maybe I don't hire monsters speaking of monsters that
somebody hired Governor Greg Abbott. Um, there's all these well
this is I mean, he's not the bad guy or
the good guy here. He does the thing that everyone
else does every time something like this happens. There's this
big investigation and all of this press about how bad

(01:01:05):
Texas juvenile justice system is and he fires the person
in charge. Right, how many times does that happen? This
fucking story. Yeah, there's a bunch of talk of reform
and YadA YadA YadA. Uh that nothing significant changes, um,
or at least the changes do not fix all the
problems that we have been talking about all episode. Um.
Here's the New York Times reporting in two thousand nineteen. Quote.

(01:01:27):
In October twenty nineteen, a prison officer who worked at
a juvenile detention facility in central Texas was charged with
sexual assault and accused of forcing a boy in custody
to perform oral sex on him in his cell. The
incident came to light the day after the alleged crime
when the boy tried to kill himself. Two months before that,
at another detention facility in Texas, a corrections officer was
fired after a teenage girl said she was pregnant with

(01:01:48):
his child. He was later charged in connection with that case,
and in May of last year, another prison worker was
arrested on charges that he had carried on a relationship
with the teenager who was on parole. At five state
juvenile detention centers, the day to day conditions are relentlessly
violent and oppressive, with guards often resorting to force. According
to a complaint filed to the Justice Department in two
thousand nineteen, prison staff used force on incarcerated children almost

(01:02:13):
seven thousand times, equivalent to six times per child who
was confined there. Oh my god. Yeah uh, this it
just feels so personal, like, oh my god, dude. Yeah yeah.
So these findings came courtesy if yet another Justice Department investigation.

(01:02:35):
How many of those? Have we seen? This episode? Right?
The DJ investigated who hooray and like like we here
in the date, like this is two thousand nineteen. Yeah,
I know, with COVID and make it that feels like
eight you know, because of COVID. But that's three years ago, guys,

(01:02:56):
yeah yeah yeah. Um. Now that Justice An investigation had
started in two eighteen, when two Texas advocacy groups begged
the federal government to intervene, arguing that Governor Abbott's promised
to personally monitor the juvenile justice system would not be sufficient.
It wasn't, which is why everything I read you you know,
was found UM. And obviously it's good that the Justice

(01:03:19):
Department documented this UM. But at the same time, I
think this is kind of a perfect example of the
actual logic behind a CAB. I think that slogans a
lot less useful politically than it than it ever has been,
but the sentiment behind it applies because these investigators, these
Justice Department people, document this. This is important work. It's
important to document this. It's critical, UM. And I think

(01:03:41):
these I'm sure these people care. I'm sure they see
horrific abuse, they want to stop it. They documented, and
I'm sure they go to bed each night exhausted and sad,
but certain that they're doing work that needs to be done.
But as we've seen over and over again in this story,
all of these investigations are part of how the system
perpetuates itself. Guards rape and beat children, whistleblowers and watchdogs complain,

(01:04:02):
government investigation leads to reform, and then guards keep raping
and beating children. These investigations and the media cycle that
follows them are a necessary part of the cathartic loop
that Texas has been stuck in for more than a
hundred years. This is a part of the loop. This
is how people how it gets perpetuated again and again,
not that like they're they're bad people for investigating this ship,

(01:04:24):
but it also is like that when I say, like,
you know, all whatever whatever are bastards or whatnot in
the system. That's what we mean the system. The system
eliminates the possibility of being good because the system cannot
be reformed. So even if you're working for something that
looks like reform in the system, a lot of what
you're going to be doing is keeping the loop going.

(01:04:46):
And it's not that simple because obviously some of these
investigations are part of why there's a massive reduction in
the number of kids who are in car Sward and
that's huge. Um So it's not I don't want to
be painting it is that simple, but like it does,
it's just doesn't get better. The actual prisons themselves don't
get better. That there are less kids in them, and
that's good, but the things keep happening because we just

(01:05:06):
can't have these places and those things not happen. Yeah,
that's the like the argument about like abolition, it's just
like we just have to start over, like because reforms,
you're just it's just duct tape, and it's not and
it's not stopping, it's not fixing the problem. You'll just
keep adding duct tape and it's and sometimes the duct
tape muffles the sound from inside. Yeah, you know, makes

(01:05:30):
people think that we've fixed it. Yes, and pretty poetic there, Robert,
every now and then. Yeah, Yeah, there's a part of
me that questions the value of continuing to loop through
all of these stories, all of these details of abuse,
all of these statistics, over and over again, every cycle
that this happens. And um, because again, I think the
only real thing to do is empty these facilities out,

(01:05:52):
burn them down, and throw any person who suggests rebuilding
them into the Gulf of Mexico. But that said, I
also don't want to ignore the work that these these
journalists in these Department of Justice people do and in
documenting this because the stories of these victims, these victims
are important. And so to close us out, I'm going
to read one more quote from that article that I
decided from about Christie Dennis. Her son was fifteen when

(01:06:14):
he was sent to the McLennan County State Juvenile Correction
Facility and marked Texas quote. Miss Dennis was horrified when
she called one day in two thousand nineteen and learned
that her son had been beaten and taunted as guards
apparently stood by. Her son was sent to the jail's
doctors on one occasion, she said, and she was later
told that many guards did not intervene because they were
afraid of the youth themselves. Miss Dennis said her son

(01:06:37):
ended up at the center after taking her car without
permission several times and money from her purse. After talking
to the authorities, she was advised that if she wanted
to teach her son a lesson, he needed to go
to a juvenile facility. A decision, Miss Dennis said, a
decisiency ended up regretting. The attacks against her son escalated
to the point where he begged guards to keep him
in solitary confinement. Released in July, months before his seventeenth birthday,

(01:07:01):
he now works at a fast food restaurant and his
earning his g e D with plans to pursue welding.
But he is not the same as he was before
his detention. She said. He has PTSD, he hears a noise,
and he panics. And that's another important when we talk
about the complicity in the system and the degree to
which maybe some of these people documenting these abuses or
even complicit, another person or group of people who are

(01:07:25):
complicit are parents in these communities, parents who turn in
their kids, parents who support these laws, parents who who
support funding these places. UM. I think it's probably fair
to say that of the adults I knew as a child,
UM were to that degree complicit in this system because
they supported keep opening more places. The politicians who supported

(01:07:47):
these places, and they were convinced that it was the
right thing to do. And the result of a lot
of people being convinced that this is the right thing
to do. It's not just the rapists and the murderers
and the pedophiles, UM, or the venal politicians who make
this possible. It's the people who think they're doing the
best thing for society. And the result of everything of

(01:08:07):
both the actions of these horrible rapists and whatnot in
pedophiles and the actions of what I'm sure loving parents
and dedicated employees and the justice part whatnot the result
of all of that is a system that rapes, beats,
and murders children on an industrial scale. That's why I
opened this episode with, like, I am a parent, and

(01:08:27):
the part of me that understands at least can empathize
what it what it feels like to have a child
that you don't know what to do with, Like I
deeply understand that, you know, um, and the part of
you that like the reality that you're still unpacking your

(01:08:50):
own trauma, Like just from just the time of age
of civilization we're in, it was like, like you said,
we were odd enough to where we could get spanked
at school, Like that's that Like we're like, it's not
that long ago that we actually realized that that was barbaric,
you know what I'm saying. So so you're you're you're

(01:09:12):
processing your own upbringing realizing, and then the parts of
you that feels like like even with me, where I'm like, well,
there's a been times that I've been like, well, I
kind of earned that spanking, you know what I'm saying,
Like I probably should have got spank for that, you
know what I'm saying That now I can't. I look
at both my children and I'm like, ain't in a
damn world I would put my hands on my kids,

(01:09:33):
you know what I'm saying, Like it just seems so
like unthinkable like that, I don't. I just don't think
I could. I could never do it, you know what
I'm saying. But when I got married again I'm black,
like black people spank their kids. When I got married
Southern people, they spanked their kids, is so normal. And
then so I'm like that no doubt in my mind,
and my parents loved me like I'm not. I would
never take that for my parents loved me. I have

(01:09:55):
great relationship with my with my mom at least, you
know what I'm saying, but like you know, uh, you know,
and and a better one with my father now. But like, um,
that being said, I'm like the part of me that
understands that you're just like I don't. And I'm from
the city, so I'm just sometimes we'd be like nah,
and how we need to go to jail, you know

(01:10:17):
what I'm saying. And then but then you get there,
which is why I feel like sometimes for me and
my wife, like us who've been advocates who have like
you know, been to the Congress, like stood to our
our front of our our councilmen and been like, you know,
our our senators and been like, this ship got to stop,
you know what I'm saying. They have like done the work,

(01:10:39):
done the therapy for ourselves. We've made enough money to
be able to do therapy for ourselves, to be able
to be like to come to the conclusions that we're
at now, to be like, this ship isn't working, you
know what I'm saying, And having the experience of like
having friends that have been through the system, you know,
ourselves somehow, you know, have in our own interactions with

(01:11:01):
the system to be able to look at our own
children and everybody else's children and be like, listen, this
is not the answer. You know what I'm saying. And
it's not it's it's not doing what you think it's doing.
Sometimes I feel like that's a privilege of mine, even
coming from poverty, coming from the hood, is having a

(01:11:21):
privilege of understanding that, like, yo, the system you think
is gonna rehabilitate your children have has no that was
never in their purview. Joe saying that was never that
was never on the table was rehabilitating them. You know
what I'm saying. Um, so I raised my children in
a different like even tho it's looking at like my

(01:11:42):
own like like friends being like, yeah, we don't spank
our kids and being like friends being like what like yo,
I was like no, like we've you know, saying we
it's a we're in a it's all that say. I'm
stuttering now because I feel so passionate about this to
where it's like the complicity because you talked about the

(01:12:03):
complicency and that's the complicency that like sits as a
parent to where you're like, but I'm also terrified for
my child and I don't want them to make bad decisions,
and I feel like they're not listening to me. And
I know what scared me straight was being scared. So
I'm like, well, maybe that's gonna But then you realize

(01:12:25):
it's like, no, you're creating a criminal. You're traumatizing your
child and not understanding how you're traumatizing your child because
you think they know you love them. But like all
of that put together and then and then like you said,
like coming out of the other end and being like
I'm trying to do my best I'm I'm, I'm I'm.

(01:12:45):
I'm saying a lot here because like, again, it's so
important to me. I just like I just went through
a situation on another on a nonprofit. I'm on the
board of that, Like you know, we had to go
through a moment to where it was like when you
sit that, I've never been in a situation where I'm
actually at the part of the table where I have

(01:13:07):
the range, like I can actually make change here, you
know what I'm saying, where I'm like, I'm actually the
one in power now, like I'm usually one outside of
the door. Now I'm actually in it. But then once
you're sitting at that and you're like, oh man, there's
like there's really a lot at steak here when I
if I make this decision that seems so easy when
I was outside, you know what I'm saying, But now

(01:13:29):
that I'm in and you're like, that's like you like
how you keep trying to like balance your understanding of
like these journalists and these like justice workers that were like, yo,
like we're doing what is obviously the right thing, you
know what I'm saying, But like at the end of
the day, you're still laying your head like, but we ship, dude, Like,

(01:13:50):
I mean I can't. I mean, what we really need
to do, you know what I'm saying, Like you said,
which really is close them all, but you're like, but funk,
like I don't have the I mean, this is the
best I could do, you know what I'm saying. It's
just like I understand so much more now at this
stage in my life, in my career and my parents
being like all of those nuances. You know, I just

(01:14:12):
wish I could just rap about it. I wish I
could just wrap about it. Do podcasts, you know, saying yeah,
I mean you do. You do have a podcast. I
do have a podcast, and I do talk about the ship,
you know. Yeah, yeah, I wish I had some cathartic
way to deal with it. Yeah, rapping sounds actually extremely cathartic.

(01:14:33):
It really is. Bro But I still think I think
I said that when the first time I was on
the show, like, yo, let me write a rap for
you man, Like, yeah, yeah, I hear you're rid them
though I don't know you're RIDM Like if you if
I could write it, but if you got rid of them,
like I don't know, absolutely not, Um, Yeah, that's that
that that that that that will always just be something
I have to admire from afar Um. But I don't

(01:14:56):
know what do you you got anything to plug PROP
at the end, at the end of this very bleak
day of talking about child prisms that proud right there
for you, and then we should perform it at the
live show. I do have something to plug. I'm happy
with PROP performing at the live show. I don't think
any that's that's not what they're paying for. So I

(01:15:17):
bet you right now if I were to throw on
because you've mentioned it already on our shelves, I to
throw on like a most like a black on both
sides record, but you could probably wrap along. There are
songs out there, some some of the doom Tree stuff.
I bet you have to throw on both few of
them tracks, few of them atmosphere songs. You already know

(01:15:39):
that you could probably wrap a love Yeah. I may
have listened to an astop rocker two in my time. Yes,
and that's listen, that's some complex rapping, like you know
what I'm saying. That ain't that ain't some easy that
ain't some that ain't some easy bars Like that's some
complex rapping anyway. Yes, dot com, we'll see how drunk

(01:15:59):
I get during the live stream. But that's one more
reason to check out the live stream. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah,
and hit me on Twitter. I'm trying to come up
with a game for us to play during the live
stream that might involve how drunk. I feel like all
the ones are like the boy Howdies and like the
Hitler calls. I'd be like, man, Luckily nobody calls me
out on my life. You know what I'm saying, because

(01:16:21):
I felt like you wasted, wasted immediately first ten minutes. Yeah. Anyways, Yeah,
profit pop dot com. I got some new coffee content
coming out, like got some uh, got some you know,
music and politics, pod Man, we're getting got renewed, thank you.
Cool more shows coming, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,

(01:16:44):
check it out. Check out prop check out props book,
check out check us out for our live stream on
check out our live stream on February seventeenth, Moment dot
com slash behind the Bastard. Yeah, check that out. And also,
I have a fiction book that is on pre sale
right now. If you order during the pre sale for

(01:17:05):
the next couple of months, you will get a signed
copy when it comes out in May. Google a k
press after the revolution, and that's where my book will be,
a K press after the revolution. By a copy of
my novel I learned about a skull fucker, Mike, school
fucker Mike. All right, Yeah, that's a great book. Man.
You're like, fiction is hard to write. It really is. Boy,

(01:17:29):
howdy that You're like, well, I'm making up a story.
Like we've been making up stories since we've been sneaking
out in front of our parents, Like we've been making
up stories. But like it's really hard. So like yo,
kudo's way easier to just be a judge. Apparently money
shim great boy. Alright, boy, howdy indeed, I am Texan. Alright,

(01:17:54):
that's the episode. Bam

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Robert Evans

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: The Child Prisons of Texas