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Texas Juvenile Detention Centers Cope
With Charges of Rape, Abuse
April 16, 2007
Keith Elliot Greenberg
 "You
need to get both hands on the wheel," Genger Galloway urges her son,
as he steers her mini-van down a side road near Crockett, Texas.
She shakes her head from side to
side. "I need a Xanax is what I need."
At 19 years old, Joseph Galloway
seems too old for driving lessons. But Joseph's teenage years have
been tumultuous ones.
Arrested at 15 for inappropriate
sexual contact with a sibling, he expected to spend nine months in
one of the 13 secure facilities or nine halfway houses run by the
Texas Youth Commission (TYC); instead, he remained incarcerated for
four years.
During that period, he claims that
guards deliberately placed him in a cell with a larger boy who raped
him and encouraged gang members to break his jaw. He also said he
was molested by a female staff member.
As his mother protested —
interviewing 150 parents of other TYC inmates and petitioning
legislators for changes in the system — Joseph said he was singled
out.
"If your parents complain, you get
your sentence extended," Genger insists.
The TYC's official spokesman tends
to agree with her.
"We have no confidence that these
extensions have been used uniformly," said Jim Hurley, the agency's
interim communications director. "We have suspicions that some of
these may have been done to punish kids."
Now, in the wake of a scandal that
has rocked the state of Texas, 1,100 extensions are being reviewed.
On April 5, Joseph became one of 473 inmates released amid pressure
from the Texas state legislature and Gov. Rick Perry.
During his first week home, Joseph
savored his new freedom, catching catfish and perch at a nearby
lake, even participating in an Easter egg hunt.
"My first day out, I almost ate a
whole cheesecake," he said. "I ate some Fruity Pebbles. I ate some
real Mexican food. I got sick, but it was worth it."
He added: "I thought I still had to
ask permission to use the restroom."
While law-and-order advocates fear
a rush of young criminals streaming back into society, Genger
focuses on the psychological wounds sustained by one-time juvenile
offenders forced to endure beatings and rapes.
"There are kids right now who got
themselves locked up in a house, locked up in a closet, locked up in
a garage, scared to speak."
Meanwhile, the fates of all 4,000
TYC inmates — ranging in age from 10 to 21 — are being re-evaluated.
Over the last month, the
seven-member TYC board was abolished and replaced by a
troubleshooting conservator. Top officials were ordered to resign
and reapply for their jobs. Superintendents at two facilities were
arrested and every employee and volunteer ordered to submit to
background and fingerprint checks.
Two former administrators at the
remote West Texas State School in Piyote were indicted on Tuesday on
multiple sex abuse charges. Ex-assistant superintendent Ray Brookins
and one-time principal John Paul Hernandez, both 41, are accused of
molesting six youths, ages 16 to 19. Both maintain their innocence.
"Pedophiles get themselves into the
system and abuse kids," contends Randall Chance, a former Texas
inspector general and a TYC employee for 21 years. "And the system
allows it. There's a dynasty of covering up."
He said that, in the past,
administrators accused of inappropriate behavior with inmates were
transferred to other TYC facilities with little or no repercussions.
"We need to get a culture change at
this agency," said Hurley, recently transferred to the TYC from the
Texas Department of Insurance. "We need to get to the bottom and
start rebuilding."
For Stanley Mitchell, a former
supervisor at the TYC's Crockett State School, the changes are long
overdue.
"I cried when I left the TYC" in
2002, he said. "We had obligations to treat these people humanely.
These kids have been sentenced. They're at the bottom of the totem
pole. It's more or less our job to be their parents."
Instead, he said, the agency "was
run to bring fear to the kids and bring fear to the staff."
At Crockett, he contends, the mood
was set by a clique of high-level supervisors known as "The
Untouchables."
"You couldn't touch them," he said.
"If they liked you, you could basically get away with anything. If
you reported abuse, you were gone."
Standing outside the fence winding
around the collection of neatly arranged buildings at the Crockett
State School, another former supervisor, Robert Thomson, steps
behind Mitchell and slings an arm around his chin.
"This is a nelson," Thomson said,
describing a restraining method. "That's an illegal hold on a kid.
It's not TYC policy. But I've seen that hold put on a kid to where
he turned blue in the face."
But Brian Gatliff, an officer at
the John Shero State Juvenile Correctional Facility in San Saba,
argued that these types of incidents should be placed in the proper
context.
"Technically, the method we're
taught to use to restrain the youth is very safe," he said. "And
when we can use it, it's very practical. But rarely does it happen
the way you're trained. A person has to be standing still and let
you put the restraint on him for it to work.
"You know, these kids — well, we
call them kids, but these are young men. Some of them are 21 years
old. And they're very strong, stronger than us in some cases."
To prove his point, Gatliff removes
a Xeroxed photo of himself, apparently bruised after an encounter
with an inmate. "This youth came into my office, got me from behind
before I ever saw him and almost choked me into unconsciousness. It
was very scary," he said.
"That's what we're dealing with day
to day. The assaults on staff are much more frequent than any
alleged abuse on kids."
Still, Gatliff recoils at the
stories of sexual molestation behind the barred windows, such as the
claim about a supervisor who allegedly lived with a teenager
on-campus at one of the facilities.
"If those things happened," Gatliff
said, "then, they're terrible, and they should be dealt with. I'm
sure they will be."
Former inmate Robert Sossaman, 22,
shared similar expectations.
"Our kids are in there for breaking
the law," said Sossaman, incarcerated at age 12 on a sex charge. "So
we need staff who can teach them to uphold it."
Yet, he admitted that while
incarcerated at the now-defunct J.W. Hamilton Jr. State School in
Bryan he had sex with a female staffer. A male officer "offered to
perform oral sex on me for contraband. You know, 'I'll bring you
cigarettes if you let me do this,'" Sossaman said.
Neither Mitchell nor Thomson, the
former supervisors, claims to have ever heard about sex between
staffers and inmates at the Crockett State School. But because of
understaffing, they say, more vulnerable children were preyed upon
by older youth.
"I remember this little kid,"
Thomson began. "He was about 10. He hadn't been here very long. He
looked just like a little baby. The older kids would take him down
and get him in the bathroom and rape him.
"When you have one staff person
watching 24 kids, you can't see everything. And it got to where they
were just molesting him like every single day — until they shipped
him off to another state school."
When other such incidents occurred,
critics say, documents were falsified or destroyed. As a result,
outside investigators are probing 2,000 complaints — hundreds
involving sexual abuse — received via a newly installed hotline.
"We're supposed to be role models
for these kids," said Mitchell, now a case manager for a state
agency assisting the mentally disabled. "And I went in trying to do
everything right. But when you try to treat these kids right, and
then it seems like wrong is right, you just get upset."
Producer Keith Elliot Greenberg has
been covering the Texas Youth Commission case for "Geraldo at
Large," seen Saturdays and Sundays on the FOX News Channel from 8 to
9 p.m. EDT.
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