Dateline Houston

Every Saturday morning at six, Sheila’s television comes on. She listens to it as she dresses, and then she drives to the Planned Parenthood building off I-45 in Houston, dons a neon-green vest that says “Planned Parenthood Volunteer,” and stands by the driveway, outside a tall black metal fence laced with dark vines, for hours. She doesn’t go home until the protesters do. Sheila is 69. She’s been doing this for 20 years.

“I started coming here just before the Republican convention in 1992,” she said when we met at the clinic on Saturday. “I had been to a friend’s funeral, Eileen, and the woman giving her eulogy said, ‘For Eileen, let’s all pledge to do something outrageously liberal.’ So I decided getting up at 6 a.m. and defending the clinic was outrageous enough.”

Sheila doesn’t want her last name in print—“It’s the one little wall I put around myself,” she says. “There are all kinds of people here. Some are well-meaning. Some are mean-spirited. This is the only place you can legally yell at women.”

On a normal Saturday, about 20 protesters gather on the sidewalk here, outside the gate or across the street, sometimes with signs, sometimes with red tape over their mouths that says “LIFE” or “VIDA.” On this day, around 150 people have assembled to launch the Back to Life Walk. It’s a 21-day trek from what they’re calling America’s largest abortion clinic (see this Houston Chronicle blog entry on that claim) to the courthouse in Dallas, the “birthplace of Roe v. Wade.” Thirty-nine women, symbolizing 39 years of legal abortion, are making the trek, beginning today and scheduled to end on Good Friday.

I arrived in the middle of the prayer rally, which comprised several small groups scattered along the sidewalks on either side of the street beside the fenced parking lot. There were many children, large families, often in matching T-shirts, and the majority wore the red “LIFE” tape over their mouths. They stood together with heads down, in groups of five or six, kept off the clinic’s grass by volunteers like Sheila and off the street by half a dozen bored-looking police. A priest stood beside a statue of Mary on a folding table. A short nun in a gray habit wore sunglasses.

The Back to Life walk was organized by Laura Allred, a young Latina who said in the post-prayer news conference that she felt called by God to become an activist when she heard Planned Parenthood was building a facility in the neighborhood where she grew up. “Mostly who would be targeted would be young Latina women,” she said, which led her to select for the walk 39 women in their 20s, largely women of color.

The conference, which didn’t seem to draw any major local news outlets, was held across the street from the Planned Parenthood clinic, crowded deeply onto the sidewalk beside a chain-link fence around a warehouse parking lot. Logistics were not excellent. Once the speakers, walkers, and a young, twisted woman on a stretcher were assembled photogenically, the whole group had to part to let three pickup trucks escape the lot.

Speeches were brief and freighted with the language of social justice. “The God who ended slavery is the same God today,” intoned Pastor Lou Engle. “The God who raised up Martin Luther King and ended the Jim Crow laws will end abortion.” Switching referents, he added, “The women of America have had a trail of tears.”

The King reference was no coincidence—his niece Alveda King was on hand at the rally, to sing a hymn and read from the 13th chapter of Corinthians. “Love is patient, love is kind…” Rev. Arnold Culbreath called abortion the leading cause of death in the black community. Then two walkers told their personal stories. One said she would never have been born if her mother, a college freshman, hadn’t changed her mind the night before her scheduled abortion. The other was 16 years old and five months pregnant when she had her first abortion. “I was kicking and screaming in pain,” she said. “I didn’t get any sedation. The nurses were saying, ‘Be still, be quiet, you made this choice.’”

Protecting women from choice was the day’s painful, earnest theme. “There’s a war on women,” Pastor Engle said, wrapping up the news conference. “And the pro-abortion community would have you believe it’s a war to take away women’s rights to reproductive health. These 39 women have a different story. Abortion hurts women, not only physically but emotionally and spiritually.” He urged the crowd to pray for President Obama “to become a pro-life president. God can do it.”

Some protesters were less positive. “We pray for our president, but we’re opposed to his policies,” began 70-year-old Addison Thorn. “He’s a merchant of death. That’s his title, Merchant of Death.”

“Yeah, the president is even for those late-term abortions, with, like, body parts sticking out,” added Jonathan Davidson, 29.

As a car slowed to pull into the Planned Parenthood parking lot, Davidson jogged up to it, trying to hand the driver a pamphlet. A volunteer in a green vest shooed him off.

Looking proud, he trotted back to me. “It’s not a women’s rights issue,” Davidson said. “They try to make it about women’s health. As if any Christian here would be against cervical cancer screenings or whatever!” He laughed. “It’s not a political issue. It’s a life issue. A zygote is a human life. It’s so simple.” He opened the pamphlet. “See, there’s a heartbeat four days after a missed period.”

“I think it’s week six,” I said.

He smiled indulgently and pointed back at the pamphlet. “By the time a woman pees on a stick and sees two little lines,” he said, “the heart’s already beating. That’s not politics. It’s just science.”

By this time, the 39 women had stretched a little, drawn into a long line, some laughing and some grave, and begun their 250-mile walk to cheers. The crowd dispersed quickly after. The Mary statue was already gone.

Sheila was still there.

Houston, you are superlative.

If you’ve ever noticed you’d reached the Houston city limits because other drivers started cutting you off, it’s not your imagination. A report from Men’s Health this week names Houston the fourth most dangerous city in which to drive, based on statistics about car crashes, hit-and-runs, and seatbelt use. (The Houston Press had a tragic story Wednesday about a driver that killed a pedestrian, checked the damage to his car, and drove away.) Austin was the only other Texas city on the list, ranking tenth.

And if you’ve ever gawked at the $21,000 ostrich feather ball gowns at Neiman Marcus and wondered who actually wears them, Forbes has the answer. Last week, the magazine released a list of the wealthiest people in America, and of them, seven of the 100 richest live in Houston. Dallas has six in the top 100, Austin and Fort Worth two each and San Antonio one, but Houston boasts the most residents in the tippy top of the one percent.

Houston also got word last week that it’s the most ethnically diverse large metropolitan area in the country, according to a Rice University report that analyzed census data from 1990, 2000, and 2010. The percentage of Anglos in Houston dropped from 58 percent in 1990 to 40 percent in 2010. For contrast, New York City is 48.9 percent Anglo.

And of course, this list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that the March issue of Men’s Fitness again named Houston the country’s fattest city. The magazine says 34 percent of Houstonians are overweight, blaming the heat, humidity, and the average work commute of almost half an hour. It also mentions that Houston has the highest number of fast food restaurants in the country—1,034. El Paso and Dallas also make the fattest list, at 7th and 25th respectively. Only Austin (12th) and San Antonio (25th) make the 25 fittest cities list.

For better or worse, Houston is all about extremes.

Private prisons are supposed to save taxpayers money, but that’s not how it worked out in Liberty County.

When state District Judge Mark Morefield took the bench in Liberty County in January 2011, he was overwhelmed by the backlog of cases confronting him. “The docket was out of control,” he told the Cleveland Rotary Club at a luncheon this January, as reported by the Cleveland Advocate. Last April, Morefield joined three others—District Judge Chap B. Cain, County Judge Craig McNair, and County Court-at-Law Judge Tommy Chambers—to hatch a plan to deal with the docket and its expense to taxpayers. “We put pressure on both sides, Texas and the defense, to get their cases ready and get them disposed of,” Morefield told the Observer. “It’s worked. We’ve moved a lot of cases.”

In addition to addressing the docket backlog, Morefield and the other judges sought to reduce the number of people in the county jail. They instituted a personal recognizance (PR) bond program.

First-time offenders who cannot afford bond, and whose arrests did not involve assault, domestic violence, intoxication or a sex crime, are eligible for consideration. A PR bond is essentially a promise to appear in court, but Morefield says he and the other judges had been previously hesitant to assign PR bonds because there was no oversight of defendants once they were released.

Under the new program, each defendant is considered individually and the conditions of his or her release are tailored. If they don’t report, “we immediately issue a warrant for their arrest and put them back in jail,” Morefield said.

When the program started in June, the county jail housed 231 inmates, which cost the county $46.50 each per day to the private company that runs the jail. Since then, the number of inmates has dropped significantly, to 132 in December, though it has crept up slightly since.

But the for-profit company that manages the jail—Community Education Centers—has responded by increasing its rates. The price per inmate has gone up to almost $60 per day. Even with the increased rate, Morefield estimates the reduction in the jail population has saved the county at least $700,000, though it could have been more.

Meanwhile, the county has extended its contract with Community Education Centers. The county is trying to get other companies interested, but Morefield said, “with our PR bond program and success at reducing the inmate population, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot … In other words, if you reduce the population below a particular figure, the cost per inmate goes up.”

“It’s designed to ensure a certain level of profitability, and I understand that,” he continued. “But perhaps it’s time that Liberty County, through the Commissioners Court, takes a hard look at whether or not it would be feasible for the county to resume operating the jail itself.

“Maybe private enterprise can do it at a rate that government cannot compete with. But I just reject the concept that every time government undertakes a task, it’s got to cost 1.5 times what it costs private enterprise to do the same task.

I’m not making a blanket condemnation of privatization. Some counties, that’s the only way they can go. But there are counties out there that still run their own jail program. After 15 years [of privatization], let’s look and see, is this something we can do ourselves?”

At an awards breakfast for Houston-area social workers on Friday, Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia highlighted ways the Harris County Jail system is working for social justice and called for treating mental illness outside the jail system.

“It is their disease that has put them in harm’s way and in nexus with law enforcement,” Garcia said. “Sometimes the only place they can find reasonable treatment is within the four walls of the county jail system. … That’s not fair and it’s not right.”

Garcia was the keynote speaker at the 12th Annual Greater Houston Social Work Awards Breakfast, at the University of Houston. His address, called “The Harris County Jail: The Largest Mental Health Provider in Texas,” was less about the jail’s current role as a mental health provider than about Garcia’s efforts to divert the mentally ill from the jail and to create a more fair and humane jail system.

Garcia opened with a tragic story that illustrated what can happen when mental illness and criminal justice collide. In his early days as a patrolman, Garcia encountered a “mountain of a man” named Jerome. Jerome was at a bar, hallucinating dead people and frightening other patrons. Garcia and the rookie he was training managed to get Jerome outside, but they were frightened and unsure how to handle the man in his delusional state. “He would stop and move and do certain things, and several times I found myself with my hand on my gun,” Garcia said. But he managed to get Jerome into the back of the police car—he was so big that handcuffs wouldn’t fit around his wrists—and drive him home. Garcia saw Jerome several times after that, learned how to manage him and always got him safely home. One night, after Garcia had been promoted to the criminal intelligence division, he saw on the news that Jerome had been shot and killed by police. He had attacked them with a sledgehammer. “I kept saying, I know I could have done something,” Garcia recalled. “I know I could have gotten him into the car. It always, always stayed with me.”

Now, Harris County has a crisis intervention team, which partners county deputies with mental health professionals to respond to emergency calls that may involve mental illness. Garcia says that in just four months, the crisis intervention team has diverted 72 people to mental health treatment who ordinarily would have gone to jail, saving the county an estimated $200,000 in jail space and medication costs. But, he said, “The best outcome of this is that they’re not being criminalized.”

Garcia praised the growth of the Harris County Jail’s chaplaincy project. Rather than 20-30 paid chaplains, they now have more than 400 volunteers “who are helping us bring a calmer, more humane environment overall, not only with our inmates, but with our staff.” And Garcia bemoaned the scarcity of mental health resources for Harris County law enforcement employees. When he came in as sheriff, he said, employees got only two mental health visits free through their insurance. “Now they get five,” he said. The room full of social workers chuckled a little, recognizing that it’s still not enough. “So we depend on our chaplains,” he said.

The sheriff also touted the county’s improvement to its competency restoration process, which starts treating the mentally ill in the jail, rather than waiting for space to become available at a state mental hospital. Garcia says plans are underway to have prisoner health files managed electronically, so it’s easier to track patients’ past medications and provide better continuity of care.

But Garcia acknowledged there’s plenty of room for improvement. A quarter of the jail’s 10,000 prisoners receive psychotropic medication, one reason the jail is often called the state’s largest mental health facility. And while conditions may have improved within the jail, Garcia says there’s an 80 percent drop-off in treatment once prisoners are released. “Until we recognize that it is cheaper and better to do things outside of a correctional environment,” he said, “then we still have a long way to go.”

In remarks to reporters afterward, Garcia emphasized that more funding for community-based mental health care was crucial to his initiative’s success. “But if we build up our capacity and nothing changes on the community side, or we lose on the community side, the whole scheme of that concept is compromised.”

“At what point does the system let go of these people?” one reporter asked Garcia after the speech.

“I’m not sure I know the answer to that,” Garcia said after a pause. “We are our brother’s keeper.”

Alice Waters, the famed chef, author, and activist, addressed a packed house at the Wortham Center’s Cullen Theater in Houston on Monday night, sharing her values and advocating for an “edible education” in public schools.

Waters is widely credited with revolutionizing New American cuisine through her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant, Chez Panisse, which has focused on organic, local, seasonal foods prepared simply ever since its inception in 1971. Her influence as an early champion of farmers markets and school lunch reform can hardly be overstated, though she’s been well recognized along the way. Chez Panisse was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine, Waters was named Best Chef in America by the James Beard Foundation, and in 2009, Waters became the only American chef to receive the French Legion of Honor.

She is also, it turns out, staggeringly unpretentious. A guest of Urban Harvest and the Progressive Forum, Waters wore a simple blue long-sleeved dress and low-heeled brown boots, speaking from her notes in a careful, thoughtful voice. A large screen displayed slides from her new book, 40 Years of Chez Panisse: The Power of Gathering. Noting early that she tended to avoid public speaking, Waters seemed nervous at moments, though she needn’t have been. Her hour-long address was punctuated by affectionate chuckles and warm applause from an elated middle-aged audience who, at the end, formed a snaking line in the lobby for her book signing.

Though most of her material was a personal retrospective, Waters said her goal was to give her audience a better idea of the “edible education” she hopes will become a regular part of all public schools. This would be a sensory, hands-on experience of every part of the food cycle, from growing food in a garden on the school grounds to harvesting it and using it to cook and eat in the cafeteria. It’s a vision realized at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, where Waters started the program sixteen years ago, as detailed in her book The Edible Schoolyard.

Waters walked the audience through her own edible education, from the awakening of her senses as a student in France to lobbying President Bill Clinton to start an organic garden at the White House. (He installed vegetable planters on the roof; Michelle Obama made the garden a reality in 2009.) Throughout, she said, she was guided by taste. Her original, single-minded aim to recreate the tastes she experienced in France became all encompassing.

In this way, hers is a story about the power of values. What she achieved is but a byproduct of living her uncompromising values, as opposed to letting ambition direct her choices. She didn’t set out to win the French Legion of Honor. She wanted to give her friends the experience of taste that she had known.

Waters’ message encourages those who feel daunted by all the good work there is to do. “If you analyze what we’re doing from the outside,” she said, “it would seem huge and multi-layered, daunting—sustainability, economics, economy of scale, food justice, beauty of presentation, worker’s rights, ecology. But if you watched what we’re doing, we’re shelling peas. We’re setting the table. We’re doing the dishes. We’re following our instincts. If one practices the basic day-to-day activities of life with integrity and consciousness, everything I’ve been talking about just naturally flows into the experience.”