Dateline Houston

Deep in North Texas stands a relic of criminal justice past.

The T.L. Roach Unit in Childress County, on the Oklahoma border, is home to the last state-run offender boot camp in Texas. Though the facility has 400 beds, just 30 are occupied now. Its inmates are all young men, age 17 to 26, sentenced directly to the camp through district courts, most of them for burglary. There, behind walls topped with barbed wire, they live strictly regimented lives for 180 days filled with physical activity and discipline. Then they’re released into a wholly unregimented world. They’re free, but are they changed?

Research says no. Correctional boot camps, whose structure of drill and ceremony is based on military boot camps, became popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a way to reform young offenders, but fell from favor when multiple studies demonstrated that they weren’t effective at saving money or preventing crime.

A 2003 National Institute of Justice analysis found that the three objectives of boot camps—reduced recidivism, reduced prison populations, and reduced costs—were in conflict with each other. Boot camps were intended to provide brief, intense experiences, usually 90 to 180 days, that would scare inmates straight. But studies showed that recidivism rates for boot camp alums were the same as those of the general prison population, and that the best ways to reduce recidivism—longer programs, therapy, and help transitioning after release—drove up costs. Camps were supposed to lower state costs by reducing the prison population, but they often admitted only specific categories of offenders, such as nonviolent first-time felons, which diminished their impact on the larger prison-crowding problem.

But the idea that rigorous military treatment can straighten out troubled youth persists in private juvenile boot camps. They proliferate in Texas despite repeated scandals and failed attempts at regulation. Congress heard appalling testimony in 2007 and 2008 that detailed beatings, smothering, and other abuses, sometimes resulting in death, at boot camps nationwide. Since 2008, U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-CA) has been trying to pass regulation, most recently the Stop Child Abuse in Residential Programs for Teens Act of 2011, introduced last October.

With the whole idea of correctional boot camp debunked by research and tarred by scandal, why is the T.L. Roach Unit still open? Maybe because it’s been forgotten. When a reporter for the Amarillo Globe-News recently asked a spokesman from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a district judge, and a district attorney about the facility, they all said they didn’t know it still existed.

Is Houston conservative talk radio star and noted homophobe Michael Berry actually gay?

According to the bouncer at T.C.’s Show Bar in Montrose, Michael Berry left the club, where he was attending as a patron, at 11:00 PM on January 31. The bouncer, Tuderia Bennett, said Berry drove in reverse for 70 feet, hit Bennett’s car, and drove away. Bennett wrote down the license plate, which was registered to Berry, and identified Berry in a photograph. Security footage of Berry inside the club has been turned over to police. Local station KPRC broke the news.

Berry peddles the usual fear and loathing of liberals, immigrants, minorities, et al. on his three-hour talk show on KTRH and KPRC. He got national attention in 2010 when he said, regarding a mosque near “Ground Zero,” “I hope the mosque isn’t built, and if it is, I hope it’s blown up, and I mean that.”

But he’s also more than your average hatemonger. He’s a notable local figure, a three-term former city councilmember who ran for mayor in 2003 and has a JD from the University of Texas School of Law.

You wouldn’t know it to listen to his show, though. Full of racist and xenophobic tweets, his Twitter account @MichaelBerrySho also indicates that Berry has an active imagination when it comes to homosexuality:

Feb. 5: What Elton John is doing backstage right now would get him beheaded in Saudi Arabia unless the king joined in. #superbowl

Feb. 5: Eli Manning gets sacked more than Barney Frank’s interns

Feb. 3: I’m dying to know when Queen will endorse Mittens, since Adam Lambert has a mancrush on Mr Taxachoosits.

Berry is now the featured “winner” on gayhomophobe.com, which tracks anti-gay public figures who are caught in compromising circumstances.

Occupy Houston was evicted from Tranquility Park Monday as dusk fell, ending a four-month protest that members called the U.S.’s longest-running occupation without violence.

Mayor Annise Parker issued a media release announcing the closure Monday afternoon, citing impending spring festivals in the park and saying the area would have to be cleaned and resodded. The notice gave protesters about two hours to leave the park, although it may have had the opposite effect. The day had been rainy, and the Houston Chronicle notes that the park was mostly empty until word spread of the closing, prompting a small number of protesters to come and be escorted from the grounds by police. There were no arrests.

“I support their right to free speech and I’m sympathetic to their call for reform of the financial system,” Mayor Parker said in the release, “but they can’t simply continue to occupy a space indefinitely.”

The indefinite-ness of the occupation has always been its strength and weakness. Kevin Laude, a 33-year-old software developer and Occupy Houston member I spoke to in January, was enthusiastic about it. “You can have a march, and that’s a single thing. You can do that for a couple of hours and then you’re done,” he said. “But an occupation never ends, in theory. I think that’s a really powerful statement, way more effective than a single protest.”

But he acknowledged that sustained activism was particularly challenging for a group that prides itself on functioning without a hierarchy. “Enthusiasm dies down after a while,” he said. “People get better ideas. People are people. Especially in leaderless movements, that’s the bad that you get with the good.”

Though the eviction may provide closure, Occupy Houston’s presence in the park had been dwindling. The group had hundreds of attendees in October, but their numbers were hard-hit by the cold and the holidays. They were already not allowed to erect tents, although some members were sleeping in bags and under tarps, and their once-robust food station had dwindled through theft and low resources to a folding table with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Moreover, members had gotten involved with diverse projects that suited their interests, rather than operating as a whole.

In this way, the occupation lives on. “Occupy Houston will survive and continue,” Joe Roche, a member, told the Chronicle. “Members are splitting off to focus on their specialties, and they are still here, even if the weather chased a lot of them off.”

Laude also saw change impending for the group, but predicted its continuance. “Good will come of it,” he said, “just maybe not the good that you predict.”

The pro-life movement has a baffling relationship with the concept of being “informed.”

Yesterday, US District Judge Sam Sparks ruled that, because of an appellate court’s earlier decision, he was unable to block Texas’s new sonogram law from taking effect. That 5th Circuit Court of Appeals panel, he said, “has effectively eviscerated the protections of the First Amendment in the abortion context.”

He’s referring to provisions in the law that require abortion doctors to perform a sonogram 24 hours in advance, play the fetal heartbeat aloud, show the sonogram to the patient and describe the fetus’s features, including limb length and the development of any internal organs. Doctors must do this even if they feel it is inappropriate or medically unnecessary, or if the patient asks them not to. The only exception granted is for patients who sign a form stating they are the victim of rape or incest and that they intend to pursue legal action, unless they believe doing so would put them in physical danger. Clinics must keep these intimate affidavits on file for years.

Sounds like a horrifying invasion of privacy, right?

Nope, say pro-life groups. It’s just informed consent. This is about empowering women, they say. What could be wrong with making sure women really, really understand what they’re about to do?

Last fall, Judge Sparks granted a temporary injunction against the law after pro-choice groups sued, claiming it violated doctors’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to deliver politically motivated speech. But Judge Edith Jones, of the 5th Circuit wrote that it and other so- called “informed consent” laws are fine “if they require truthful, nonmisleading, and relevant disclosures.”

Then, couldn’t it be considered “truthful, nonmisleading and relevant” to let women approaching a “crisis pregnancy center” know what such centers do and do not provide?

Nope, say pro-life groups. That’s unconstitutional.

The City of Austin is locked in a legal wrangle with pro-life groups who are suing over an ordinance requiring “crisis pregnancy centers,” which do not provide abortions or contraceptives or refer patients to places that do, to have a bilingual notice at their entrance stating just that.

Last week, the Austin City Council unanimously decided to repeal the current ordinance, which is being sued, and pass one that requires only that the notice state that there is no licensed medical professional on site. Pro-life groups are still suing.

“We are saddened that the City of Austin has approved yet a second unlawful ordinance that violates our client’s First Amendment rights to free speech and exercise of their religious beliefs,” said Jonathan Saenz, an attorney and director of legislative affairs for Liberty Institute in Austin, in a press release.

Resistance to accurate labeling of crisis pregnancy centers helps prove that the sonogram law wasn’t about providing women with “relevant, nonmisleading” information.

Judge Sparks knows what it was about. In yesterday’s ruling he states, “There can be little doubt that (the law) is an attempt by the Texas Legislature to discourage women from exercising their constitutional rights by making it more difficult for caring and competent physicians to perform abortions.”

At 2:30 a.m. on Jan. 27, Sebastian Prevot failed to stop. Well, he stopped at the stop sign three blocks from his house, but he was past the white line. For this, a Houston police patrol car tried to pull him over. Prevot proceeded to his home and there, again, he stopped. He says he got out of the car with his hands up. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t speed. He just didn’t stop soon enough.

His wife, Annika Lewis, awoke to screaming. When she went outside, she found at least 10 cop cars converged in front of her house, some twenty officers on her lawn, and her husband, Prevot, screaming as he was punched and kicked, and beaten with a baton.

Lewis is 4-foot-11 and weighs 103 pounds. She knew she couldn’t stop the violence against her husband—but she could record it. She says she grabbed her phone and started filming, and that’s when a cop grabbed her hand and twisted it behind her. Another grabbed her hair and forced her to the ground. She says they picked her up, punched her in the face, and put her in the back of a police car. Meanwhile, her phone was confiscated and its memory card removed before it was placed back in her home.

Prevot, who crossed the white line before coming to a stop, was charged with a felony of evading arrest. He had to be treated at Ben Taub hospital for injuries including a torn ear that required stitches.

Prevot and Lewis are black. Lewis says all of the officers present were white.

Let me first say this: It is far too easy to judge the police. They do a necessary, dangerous, and difficult service. They are human; they get scared. Few of us outside the military will ever deal with the particular kind of uncertainty and anxiety that must go with day after day, shift after shift, year upon year of literally looking for trouble. Their good works go unnoticed every day, taken for granted as part of the job.

But cases like this make it hard to keep the faith.

It’s impossible for me to understand 20 cops against one man, even if he was fighting back. Even if he had been armed, which he wasn’t.

And they were. If they were all civilians, what happened Friday morning would be an angry white mob assaulting a black victim. But because the 20 men had guns and batons issued them by the state, it’s not?

HPD has dealt with police brutality and video before. Last year, a 15-year-old burglary suspect, Chad Holley, ran from police. But he was clipped by a police car, fell to the ground, and lay face down with his arms folded in the position of surrender. We know this because video of it exists, video that a court order suppressed but a community activist leaked to the local news, causing outrage. In it, police swarm Holley, kicking, stomping, and punching his head, his hands, his legs and sides. It is almost unwatchable. With half a dozen cops all over the unresisting high school sophomore’s body, another runs up to them at full speed and dives in to help beat him. Twelve officers were disciplined, fired, or charged in the case. All appealed, and two of the three fired officers won their appeal and are back on the job.

What would have happened if there had been no tape?

Earlier the same night as Prevot’s assault, community leaders had held a town hall meeting encouraging citizens to record and report police misconduct. Representatives from HPD and the FBI attended, assuring citizens of the legality of recording police work. Activist Deric Muhammad helped organize the town hall, prompted, he said, by “calls I was receiving about police misconduct, brutality, disrespect, and an all-around abuse of authority, particularly by a Caucasian crew on the night shift of Northeast Houston.”

After Prevot’s arrest, a family member of Lewis’s contacted Muhammad, who organized a press conference with the couple on Jan. 29. After continued media attention, HPD Chief Charles McClelland met Jan. 31 with Muhammad and Prevot’s attorney, Robert Collier. All called the meeting productive, and Tuesday night, Chief McClelland issued a statement saying that HPD encourages citizens to report police misconduct. He added, “I expect the men and women of HPD to respect the rights of the public to photograph, film or record police actions.”

But will they? Muhammad says, “The fact that they would go to the extreme of physically assaulting somebody as small as Annika Lewis says that the camera is very powerful.” And that’s why he says, despite the risks, citizens should still pull out their phones when they see injustice. “They’ve gotta know somebody’s watching.”