Dateline Houston

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.”

Robin Nelson

Prison boot camp in Georgia.

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.”