The Texas Observer

Word at the capitol is that Texas Youth Commission Executive Director Dwight Harris has decided to resign. “It’s not official, but I understand he’s going to resign on Monday,” Senator Juan Hinojosa said. “I’m not surprised, in lieu of the list of wrongdoing we have here,” he said.

One week after we broke the story of the sex abuse scandal at the West Texas State School in Pyote, Harris may have decided the fallout had become too much to handle. He is scheduled to appear before the Senate Criminal Justice committee on Tuesday to answer questions about his agency’s handling of the allegations of sex abuse, including what appeared to be an effort by the agency to cover up the scandal.

And there may be another unpleasant surprise in the offing: Yesterday the agency distributed a memo to elected officials warning that it had received a press inquiry into another incident of sex abuse, this one occurring in 2004-5 at the Ron Jackson State School in Brownwood, in Central Texas. According to the memo, a male staff member was found to have engaged in sexual relations with more than one inmate at the facility. He resigned when the agency began investigating, and no charges were ever filed, the memo said. As far as I can tell, this incident has never been covered in the media.

Harris’ possible resignation raises several questions, among them: 1) Who can the TYC board find to turn this troubled agency around, and 2) Who will field questions from Sen. Hinojosa and the Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday? Our suggestion for question number two: Chip Harrison, the man who was superintendent at Pyote while the sex abuse was allegedly going on, who hired both of the alleged perpetrators, and who was later promoted to director of juvenile corrections in Austin.

After I mentioned the need for an independent inspector general’s office at the Texas Youth Commission yesterday, Isela Gutierrez of the Texas Coalition Advocating Justice for Juveniles informs me that there are in fact two bills in the works on that front:

I just read the Observer Blog for today, and wanted to let you know that actually Madden has filed HB 914, which would create an Office of Inspector General, akin to that in TDCJ, with law enforcement authority to investigate criminal and fraudulent activity in TYC facilities. It would report directly to the TYC Board. Hinojosa’s SB 103 also has a virtually identical provision for an Office of Inspector General.

The story of the sex abuse scandal at Pyote, which we broke on Friday afternoon (followed closely by the Dallas Morning News on Sunday), hit the wire services and made the rounds Monday and Tuesday, including TV news reports in Midland. Hernandez, one of the alleged perps, has been suspended with pay from his current job as prinicpal at Milburn Academy, a charter school in Midland. Randy Reynolds, the district attorney in Ward County who sat on the case for almost a year and a half, announced that he was now ready to prosecute, though no arrests have yet been made. In at least one report I read, Reynolds seemed to imply he was waiting for the Texas Rangers to finish up so that he could act. In fact, as we reported in our original story, the Rangers have been done with their investigation for roughly a year and a half. Ranger Captain Barry Caver had this to say about a possible cover up by the Texas Youth Commission in yesterday’s Odessa American: “It’s obviously a good-old-boy system, and they take care of each other.”

Senator Juan Hinojosa, meanwhile, has introduced SB 103, which would allow the Texas Rangers to take an active role in investigating abuses at TYC state schools. It looks like TYC executive director Dwight Harris will be in the hot seat on Tuesday, when the bill is scheduled for a hearing before the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. If problems at TYC are as widespread as they seem to be, the Rangers might find their resources pretty stretched. Other advocates have called for a truly independent inspector general’s office for TYC, with a director who is not hired and fired by the head of the agency, and who therefore doesn’t have to worry about getting his wrist slapped for going too high up the chain of command. The adult prison system has this type of IG. I haven’t seen such a bill filed yet.

We’ll see what Harris has to say on Tuesday, now that the Pyote cat is out of the bag. Should be interesting.

For those following the story we broke Friday afternoon on the sex abuse scandal and cover up at West Texas State School in Pyote (we posted a special web-only advance copy of the story “Hidden in Plain Sight” on our homepage; the print version will be arriving in mail boxes later this week), note that the Dallas Morning News weighed in on the same story yesterday with 1700 words by reporter Doug J. Swanson. We’d been hearing that Swanson was on this story and filing record requests for quite some time. Apparently through his own compilation of figures he obtained through open records, he came up with this astounding fact: “Since 2000, more than 90 employees at TYC facilities – some of them contractors – have been disciplined or fired for sexual misconduct with inmates.”

Clearly, this is a serious problem at TYC and we’re glad to see the News on the story. The Senate finance committee seems unusually attuned to the agency’s troubles right now; we’ll see if the added attention gets things moving. Watch this space for updates on the fallout from this new scandal.