Snake Oil

Texas Juvenile Justice Department

More than 22 percent of youth in the Corsicana Residential Treatment Center reported sexual victimization in the last year.

More than 11 percent of juveniles locked up in Texas’ state-run facilities reported being sexually victimized in the last year, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice.

That’s higher than the national average of 9.5 reported in the study, but well below what kids reported the last time the DOJ did this survey, in 2008. At that time, of course, Texas wasn’t too far removed from the sex abuse scandal that prompted a major makeover of our juvenile justice system.

The new federal study is the second National Survey of Youth in Custody, part of a larger data collection effort stemming from the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act. Nationwide, 2.5 percent of youth reported forced sexual activity with another youth, while 7.7 percent reported any sexual contact with a staff member. The federal report ties the drop in sexual victimization to three things: smaller youth lockups around the country, less time spent locked up and better relationships with staff members.

ProPublica reported on the federal study earlier this month, under the headline “Rape and Other Sexual Violence Prevalent in Juvenile Justice System“—but Texas is a special case. The widespread abuse the Observer reported in 2007 made that clear years ago. Curbing sexual abuse in youth lockups has been at the heart of juvenile justice reforms here over the last few years, including smaller juvenile lockups, internal investigations, new cameras and anonymous complaint lines. After 20 percent of Texas youth reported sexual abuse in the last federal survey, state officials commissioned a report on the problem.

Years into such major reforms, we should be way out ahead of other states—so why, according to this DOJ study, does Texas still have the 14th-highest rate of reported sex abuse?

According to spokesman Jim Hurley, Texas is ahead of other states—you just can’t tell based on a survey like this. ”It’s totally anonymous, there’s no way to go back and check up on them,” he says. “It’s really hard when you don’t have the ability to do follow-up to determine the validity of those things.”

Hurley says TJJD got 11,446 complaints from youth last year through its new system, and 131 of them “involved some sort of sexual allegation.” Contrary to the DOJ survey, the minority of those—45 complaints—involved staff members. The agency’s independent Office of Inspector General found evidence of a crime in six cases, Hurley says, of which three were declined by local prosecutors and two resulted in no-bills from a grand jury. Just one of those 131 sexual abuse complaints last year resulted in a conviction, he says.

“We don’t want to make light of the DOJ report, but we know that kids overreport this kind of thing. We saw what some of the questions were when they were coming in, and we thought some of the kids might have a hard time understanding the questions.” (The questions, like, “Have you had any other kind of sexual contact with someone at this facility?” are listed here.)

The federal survey also comes just a month after another big report on Texas’ juvenile system found that “youth do not report sexual assault to be a significant problem.”

That one, from Michele Deitch at the University of Texas at Austin, was a special report to TJJD’s ombudsman in response to the spike in violence at juvenile facilities last year. That report comes with a handful of recommendations for cutting down on violence—a new behavior management plan, for one, and a new approach to housing mentally ill youth—but doesn’t recommend any changes related to sexual abuse. ”Importantly, given the agency’s history, youth report that sexual assault is extremely uncommon,” the report says.

“Our data does not support the numbers that the DOJ has in their report, and I do feel like we’re very thorough in making sure our kids are safe and investigating any allegation,” Hurley says. ”If you look around the nation, everybody is fighting the same issues. … It is nice to be on the leading edge.”

An emotional and incredibly strange war waged over the last two years—in community halls and small-town diners, conference calls and YouTubes, Fox News broadcasts and legislative hearings—concluded this morning as Sen. Dan Patrick announced that “the era of CSCOPE lesson plans has come to an end.”

And so begins the time for Tea Party and anti-CSCOPE activists to take a victory lap, or, if you’re one of the thousands of teachers that used CSCOPE’s lessons in your classroom, the time to start printing off and photocopying those handouts before they disappear forever.

“The big lesson here is that if you can generate a witch hunt that includes enough incendiary and distorted claims, then there are politicians at the Capitol who are ready to throw their supposed commitment to local control out the window,” said Texas Freedom Network President Kathy Miller in a statement this morning.

The curriculum management program, run cooperatively by the state’s 20 regional Education Service Centers, will still be available for the hundreds of school districts that use it to help teachers cover all the state standards, or TEKS. But the handouts and sample lessons that prompted charges of Marxist, progressive, liberal, socialist, globalist, environmentalist, anti-American, anti-Christian, Muslim, Mexican indoctrination will be gone by August 31.

It all ended with a 72-hour blitz of meetings at the Capitol and a letter late last night, “signed by all 20 members of the CSCOPE board,” Patrick said. CSCOPE administrators had turned over thousands of financial documents to Patrick’s office last week.

“It couldn’t be a more exciting day for us on the education committee,” said state Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels). “We identified something that was shrouded in secrecy, that affected education for our children, made it difficult for parents to find out what was being taught to our children, and we now have that issue resolved.”

Kyle Wargo, executive director of Amarillo’s Region 17 service center and a CSCOPE board member, got the privilege of speaking for the defeated. ”I’m certainly very excited,” he said, which is understandable given what a punching bag regional service centers have become over the last six months.

“It’s the right thing to do. It’s in the best interests of the school districts, it’s in the best interest of the children.” Wargo said. Writing lessons for schools across Teas just isn’t practical, considering how much diversity of thought there is across a state Texas’ size. “We’ve learned one thing,” he said. “Lesson plans have a lot of subjectivity to them.”

“This is a great example of what happens when moms and dads across the state of Texas come together and get involved in their children’s education,” said Rep. Steve Toth (R-The Woodlands). “Everything that happened has happened here as a result of all their hard work, tireless efforts, blogging, Facebook messages, Twitter messages, email, press conferences, traveling tireless hours across the state to raise awareness about this program.”

Toth will pull his CSCOPE accountability bill in response to today’s news, and Patrick said the State Board of Education would also shelve its review of CSCOPE history lessons.

Patrick said he hoped big school districts would step in to help small districts replace the lesson plans they’d been getting from CSCOPE before—a practical solution, but also the sort of regional partnership that created CSCOPE in the first place. Failing that, he said, of course there’s always the private sector: “There are many vendors that, I’m sure, will try to fill this vacuum starting next year.”

Want to know why Devo really broke up?

We featured Rep. Matt Krause’s House Bill 360 back in February as a “bad bill,” because it would let student groups discriminate among its membership, kicking out students who don’t fall in line with the principles the group was founded on. It’s especially easy to imagine groups kicking out gay members in the name of their founding principles.

Rebecca Robertson, legal and policy director for the ACLU of Texas, put it simply: “It’s not legitimate to use public funds for discriminatory conduct.”

But the Fort Worth Republican said it’s a free speech guarantee, a protection against “subversive” members hoping to hijack a group. He offered what seemed like a hilarious off-hand example at the time: the Red Hat Society, a ladies’ social organization promoting fun, friendship, freedom, fulfillment and fitness. And wearing red hats, probably. “You would exclude the blue hats,” Krause explained.

His bill died at last week’s deadline, but he brought it back today as an amendment to the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s sunset bill. With it, he also resuscitated his old analogy.

“Let’s say there’s a red hat club,” Krause suggested on the House floor today. “Anybody who wants to come in and subvert that, ‘I don’t like red hats’,” well, he suggested they just start their own club.

“Are we opening this up to the Ku Klux Klan?” Krause asked rhetorically. “A school is not going to allow the Ku Klux Klan,” he said answering his own question.

“It doesn’t apply to race, it doesn’t apply to gender, it doesn’t apply to sexual orientation. It only applies to those which would seek to purposefully come in and subvert and undermine the purpose for which the club was in the first place.”

Dallas Democrat Eric Johnson tweeted that it was a “mean-spirited amendment,” and the Texas Freedom Network and LGBT groups were working all day to rally opposition to Krause’s amendment, which had been pre-filed.

Krause’s original bill is exactly the sort of ultra-contentious legislation that’s been kept off the House floor so far this session. Lawmakers have even been pulling down many amendments that might spark bitter partisan battles.

But in a lengthy debate over the amendment, nobody challenged Krause on its implications for gay students, or students of a particular race who could be excluded from a club. Opponents mostly played along with his vague “red hat” scenario—Rep. Senfronia Thompson did suggest replacing it with “The Islamic Club”—and worried it was simply impractical.

Krause batted away suggestions that his plan would run afoul of a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that discrimination in student groups is unconstitutional. He sidestepped the suggestion that his bill would take away local control, or that kicking students out of clubs would create needless paperwork for universities.

Rep. Marisa Marquez (D-El Paso) did press him about what his bill would mean in the long term. ”Things change. They evolve,” she said. “The mission changes, sometimes the demographics change. What you’re saying here is that you have to keep these parameters in place for these clubs.”

“Let’s go back to the red hat club,” Krause suggested. “Let’s say everybody want to wear a red hat so it’s a big club. All of a sudden everybody wants to wear a yellow hat. Eventually it’ll atrophy, it’ll get smaller and it’ll be nonexistent.”

Rep. Harold Dutton (D-Houston) suggested an alternate possibility: “I think the red hats ought to accept the blue hats, and the blue hat doesn’t look blue to me cause it’s now purple.”

The majority of House members disagreed, passing Krause’s amendment 78-67. The bill passed minutes later. Whether Krause’s plan sticks is up to a few House and Senate members who’ll take on the bill in conference committee next.