ustxtxb_obs_1959_02_14_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

Public Defender Bill Limited to Bexar ELLIS WARNS OF RIOTS AUSTIN Sen. Henry Gonzalez, narrowing his bill to authorize public defenders to his own Bexar County after Sen. George Parkhouse, Dallas, voiced opposition and Sen. Bob Baker, Houston, failed to comment, expects the bill to be advanced when it is restricted to Bexar. A subcommittee of Parkhouse, Gonzalez, and Jep Fuller, Port Arthur, is expected to report on the bill to the Senate judiciary committee Monday. The revised bill would authorize Bexar to employ a public defender with county funds to defend indigent defendants and would require him to carry forward appeals when he thought them justified. Originally the bill included Harris, Tarrant, Dallas, and Bexar. Testifying for the bill, Bexar Cty. Cmsr. Albert Pena said ,it is badly needed in Bexar; where a third of the people make less than $2,000 a year. Court-appointed lawyers are usually “inexperienced and young,” he said. “A fair trial unfortunately at times is decided by a man’s pocketbook,” and often a poor defendant gets members and of its “un favorable location” should actually be in a position to pay a little Higher than other state universities to get comparable talent. Ransom also stoutly defended, the library fund requests, maintaining the University library is the “research center of the state” annually handling “thousands” of requests for research materials from other Texas schools. Tuition Raise Opposed Wilson dwelled on the past legislative practice of using the University’s available fund oil revenues to meet current operating expenses. He urged the available fund be used for enrichment purposes instead, a viewpoint shared by the Governor but not by the Legislative Budget Board. Wilson said, “To the extent the available fund is used merely to balance the ordinary operating budget, it ceases to be an educational endowment of the university and becomes an endowment of the state general revenue fund. If it is used properly, it will give only “a three minutes’ whispered interview” with his court named lawyer. Parkhouse said, “A public defender’s office would cost approximately the same amount as the district attorney’s of f i c e. We would be setting up two offices to fight each other. I don’t think society owes to every indigent criminal the same legal obligation it owes itself to prosecute criminals. This would go far beyond the laws of guaranteeing fair trials.” He said the Dallas Crime Cornmission and his county commissioners court oppose the bill. After the hearing a reporter asked Parkhouse, “Who in Dallas is against the bill, the criminal attorneys?” “Everybody,” he meplied. Pena said after the hearing, “Juan Tortilla has bTen in jail six months and he’s ready to agree to anything. He has a threeminute whispered interview with the court lawyer. who often tells him to plead guilty, asks him `You gonna take three years or five years?'” Gonzalez asked for more time to modify the bill to limit it to Bexar, and the subcommittee was assigned this task. us a superior university for the price of a pretty good one, but if we have to use it to balance the operating budget, we sink back to the level of mediocrity.” Both Ransom and Wilson spoke out against new increases in student tuitions, which were raised in 1957 from $25 to $50 per semester. “Society in general benefits from education,” Wilson said, “and the higher you raise tuition, the more students you eliminate, the more it is ‘selection by pocketbook rather than by worth.” Wilson supported the 1957 increase. Subsequently State Education Commissioner J. W. Edgar told the House appropriations committee that federal aid to education is “very \(Much a reality” in Texas and that one of the major needs of the state education agency is more money to support federalstate programs for vocational and rehabilitation education \(Obs’. milk programs. Edgar said the agency’s current $292 million public school budget includes $11.5 million in federal funds. L.G. best in the U.S., but from any other vantage point “we don’t have a first class prison.” There should be a psychologist in every unit and twice as many doctors; at Easthan farm there are 1500 men and “not even a trained nurse.” In the past the board hasn’t asked for enough money. “We’re just playing catchup. This appropriation will just get 400 men off the floorthey’re sleeping there tonight, down on the lower farms. What Mr. Ellis euphemistically 1 calls dormitoriesI say they’re tanks, 200 men in. big rooms …. In those tanks sexual perversion cannot be prevented with. the best supervision, and abuse of the weak by the strong among the convicts cannot be prevented.” H. H. Coffield, board president from Rockdale, presented the board’s request to be allowed to turn the Blue Ridge farm property in to the state for $1.2 million and buy some property outside Huntsville to replace it. No Youth Parole Dr. James A. Turman, executive director, Texas Youth Council, presented the case for the state’s youth institutions. He asked for many administrative pay raises, including a $5,000 raise for himself from $10,000 to $15,000. He said it is next to impossible to attract people from other areas to work in the state reform schools at from $220 to $260 a month: he is seeking raises for them of about $100 a month. The budget board struck entirely the T.Y.C. request for a juvenile parole supervision system, cost of which the council estimated at $685,000 for the biennium. With 1700 delinquent children on parole from Gatesville, Gainesville, and Crockett schools, Turman said, “We do not have a single person on our staff to take care of this responsibility.” Of the delinquents sent to these schools, he said, 78 percent come from 28 big-city counties. Every one of these counties, he said, has some county juvenile parole system, but nevertheless, 81 percent of the young people who go back to reform school from violated paroles are from the same 28 counties. “Many of these kids come out of the junkheaps of society. It is a problem to find a place for them to live. To return them to the cesspools from which they come is a waste of the state’s money,” Turman said. Broken parole runs 33 percent at Gatesville, he said. Local parole officers in the big cities are “the very first to tell you they can only do a superficial ‘job,” and the courts in Travis County have declared that as of March 1 they will do nothing more to supervise juvenile parole for the state, he said. Youths sent to state reform schools get indeterminate sentences. At Gatesville, with 1130 youngsters where only 810 have been planned for, the average youth spends about six months, too little time for rehabilitation, Turman said. Then he’s let go without any supervision. “It is a physical impossibility for us to carry out an adequate training program under such overcrowded conditions,” Turman said. Rep. Truett Latimer, Abilene, sought to have Turman explain a day in the life of a youth in a reform school, ‘but Turman, in two answers, did not do so. Turman and a board member said about 30 percent of the Gatesville inmates walk off “the campus” every year; but later Turman said this figure was too high. The council is asking for a new reform school with a fence around it to which the more troublesome boys could be assigned. There is no fence at Gatesville. Rep. Virginia Duff, Ferris, developed that a safety device to unlock all 40 doors in a dorm at Gainesville school for girls is located where a fire could block it off from gtiards, in which case the only way the girls could be freed in event of fire would be by axe. Turman said he accepted this criticism of the safety device and will be glad when the girls get out of the firetrap and move into a new building. Bill Windsor, new T.Y.C.. chairman, said about all a boy learns at Gatesville in five months is more wrinkles in the criminal arts. “This parole system is absolutely necessary. We can’t hope really to do an effective job without it,” he said. Turman pointed out that building a fence around Gatesville might lead to riot; that “runways” and riots are expressions of the same impulses that develop in overcrowded places of detention with poor food. Neglected Negro Kids Turman called for a new state home for neglected Negro children. “Gentlemen, there’s not to my knowledge a single bed in Texas, state supported, for neglected Negro children,” he said. “What happens is they stay on the streets and then we get ’em at Crockett or Gatesville” \(schools The council asked for considerably more construction than the budget board allowed them, including the new boys’ reform school and the state home for neglected Negro Children. Abilene and Hearne, respectively, have offered free land for these two new institutions. Mrs. Maxine Burlingham, superintendent of the Gainesville school for girls, at which returns are 18 percent, compared to 33 percent at Gatesville, described a day in the life of a girl at the school to Latimer’s and the committees satisfaction. She said the school goes only to the seventh grade and asked for teachers through the ninth. “We have had girls stay four years simply because there was no place to send them,” she said. “Until we can get a parole system of people who can go in and help these children during those first three months, when they wobbleand need supportthen we’re spinning our wheels!” Mrs. Emma G. Harrell, superintendent of the Crockett ‘school for Negro girls, said the average girl stays there 16 months but some much longer “because we have no place to send them after they get out.” 0. F. Perry, superintendent at Gatesville, asked for an eight-hour work day for attendants, who now work 12 hours a day. He said he has 60 or 70 boys in dormsmore than 90 in each of two dorms and 40 is about right. Clothes for $70, $80? Heads of the three institutions for neglected children, at Corsicana, Waco, and Austin, presented exceptions to budget board cuts, too. Herbert Wilson of the Waco home said that $80 , a year for clothes for the children, who attend the public ‘schools in Waco, had been cut to $70 by the board, whereas $80 would give them clothes “like the average, not the best, but not perhaps the worst,” and this, he felt, was important to growing girls, especially. Don Jackson, superintendent at Corsicana, said the board’s ciit of $16,000 in operations at Corsicana will “hurt the children.” J. C. McAdams of the Austin school for Negro children said the budget board appropriated on the basis of 175 children at the school, whereas 200 are likely. R. D. UT Hits Tuition Hike BUSINESS PROTESTS RAISE Texas Ranks First in 8 Types Of Federal Aid Received AUSTIN Texas ranked first in 1958 among all the states of the union in federal aid received in eight categories, and second among all the states in federal aid received in four other categories, in spite of the prevailing custom of Texas officeholders to oppose federal aid. A legislative bulletin of the council of state governments said Texas received $288.3 million in federal grants-in-aid in 1958, about $39 million more than in 1957. Texas ranked first among the states in federal aid in these programs. agricultural experiment stations, $1.1 million; agricultural extension w o r k, $2.8 million; watershed protection and flood prevention, $4.8 million; primary highway fund s, $28.2 million; secondary highway funds, $16.2 million;venereal disease control, $.1 million; hospital construction, $6.8 million; child welfare services, $.5 million. The Lone Star State also ranked second in funds received for the national school lunch program, $5.4 million; old age assistance, $88.1 million; services for crippled children, $.7 million; wildlife conservation, $.8 million. Texas ranked third in federal funds received for interstate highways, maintenance and operation of schools, aid to the blind, and material and child health services; fourth in urban highway funds, vocational educational, control of heart disease, and general health assistance; fifth in civil defense, school construction, men tal health control, cancer control, and water pollution ontrol; sixth in A&M colleges and TB control; and seventh in aid to airports and aid to dependent children. reasonable, logical, and just, and I think Texas needs it.” When Rep. Cowan made the motion to adjourn until Feb. 24 “to give these witnesses and other businessmen a chance to study the bill to see how it would affect them and then report back to this committee,” Winfree jumped to his feet to say such a lengthy adjournment would have the effect of killing the bill. “We have to complete these hearings and then send the bili. to subcommittee, get it back and passed in March in order for the state to get any money when this bill goes into effect May 1.” He moved to table Cowan’s motion, and the committee did so by voice vote. Witnesses from smaller corporations followed the oil spokesmen to the microphone. Several accused the Governor of contradicting himself by backing a program to attract industry through advertising while at the same time discouraging them from coming by raising corporate taxes, W. A. Kirkland of the Lufkin Foundry a n d Machinery Co., which manufactures o i 1 field equipment, said the domestic crude oil recession has reduced earnings and made sales more competitive so that “somewhere there is a point of no return.” Leland Ross, executive vice president of Corpus Christi Home Builders Assn., said the raise would discourage the capitalization of profits. Joe E. Rich, Lufkin Foundry & Machine Co. personnel director, said most orporations want to carry their share of the tax burden, and “the present tax accomplishes this.” As Winfree’s sole witness for the bill, Steakley said the new allocation formula is designed to tax more accurately and realistically those multi state corporations which are not now carrying their fair share of the ‘burden. His contention the tax was deductible from federal levies was challenged by one business representative, who said “you have to make a profit before you’re taxed at the federal 52 per cent rate. Under this tax, you pay whether you make a profit or not.” The franchise tax has been increased frequently in recent years. Pegged at $1.00 per $1,000 taxable capital in 1946, it stands now at $2.25 and would be increased under Winfree’s bill to $2.85 for one year before reverting to $2.25. The changed formulas would become a permanent part of the franchise tax, however. Committee chairman V. L. Ramsey estimated he’d received some