Texas has a national and international reputation for maintaining an assembly-line death penalty operation, imposing insanely long prison sentences (e.g., 40 life sentences plus 60 years, the longest in Texas history); and a juvenile justice system that treats its youthful offenders like refuse.
The Texas juvenile justice system truly shocks the conscience of any reasonable-thinking person—a system plagued with racism, brutality, and inhumane treatment.
In an April 28, 2023 article written by Jolie McCullough, the Texas Tribune headlined the point that the state of Texas uses its juvenile justice system as “a way to throw kids away.” The headline was taken from a quote given to the news outlet by Alycia Castillo, policy director at the Texas Center for Justice and Equity.
“It seems we really are just using the TDCJ as a way to throw kids away,” Castillo told the Tribune. “My suggestion would be to actually treat the kids that have those most continuing behaviors … Locking them in a cell in an adult prison to be forgotten about is not the way to do that.”
As outlined in the Tribune article, here are some of the more shocking features of the five youth prisons operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) in which roughly 600 juvenile offenders are incarcerated:
- All the facilities suffer from a depleted workforce;
- Lack of staff results in juveniles being held 23 hours a day in a cell without a toilet, where they are forced to use water bottles and food trays as toilets;
- Self-harm is prevalent;
- The juvenile penal system has failed in its “mission of rehabilitation and treatment;”
- Use of restraints and verbal abuse by staff is commonplace; and
- Mental health issues of juvenile inmates go untreated.
Throughout the nation, prosecutors, judges, legislators, and prison systems have struggled over the past two decades with the issue of juvenile crime and justice. This roiling criminal justice issue was even spurred by a series of landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court placing limitations on how the states can punish offenders who commit their crimes as juveniles but are tried and punished as adults. Those decisions are:
- Graham v. Florida (2010): Offenders under age 18 cannot be sentenced to life without parole for non-homicide offenses;
- Miller v. Alabama (2012): The Eighth Amendment forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without the possibility of parole for juvenile homicide offenders;
- Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016): The Miller ruling had to be applied retroactively to more than 2,000 juveniles previously sentenced to life without parole.
Texas has responded to its juvenile justice crisis as it does with most human crises: a tough, law-and-order Republican approach. Texas, through its TDCJ, is transferring its most chaotic and disruptive juvenile detainees into the state’s sprawling prison system that houses roughly 135,000 inmates in 64 penal facilities—places where violence, brutality, corruption, slave labor, prison gangs, and mental illness are prevalent.
Texas Republican lawmakers and prosecutors believe these are the perfect places to warehouse problem youths—quasi-official universities of crime that offer a wide variety of criminal activity courses for a youthful inmate to get educated.
Jack Choate, the executive director of Texas’ Special Prosecution Unit—which handles cases of crimes committed in prison—put it this way to the Tribune:
“The thought was how can we get these 10% of [problematic] kids out of [juvenile] population, so the kids who are doing well and are being rehabilitated aren’t being swept in with the kids who are assaulting staff, assaulting kids.”
16-year-old Joshua Keith Beasley, Jr., a juvenile with an extensive history of mental illness, was transferred out of the juvenile system into the adult system because he hit and spit on an employee. This “assault” came after the kid was hospitalized 12 times for what the Tribune said was “severely harming himself.”
So what happened to Joshua under the Jack Choate plan?
The adult prison system left him alone where he could kill himself. He did. The Tribune reports that seven adult prison employees faced termination for failing to monitor this “problematic” kid.
There are hundreds of youths in the Texas adult prison system, which houses 1100 juveniles tried as adults who are serving life or virtual life sentences, according to The Sentencing Project. In Texas, as in most states, youths who aged out of the juvenile system are forced to complete their sentences in the adult prison system.
Attorney Elizabeth Henneke, founder of Lone Star Justice Alliance, which represents juveniles facing transfer to the adult prison system, told the Tribune:
“If a kid is not thriving at TJJD [Texas’ Juvenile Justice Department], we should ask the question: why? And if it’s due to poor conditions in the unit, a lack of treatment being provided, a lack of education being provided or, in some cases, I’ve had actual abused by TJJD staff that may explain why the kids have failed.”
The Sentencing Project reports that as of August 8, 2024, there are 8600 inmates who committed their crimes as juveniles but who were tried as adults. Many have already been locked up for decades serving life with parole or virtual life sentences (50 or more years). Henry Montgomery spent 57 years in Louisiana’s largest maximum security prison in Angola, before being released on parole in 2021. Fifty-seven of these inmates are serving life with parole or virtual life sentences for non-violent crimes.
As with most things in the nation’s criminal justice system, a disproportionate number of these juveniles tried as adults are Black, who receive the longest prison sentences and serve the most time in prison before being released.
We do not see any positive changes towards changing this juvenile crisis in Texas in the foreseeable future—a state with the worst foster child care and elderly treatment care systems in the nation. Texas politicians, sitting on a roughly 30 billion dollar surplus, love to punish problem children, lock people up, abuse the elderly, deprive the needy, and then go to church on Sunday. That’s Texas justice.