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FIVE “Hard to Reach” The Politics of Delinquency Prevention in Postwar Houston On the afternoon of December 6, 1956, representatives from Houston’s juvenile court met with the tsydc board in Austin. It was a moment of crisis for the tsydc. Several of its key administrative personnel had resigned in recent months, while the Gatesville superintendent, Herman Sapier, had asked to be relieved of his duties . Much of the discussion that morning had revolved around a proposal in the legislature to shutter the agency permanently. The board had voted to make James Turman the new executive director of the tsydc to better represent the agency before the legislature. Turman had accepted the board’s unanimous vote only on the condition that he receive its “total support” at all times, a demand that was put to an immediate test by the Houston delegation. Led by juvenile court judge J. W. Mills and chief juvenile probation officer Paul Irick, the Houston group was there to share news of their recent creation of the state’s first domestic relations court and their expansion of juvenile probation services. They also wanted to know what the tsydc’s future plans were, given the statewide rise in juvenile crime. Mills made clear that he was no admirer of the tsydc’s move toward large institutions; he had been “disturbed” at having to commit a child recently to tsydc custody for an indeterminate period. He asserted that the tsydc should “decentralize” the training schools and locate smaller facilities near large cities, such as Houston, in partnership with city governments. For good measure, he excoriated the idea of lowering the age at which a juvenile could be tried as an adult—an idea Turman had championed in recent tsydc board meetings and would soon promote publicly —as “a big mistake.” Turman blandly rebutted this assertion by citing “pressure in some areas to revise juvenile laws” and rejected Mills’s suggestion about regional facilities as too expensive. The meeting ended cordially but with little having been accomplished. However, this episode was noteworthy for what it revealed about the lack of relationship between the tsydc and local jurisdictions and the distinct perspectives fostered by that widening gulf. As we have seen, the rise of community-based T H E P O L I T I C S O F D E L I N Q U E N C Y P R E V E N T I O N · 127 child welfare, recreation and mental health services in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had helped nurture demand for reform in the statewide administration of juvenile justice, which in turn contributed to the creation of the tsydc. When budgetary restrictions and internal ideological shifts led the tsydc to retreat from its short-lived work with local reformers, those groups were forced to seek support elsewhere for new policies, programs, and innovations. This chapter focuses on Houston, picking up where chapter 2 left off chronologically in the early 1950s, just as the tsydc was fading from the local scene. It explores the impact of rapid growth, suburbanization, and racial and ethnic conflict on the politics of juvenile delinquency in the state’s largest—and by 1960, the nation’s fifth largest—metropolitan area. The most notable local campaign against juvenile delinquency received sponsorship not from the tsydc but from the federal government. Inaugurated in 1962, Houston Action for Youth (hay) was funded initially by the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime and later under the Community Action Program of the War on Poverty. As we shall see, it was bedeviled by some of the same types of representational issues that had surfaced during the tsydc’s early media campaigns. Although a disproportionate number of youth in Houston’s juvenile justice system were African American and Mexican American, hay chose to portray the problem of juvenile delinquency as largely white, middle-class, and psychological in orientation. Once hay began working with actual at-risk youth in some of Houston’s roughest areas, however, the agency moved to embrace the theory of the “culture of poverty,” which had its own problems. Overall, Houston’s reformers, while flawed in ways that echoed the tsydc’s shortcomings, could not escape a confrontation with social, economic, and political root causes for delinquency that had gone ignored at the state level through much of the postwar era. In some instances, even well-meaning reform efforts echoed the tsydc’s practice of implicitly or overtly...

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