John Hill for the State of Texas

(5)Corralling MaverickChild Care Home Operators

(5) Corralling Maverick Child Care Home Operators I focused on consumer and environmental protection during my first year as attorney general because the abuses in those areas cried out for attention but were ignored by our state’s leaders in deference to business lobbyists. I quickly learned there were other abuses that also cried out for attention but simply were not heard because they could not compete against all the other issues that held our attention. Such was the case of a stealth industry that had sprung up almost entirely unnoticed in the late 1960s and early 1970s to accommodate parents, social service agencies, and courts unprepared for the tidal wave of teenage runaways. I was caught unaware, as were most state government leaders , when this issue exploded in the summer of my first term. Governmental regulation of these facilities for troubled youth was scant, allowing many of them to be owned and operated by untrained or unqualified amateurs unprepared for the level of physical and psychological challenges posed by the often turbulent personalities of these young people. Occasionally in self-defense or fear, often because they succumbed to frustration at their inability to cope, and perhaps because they were overcome by the temptation to punish a vulnerable younger person, the keepers of these facilities sometimes resorted to brutality. Regrettably, the state’s fledgling efforts to protect children in these privately managed facilities sometimes were compromised by a combination of factors. These included political interference, an ambiguous attitude in state government toward aggressive enforcement of regulatory laws, and parents so desperate to solve a problem with a child that they turned a blind eye to evidence of abuse or approved of its use as a deserved punishment for misbehavior.1 (90) Chapter 4 The increasing number of runaways was a by-product of the social upheaval of the 1960s, which unmoored many teenagers from the disciplined home life their parents had known. Use of marijuana, methamphetamines, LSD, and other mood-altering drugs by young people was popularized by countercultural entertainers, journalists, and political activists in the 1960s. Oral contraceptives became available in the early 1960s, freeing young people from most of society’s inhibitions about premarital sexual relations. New legal rights for women, along with growing employment opportunities , helped launch the women’s liberation movement during this era. The divorce rate in Texas increased 28 percent from 1960 to 1970. Pushed by the passage in 1967 of a no-fault divorce law, the rate had jumped another 13 percent by 1972.2 A TIME magazine cover story in 1970 chronicled the establishment of about three thousand “hippie” communes catering to alternative lifestyles.3 School dropouts resulting from by this turmoil quickly overwhelmed traditional social service and law enforcement facilities. Into this void stepped entrepreneurs such as Joseph D. Farrar of Houston. His unsuccessful career in college administration was followed by a job as a high school music teacher while he counseled students as a private sideline. He converted this off-hours job into a full-time business by advertising himself as a psychologist, in violation of a state law limiting that designation to holders of a PhD from an accredited university. As the business grew, he expanded the operation into a day school for students with learning and behavioral problems, a facility he never licensed with the state, and then a rural residential facility northeast of Houston, which he also declined to license with the state.4 Farrar’s world had begun to unravel on Mother’s Day, 1971. Charles “Sonny” Huey, a fifty-year-old deputy game warden responsible for patrolling an area in northeast Liberty County near the southern edge of the Big Thicket National Preserve, was driving near the tiny community of Rosemary when he received a mid-morning call on his car radio from a deputy sheriff in Cleveland, about ten miles away. He asked Huey to help find several runaways from a troubled teenagers’ residential facility near Rayburn named Artesia Hall. This area of the state about forty-five miles northeast of Houston was densely wooded pine forests with small towns scattered along railroad lines and highways. As Huey began his search along narrow roads crisscrossing the area, he spotted a girl running across a road and into the woods. He stopped Maverick Child Care Home Operators (91) his car, jumped out, started walking slowly, and began calling out to the girl, warning...