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SEVEN Creating a Right to Treatment Morales v. Turman, 1971–1988 In July 1971, each of the tyc’s roughly 2,500 training school inmates received a sealed envelope. In it were a questionnaire and a cover letter from Judge William Wayne Justice, of the Eastern District of Texas, presiding in the case of Morales v. Turman. The letter explained that the tyc was standing trial and requested that inmates complete the enclosed survey. Inmates were assured that their responses would be kept confidential, in keeping with the court’s interest in protecting their “legal rights.” The questions focused on whether inmates had received a court hearing or counsel before being committed to tyc custody. Of the 2,294 respondents , 863 had hearings without legal counsel, while 280 had never set foot in a courtroom. Nearly half of the tyc’s inmate population, in other words, had been committed in violation of the due process requirements laid down in the Gault ruling. It is possible to view this result as a consequence of the tyc’s change in mission during the 1950s. Had the tyc maintained its early role as an arbiter of standard procedures in local juvenile courts, it might have taken the lead in ensuring compliance with Gault. However, by withdrawing from the field and narrowing its focus essentially to incarceration, the agency seemed to be barely aware of the problem, let alone concerned about it. Moreover, as if these revelations were not damning enough, about fifty respondents scribbled on the back of their questionnaires handwritten descriptions of abuses suffered at the hands of staff. This information, along with some of the testimonials obtained by Bercu from his initial group of clients, opened the door to expanding the case’s focus from due process to conditions of confinement. Throughout spring and summer 1971, tyc officials struggled to respond to the horror stories that had been circulating publicly in recent years. Their descriptions of juvenile inmates vacillated from ominous warnings about their dangerousness to sympathetic invocations of “hurt, frightened children.” From tyc director Turman ’s perspective, the focus on the agency’s most controversial training schools was frustrating. The tyc was also responsible for two orphan homes for dependent 174 · C H A P T E R S E V E N children, which had experienced no serious scandals over the years. Equally quiet was the Crockett School for Girls and the recently opened Brownwood facility just west of Austin, which served as the diagnostic intake center for all female commitments and offered an experimental, coeducational rehabilitation program that would later receive praise from the Morales litigators and experts. Although only partially implemented over the previous decade, the tyc’s juvenile parole program was now staffed with twenty officers working in most of the state’s major urban areas. In short, the tyc was doing some things right that were being lost in the whirlwind of abuse scandals and legal actions. At the same time, as we saw in the 1969 legislative investigations, many Texans were becoming impatient with what they viewed as the tyc’s overreliance on large institutions. This anti-institutional critique dovetailed with a national trend. One of the more influential expert witnesses in the Morales case was Jerome Miller, who had taken the then-unprecedented step of closing down all of Massachusetts’s juvenile training schools during his tenure as director of the state’s Department of Youth Services. The move attracted national media attention; in numerous interviews and later a memoir, Miller explained how he had come to Massachusetts to “clean up” its scandal-ridden juvenile facilities. However, he quickly found his efforts frustrated by a staff accustomed to running a prisonlike program of control and custody; community groups fearful of delinquents allowed to run wild due to “permissive” treatment policies; and elected officials with vested economic interests in maintaining the status quo. Miller developed an anti-institutional critique that was also being adopted by analysts of the “prison-industrial complex” spreading across the Sun Belt region and by critics of mental hospitals who believed that the mentally ill and mentally retarded could be integrated into everyday society. He also seemed to identify many of the key obstacles to reform in the troubled history of Texas’s juvenile justice system. However, the overarching reality was that the tyc had failed to keep up with the changing face of juvenile justice. Apathetic to new concerns about child welfare and children’s rights, the agency also...

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