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Introduction Race, Childhood, and Juvenile Justice History On February 16, 2007, an article on the Texas Observer Web site exposed a gruesome sex abuse scandal at the West Texas State School, a juvenile corrections facility in the remote town of Pyote, near Odessa. Over the next several weeks, news reports revealed that the school’s assistant superintendent, Ray Brookins, and its principal, John Paul Hernandez, had coerced sexual favors from several juvenile inmates over a period of at least two years. Compounding the alleged crime was an inexplicably slow response from authorities. Between December 2003 and February 2005, staff complaints about Brookins’s and Hernandez’s suspicious behavior had fallen on deaf ears in the upper echelons of the Texas Youth Commission (tyc), the agency charged with administering the state’s juvenile facilities. Finally, in February 2005, Marc Slattery, a volunteer math tutor from nearby Midland, was approached by two students who wanted to confess “something ‘icky.’” As Slattery later told a reporter, “I knew it must have been something bad if they had no word for it.” Slattery soon discovered that boys were being led into the administration building each night for forced encounters with Brookins, who had used his power to unilaterally lengthen or shorten youths’ sentences to exact sex from inmates. Appalled, Slattery contacted a Texas Ranger named Brian Burzynski, who launched an investigation. Within weeks, Burzynski had gathered sufficient evidence to charge both Brookins and Hernandez with multiple criminal charges. Instead , however, two years passed, during which the tyc forced both men to resign, a criminal case stalled in the offices of the local county prosecutor, and the United States Attorney’s Office in San Antonio resisted numerous requests to take action. When news outlets finally broke the story, they portrayed a cover-up orchestrated by top administrators and enabled by, according to the Dallas Morning News, “a culture in which prison officials were free to abuse their power” and “punish children who tried to complain about them.” The story was subsequently picked up by the national media and mushroomed into a major scandal. 2 · I N T R O D U C T I O N The west Texas incident turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. Subsequent investigations revealed over 2,000 confirmed allegations of staff-on-inmate violence between 2003 and 2006 and more than 60 instances of “suspicious” broken bones treated by medical personnel. An abuse hotline launched by the tyc immediately after the scandal broke amassed more than 1,100 complaints in less than a month. The tyc released nearly 500 youth inmates, mostly misdemeanants, and arrested, fired, or suspended numerous employees. In March 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice declared that the violent conditions at the Evins Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburg, Texas, south of San Antonio in the Rio Grande Valley, violated the constitutional right of incarcerated youth to be adequately protected from harm while in state custody. Along with complaints about lack of programming and sufficient staff, the report described Evins as having an assault rate five times the national average. Meanwhile, several inmates and their families launched personal injury lawsuits against the state. One of the most-watched cases was that of Shaquanda Cotton, a fifteen-year-old African American girl from the east Texas town of Paris, who received an indeterminate sentence (up to age twenty-one) for shoving a hall monitor in school. Portrayed in the national press as a victim of racially motivated sentencing, Cotton briefly became a symbol for civil rights advocates, who won her release at the end of March 2007. Cotton subsequently described the conditions at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex in Brownwood for a feature in Seventeen magazine: “Seeing the barbwire fences and guards terrified me. I was given an orange jumpsuit and socks and taken to my quarters—a tiny room that had only a bed, a bookshelf, and a desk. Some of [the other inmates] had committed serious crimes, like murder.” Public anger ran deep. While some critics denounced what they saw as a clearcut case of racial profiling, others alleged a deliberate conspiracy against all juvenile offenders regardless of race or ethnicity. “Staff are being paid your tax money to rape your children,” declared Randal Chance, a former tyc inspector, who described the agency as “a dynasty of corruption that condones the mistreatment of youth in its care.” For its part, the Texas legislature promulgated an overhaul of the tyc’s...

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