Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Prof. William Bush

The child sexual abuse scandal rocking the Texas Youth Commission is any parent's worst nightmare. Adult officials at the West Texas State School, charged with the care and rehabilitation of troubled boys from 10 to 20 years old, instead, according to staffers, roused boys in the middle of the night to rape them for "hours, sometimes into the early morning." The perpetrators should be punished to the full extent of the law.

The Texas Senate has taken an important first step by voting unanimously to overhaul the management of TYC through a conservator, but even that move does not go far enough. Lost in the heat of the moment is that we've traveled this path before.

The TYC, in fact, owes its existence to a similar scandal. In 1948, the Legislature created the Texas Training School Code Commission to evaluate the state's juvenile correctional facilities. The commission's findings mirror abuses cited recently by state Sens. Juan Hinojosa and John Whitmire: poorly trained staff with a high rate of turnover; the housing of younger and older juveniles together; and an insular culture of covering up abuses. Among the litany of horrors, was "the water cure," in which adult staff members sprayed a high pressure hose on a boy's genitals.

The public and its representatives were outraged enough by these revelations to enact sweeping reforms that put Texas in the forefront of American juvenile corrections. In 1949, the Legislature created the Texas Youth Development Council, the forerunner of the TYC. Its task was to ensure the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders placed in state custody, using the newest knowledge about child and adolescent development. Many observers hoped the agency would be able to keep most troubled juveniles out of institutions altogether by devising community-based responses to delinquency.

That promise was never realized.

Instead, in response to a perceived rise in the number of "violent and serious" juvenile offenders, the TYC expanded its custodial institutions in the 1960s and '70s. Reports of abuse continued to dog the agency, leading both houses of the Legislature to launch well-publicized investigations in 1968-69. The TYC was even featured in an NBC television special, "This Child is Rated X," which aired in May 1971. On camera, teenage boys and their parents described vicious beatings administered by guards.

Finally, in 1971, a class-action lawsuit, Morales v. Turman, was filed against TYC on behalf of hundreds of incarcerated juveniles. The case attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, the American Psychiatric Association and the national media. In the trial phase, a parade of young inmates took the witness stand and described horrific abuses inflicted upon them that were virtually identical to those reported in the 1940s.

Much like the current scandal, the case led to firings and resignations in the TYC board and administration. By the end of the 1970s, two of the most notorious institutions for boys were shut down, and hundreds of juvenile offenders were sent home. Halfway houses, group homes and other non-institutional diversion programs began to gain traction, most notably in the establishment of the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission in 1981. U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, who had presided over the Morales case, supervised TYC until a settlement was reached in 1988 that once again put Texas in a position of national leadership in the field of juvenile corrections.

Now the state is confronting another abuse scandal. Why does this state of affairs persist? Is it a matter of a few individuals covering for one another, or what one critic calls "a dynasty of corruption that condones the mistreatment of youth in its care"?

We have condoned abusive institutions for far too long. If meaningful reform is to take place, we must examine our own preconceptions about the young people who end up in lockdown institutions. Too often, we have been all too willing to view, and punish, youthful offenders as if they were fully responsible adults.

Indeed, the recently ousted TYC chairman, Pete C. Alfaro, was appointed in 1995 amid a national panic over so-called "super-predators." In the first half of the 1990s alone, 40 states passed laws making it easier to try juvenile offenders in adult courts. Is it any wonder, then, that abuses reminiscent of prisons have surfaced even in juvenile institutions?

Breaking the cycle of abuse means that we must acknowledge what the creators of the juvenile court knew more than a century ago: Children and adolescents are more vulnerable and less responsible for their actions than adults. Whenever remotely possible, they should not be warehoused in prison-like institutions, which history has shown are breeding grounds for abuse and brutality.

Today's horrors offer a chance to break the cycle of abuse. It is time to move beyond merely replacing a few staff members and administrators.

Bush, a University of Texas graduate, teaches history at UNLV.