Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Photo by MONA REEDER of the Dallas Morning News

As the American-Statesman's Mike Ward showed so poignantly in his Sunday story ("Guards' hurts stir oversight concerns"), we're getting what we pay for at the Texas Youth Commission.

Brutal violence is an everyday occurrence at the Youth Commission largely because the state of Texas is allowing under-trained, understaffed and underpaid correctional officers to oversee youths.

Though the results are less outrageous, the adult system is in similar shape. There, correctional officer training, turnover and pay are only slightly better, but the results are startlingly similar: 36 percent of all reported inmate rapes in the United States occur in Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) prisons.

It's time to confront a new reality: You can't incarcerate on the cheap. Public safety costs money. It's time for comprehensive reform.

The Youth Commission and TDCJ operate in a culture of concealment. Let the sun shine in and heed the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, whose 2006 report called for independent inspector generals who can inspect any facility at any time without notice. The Legislature also should create and fully staff its own monitoring system.

Right now, the "new boots" aren't ready for this difficult and dangerous job. The Department of Criminal Justice requires only five weeks of training. The Youth Commission is even less demanding. As Ward reported, training in defusing violent situations is sorely lacking.

Currently, there is no correctional officer accreditation system at either the Department of Criminal Justice or the Youth Commission. Consequently, staff quality is inconsistent, and the standards to which they're held are set at the whim of wardens and superintendents. Professionalizing the staff — with requirements that include reporting abuse — will improve performance and morale.

Texas operates the only major incarceration system that doesn't formally negotiate with frontline employees over safety and the best ways to accomplish the agency's mission. With few rights, correctional officers are in a constant state of fear for their jobs and safety. That may be one reason why, for example, the abuse by top-level Youth Commission administrators went unreported for so long at the Pyote facility.

Correctional officers deserve expanded whistleblower protections and an employee grievance system that is clear, open and not decided by the warden or superintendent. There also should be an employee-management consultation process to head off emerging problems, and correctional officers should be allowed to organize at units. Correctional officer pay at Department of Criminal Justice is 47th in the country. Pay at the Youth Commission is so low it isn't even on the radar screen. To attract and keep quality correctional officers, pay must be increased to the national average, and these employees should be placed in a separate, 12-year career ladder.

Low-level offenders, drug and alcohol addicts and probation-eligible inmates are clogging state prison units. Instead of building and staffing costly prisons, the chairmen of the two committees that oversee prisons, state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, and state Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Richardson, want to move these inmates out of state units and into programs that will turn lives around.

Meanwhile, many have called for moving many juvenile offenders into adequately funded community-based programs instead of crowded Youth Commission facilities.

In 2001, the House and Senate unanimously passed House Bill 3185, which would have put into effect most of these reforms at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. However, Gov. Rick Perry vetoed the bill, saying that the department would implement them without the legislation. It never did.

Six years later, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice remains short at least 3,200 officers, still loses about 6,000 (25 percent) a year, and is just as violent and overcrowded as ever. At the Youth Commission, the story is obviously worse and the consequences have been more dire.

All of these issues are on the table again at the Legislature. It's time to act — finally.

Simpson is the Texas political and legislative director for the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represents TDCJ correctional officers.