Speaker 1: What's fucked my home state? Yea, this is Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards podcast Bad People tell you all about him. We
Speaker 1: have an opening schema that I used in the last
Speaker 1: episode that dates back several years, where I would I
Speaker 1: would essentially say, what's xing my wise. It started with
Speaker 1: generic introduction, you know, what's cracking my peppers and stuff?
Speaker 1: And now it's become completely atomized from its origins and
Speaker 1: probably makes no sense to people who are just like
Speaker 1: hopping into an episode, But that's how we introduce you sometimes.
Speaker 1: So hello, it's quite a joy, man. I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 1: And we don't usually introduce ourselves, and sometimes we forget
Speaker 1: to introduce our guests. Yep, our guest who is of
Speaker 1: course Prop. I will not be saying your your your
Speaker 1: government name. Appreciate that. It's all yeah, yeah, um Prop.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about Texas? How truthful do you
Speaker 1: want me to answer this? It's fine, it's fine. I
Speaker 1: can't stay in this place. Yeah, I couldn't, like you know, now,
Speaker 1: there's things about it that are nice. Yeah. Now, as
Speaker 1: a caveat, there are plenty of lovely people that I
Speaker 1: adore that live in Texas, one of which is my grandmother,
Speaker 1: you know, was from Sulfur Springs and moved to Dallas,
Speaker 1: and my father was born into big d you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, And like, so I got some I
Speaker 1: got some some roots out there. That being said, I
Speaker 1: don't know nobody in my family that still lives there
Speaker 1: because pretty much strange from that side of the family.
Speaker 1: That being said, the ones that were from Texas that
Speaker 1: I do know, all came to California in the sixties.
Speaker 1: So in my mind that Californians. So I moved from
Speaker 1: Texas to California. It was one of the best decisions
Speaker 1: I ever made my family, just like my great grandma. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's see, there's a thing that you get. I mean,
Speaker 1: I say, it's about half of the people that I
Speaker 1: love in the world still live in Texas. There's wonderful
Speaker 1: things about it. There's still only Texas has but like
Speaker 1: there is a feeling a lot of people get living
Speaker 1: in Texas that more or less I would sum up
Speaker 1: as I gotta get the funk out of here, out
Speaker 1: of this place. One of my d j's from San
Speaker 1: Angelo that I worked with, the same thing. He was
Speaker 1: just like, I'm a Texan, but I cannot wait to leave. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is indelibly printed on my soul. There's all
Speaker 1: sorts of things about me that are very deeply Texan.
Speaker 1: But like, well, I just at a point where I
Speaker 1: was like I'm going, yeah, I gotta get out of here.
Speaker 1: And yeah, David, Um, I like I like a lot
Speaker 1: of West Texas. Um, had some real good times in
Speaker 1: Hill Country. Um. There's kinds of freedom that you can
Speaker 1: have in Texas. If you're a white person, I should
Speaker 1: I should stay. Yeah. If you are a white person, yeah,
Speaker 1: um that you you don't often find other parts of
Speaker 1: this country, even as a white person. There's like things
Speaker 1: that you can get up to in Texas that are
Speaker 1: absolutely nuts. Um. But it comes with a couple of caveats,
Speaker 1: one of them being the fact that Texas has probably
Speaker 1: the most nightmarish juvenile justice system in the entire United States, which,
Speaker 1: as we have discussed a number of times in this podcast,
Speaker 1: including earlier this week, has a pretty shitty history with
Speaker 1: juvenile justice. Texas is unquestionably the worst. Like the state
Speaker 1: that is the has the worst history with juvenile justice,
Speaker 1: and that's Texas is winning in a contest that includes
Speaker 1: fucking Florida. It's crazy like, do you know how much
Speaker 1: Florida hates kids? Yes, Florida really really hates keys Texas.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Yeah, that's what we're about to talk about today.
Speaker 1: Um So, in our last episode, I opened by giving
Speaker 1: a history of the term super predator, and while that
Speaker 1: specific term was the creation of a single man, he
Speaker 1: was simply the latest in a line of men who
Speaker 1: have spent generations building and reinforcing an area if that
Speaker 1: some children are inherently dangerous and must be policed brutally
Speaker 1: for the safety of all. William S. Bush is a
Speaker 1: PhD u S History professor from the University of Texas
Speaker 1: at Austin. And he's a good guy. I introduced him
Speaker 1: after you're talking about the super predator thing. No, he's
Speaker 1: he's he's a he knows his ship. He wrote a
Speaker 1: book that is one of the major sources for this episode,
Speaker 1: with one of the most chilling titles for a book
Speaker 1: I've ever heard. It's called Who Gets a Childhood? And
Speaker 1: it is about the criminal justice system in Texas. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's It's interesting, dude, because it's like one of the
Speaker 1: things among like black activism is the idea that like
Speaker 1: black and brown children are forced to be adults in
Speaker 1: the eyes of the law, way before we're ready to
Speaker 1: be it. So, yeah, okay, this is crazy and bull
Speaker 1: boy he does focus a lot of it is about
Speaker 1: racism in the Texas criminal justice juvenile justice system. It's
Speaker 1: a good book. I recommend it. It's very readable. It
Speaker 1: is kind of an academic text, but it's a very
Speaker 1: readable one. Um now, Bush and it, folks, this is
Speaker 1: a book about Texas specific. Bush notes that historians of
Speaker 1: childhood claim that the or tend to agree that the
Speaker 1: concept of of what they call protected childhood started in
Speaker 1: the United States around the eighteen twenties. Obviously, this is
Speaker 1: the thing happening in different parts of the world in
Speaker 1: different ways. But like we now see childoo was like,
Speaker 1: you have to not just that, Like you have to
Speaker 1: protect children, which is the thing people have always done,
Speaker 1: but you have to protect children from certain things like
Speaker 1: understanding and interacting in the world the same way in
Speaker 1: adult That's right, kids don't work, they shouldn't. We most
Speaker 1: people agree on that now, like like kids should not
Speaker 1: recent labor like adults labor. Kids should not be subject
Speaker 1: to some of the realities that adults are subject to.
Speaker 1: These are we can always debate some of this stuff,
Speaker 1: like particularly hiding certain realities of the world from kids,
Speaker 1: but these are things society broadly agrees upon. Now, this
Speaker 1: is what a protected childhood is, right, the idea that
Speaker 1: you protect kids from some of the things that adults
Speaker 1: have to deal with. And no, the movement towards this
Speaker 1: concept for protected childhood in the United States, and again
Speaker 1: we're talking in the U s. Here, it happens other
Speaker 1: places different ways. There's a lot of academics here. Please,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to this is this is a broad overview.
Speaker 1: This movement starts with the free school and Sunday school
Speaker 1: social movements, which again kind of the eighteen twenties come down.
Speaker 1: As we've talked about actually in a couple of recent episodes.
Speaker 1: These all start in like the Northeast and kind of
Speaker 1: spread to the rest of the country. These ideas that
Speaker 1: like school should be free, every kid should get an
Speaker 1: education and it shouldn't cost them anything. And also the
Speaker 1: idea that like Sunday school is a is a thing,
Speaker 1: which is you know, tied to religion, but also also
Speaker 1: tied to this idea that like this very new idea
Speaker 1: that like education is a thing that every kid deserves.
Speaker 1: So people died all the time back then for basically
Speaker 1: no reason, which also meant that like in this period,
Speaker 1: there's a ton of orphans, you know. Um, And so
Speaker 1: when people started this kind of long process of giving
Speaker 1: a ship about childhood's for children, um, it leads to
Speaker 1: a bunch of facilities getting opened, not just to deal
Speaker 1: with orphaned kids, but to deal with like kids were
Speaker 1: delinquent kids who have various kind of behavioral issues. They
Speaker 1: all kind of get shoved into the same place. These
Speaker 1: these are generally called houses of refuge. And it's a
Speaker 1: mix because obviously they are saying like well, if you're
Speaker 1: homeless or or if you're a kid committing petty crimes,
Speaker 1: you belong in the same place, which is not great, um,
Speaker 1: but also it is it is good, and that it's
Speaker 1: kind of as a society people being like, well, even
Speaker 1: though they're not my kid, I as a member of
Speaker 1: society have some responsibility towards And that's just a fun
Speaker 1: this facility, which is not a bad development. Again, it's problematic,
Speaker 1: but yeah, but it's a communal understanding that like the
Speaker 1: children are ours, yeah, not just yours, they're ours, and
Speaker 1: like we and if we want to like live in
Speaker 1: a community that we enjoy, Like I should invest in
Speaker 1: your the other things around me, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I think often when we talk about movements like this,
Speaker 1: it is easy to focus on like the horrible negatives
Speaker 1: which we'll be talking about. Everything today we're gonna talking
Speaker 1: about comes from this. But it's not one thing or
Speaker 1: the other entirely it is. There's a lot that's sucked
Speaker 1: up about this. It also is coming from this place
Speaker 1: of like, oh, there's all these children on the streets
Speaker 1: and like maybe we have a responsibility to them some
Speaker 1: money here too. Wait, You'm I mad? Yeah, what what
Speaker 1: are you doing? People? What you're doing on the quarter
Speaker 1: three years old? Yeah? Yeah, I would even say this man,
Speaker 1: Like even just going through as a parent, like I'm saying,
Speaker 1: as like a now a parent is like even when
Speaker 1: going through just the history of the decisions other parents
Speaker 1: or societies have made for their kids that obviously that
Speaker 1: weren't preposterous, but ones that are like the reality is
Speaker 1: like there's no this a whole last human and you're like,
Speaker 1: there's nothing more terrifying than the idea of like their
Speaker 1: life is in my hands and I don't know what
Speaker 1: the funk I'm doing? Like that that existential dread. I
Speaker 1: feel like, if you're going to be a good parent,
Speaker 1: you have felt that fear where you're like, I don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm doing, YO saying, You're like, where do
Speaker 1: what do I I can't I don't know what I'm
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to
Speaker 1: fund this kid up. You know what I'm saying. And
Speaker 1: you know, you're like, well, I'm fucked up, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, Like, I mean, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: just I think, like I think you're like, I don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm doing, but at least I know you
Speaker 1: should live on a damn streets man, Like there needs
Speaker 1: to be some sort of adult in your life, right,
Speaker 1: like you know, I mean, yeah, yeah, and that that
Speaker 1: that's kind of happening on a really broad scale here,
Speaker 1: and a lot of it's made possible because of industrialization.
Speaker 1: Both there's a lot more people from industrialization kind of
Speaker 1: all the sources and so like these facilities kind of
Speaker 1: grow in size and pop up, start popping up all
Speaker 1: over the United States throughout like kind of the mid
Speaker 1: to late eighteen hundreds. Now at the same time, all
Speaker 1: this is happening, and part of why it's happening is
Speaker 1: that the US is creating its middle class um and
Speaker 1: in fact the very concept of a middle class. Parents
Speaker 1: start having fewer kids and devoting a lot more time
Speaker 1: and attention to the development of the kids that they
Speaker 1: do have, and the idea starts to spread as a
Speaker 1: result of all this that children not not don't don't
Speaker 1: just deserve maybe to be house but deserves to learn
Speaker 1: and play um and not to die in coal mines
Speaker 1: are like bang drums, Well, don't shoot rifles at each other,
Speaker 1: right at Like, maybe you shouldn't be doing some of
Speaker 1: the things we're doing with kids. At some point you
Speaker 1: said to yourself, you know, my childhood was trash. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't really get to that. Look, I wish I
Speaker 1: could have been able to you know what when I
Speaker 1: have it's I'm gonna let him play outside. You don't
Speaker 1: need to go to no coal mine and die. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. And so that that's happening in this period
Speaker 1: and the kind of the people who these early advocates
Speaker 1: of the concept of a childhood, these early like people
Speaker 1: who are are supporting the idea that there should be
Speaker 1: restrictions on like what we can make kids do. UM.
Speaker 1: They're generally called child savers, and most of them are
Speaker 1: middle class moms. UM. And it's from them in this
Speaker 1: advocacy in kind of the late eighteen hundreds that we
Speaker 1: get stuff like age of consent laws, child labor bands,
Speaker 1: and compulsory education. That's all good stuff broadly speaking. UM.
Speaker 1: But these positive moves occur along more muddled developments too,
Speaker 1: because these women are also responsible. These activists are also
Speaker 1: responsible for the concept of youth curfews, the idea that like,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't let kids out at night sometimes and they
Speaker 1: should be punished if they are out at night, um,
Speaker 1: and the juvenile justice system, which is a very mixed bag.
Speaker 1: William Bush writes. Many of these reforms were aimed at
Speaker 1: extending the protections of childhood to working class and poor children. Moreover,
Speaker 1: they sought to broaden the years of protection and semi
Speaker 1: dependence on adults upward into the adolescent years, a reflection
Speaker 1: of the slowly spreading idea of adolescence itself at the
Speaker 1: turn of the twentieth century. One of its leading proponents,
Speaker 1: the Clark University psychiatrist and child study movement leader Grandville.
Speaker 1: Stanley Hall described the life stage of adolescence famously as
Speaker 1: a time of storm and stress, a time of risk taking, rebellion, awkwardness,
Speaker 1: and self discovery. Adolescence he and other psychiatrists such as
Speaker 1: William Healy proposed uh needed to be treated individually, especially
Speaker 1: when they ran a foul of rules, as seemed almost inevitable.
Speaker 1: Early juvenile court judges such as Denver's Ben Lindsay helped
Speaker 1: popularize the idea of the tough but fatherly juvenile justice official,
Speaker 1: for whom understanding his wayward charges was a specialty. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: courts for delinquent girls, headed by matronly figures such as
Speaker 1: Mary in Barthelm of Chicago, preoccupied themselves with curbing the
Speaker 1: precocious sexuality of working class girls, whose families were often
Speaker 1: recent arrivals in American industrial cities. So again, a lot
Speaker 1: going on here, you know, still products of your your time,
Speaker 1: of its time. But yeah, this is this is kind
Speaker 1: of how this starts to look. Um. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: it's important to note that, like, because we're talking about
Speaker 1: how bad the juvenile justice system, the idea that we
Speaker 1: should have one came from a really good place, which
Speaker 1: is that like kids as adults when they grownups. You
Speaker 1: should be in prison with the grown ups. You shouldn't
Speaker 1: be judged by the same judges who judged grown ups,
Speaker 1: like we should have a separate thing for you, in
Speaker 1: part because kids are gonna funk around and like they're
Speaker 1: like the finding out part of that shouldn't be as
Speaker 1: brutal as it is for adults. Judge Lindsay even complained,
Speaker 1: quote this business of punishing infants as if they were adults,
Speaker 1: and of maiming young lives by trying to make the
Speaker 1: grizzle of their unformed characters carry the weight of our
Speaker 1: iron laws and heavy penalties. Um, yes, yeah, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: there's some people who are saying really good shit now.
Speaker 1: In Texas, juvenile and adult offenders were first separated in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighties six after protests from the local women's Christian
Speaker 1: Temperance Union, which is right around the same time it
Speaker 1: starts happening in a bunch of other places. The next year,
Speaker 1: the legislature in Texas passed a bill approving a dedicated
Speaker 1: house of correction for children. Gatesville opened in January of
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty nine, and it was one of the first
Speaker 1: dedicated juvenile attention facilities anywhere in the United States. It
Speaker 1: was followed later that year by facilities from in Virginia, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: and Alabama. Gatesville opened with eighty six inmates. It was
Speaker 1: immediately popular with the locals, who saw rightly that it
Speaker 1: would bring a lot of jobs to their town. Local
Speaker 1: residents actually raised money so the state can't pay, like
Speaker 1: their budget runs short and they can't pay for all
Speaker 1: the land they need to buy this facility, and people
Speaker 1: who live in the town nearby raise the money to
Speaker 1: buy it for the state because they're like, well, this
Speaker 1: is going to provide us with jobs forever if we
Speaker 1: have a child prison in town. Oh my god, why
Speaker 1: is that? Their first thought was like everybody's first thoughts,
Speaker 1: like spoilers, that's where this is going for the next century.
Speaker 1: That's why I went. What it's like. I thought they're
Speaker 1: gonna be like, oh that's cool man, you know, yeah, kids,
Speaker 1: I got it. You shouldn't have to go to jail.
Speaker 1: There's money in this ship. Wait, we can buy some
Speaker 1: money off you hit the lip bro like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great. Um. So, the boys who were interned in
Speaker 1: Gatesville were overwhelmingly city dwellers. And there's this idea at
Speaker 1: the time that Texas never gets past that kids who
Speaker 1: are juvenile delinquents, most of whom are urban kids, need
Speaker 1: to be put in prisons far away from their families,
Speaker 1: in isolated rural communities. Um basically, all of these kids
Speaker 1: were poor to One survey of early Gatesville inmates found
Speaker 1: that a hundred nineteen out of a hundred ninety five
Speaker 1: listed their mother's occupation as housekeeper, while the leading descriptions
Speaker 1: of their fathers were unknown railroad men, laborers, and farmers. Unknown.
Speaker 1: Being up there is to tell you something about what's
Speaker 1: gone on. Two thirds of these boys had lost one
Speaker 1: of their parents, and slightly less than half of their
Speaker 1: parents had criminal records themselves. William Bush goes on to
Speaker 1: note that the racial disparity and who went to Gatesville
Speaker 1: was pretty blatant. African Americans comprised forty six of the
Speaker 1: first forty of the first sixty eight inmates, all of
Speaker 1: whom were transferred from the adult prison system. Although Gatesville
Speaker 1: admitted inmates regardless of race or ethnicity, it's strictly segregated
Speaker 1: every aspect of daily lives, housing, schooling, dining, and religious services.
Speaker 1: As a result, by nineteen seventeen, about two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty black inmates crowded into Harris Hall. The Jim Crow
Speaker 1: Congregate Dormitory built a house about half that number. By contrast,
Speaker 1: when the state opened its first and only training school
Speaker 1: for girls before World War Two, it excluded black females altogether.
Speaker 1: Black girls charged with committing a crime in this period
Speaker 1: may have had their cases heard in local juvenile courts,
Speaker 1: but the available remedies were limited to the county jail
Speaker 1: or released back into the community. So nothing new. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean not exactly news that Texas in nineteen seventeen
Speaker 1: was pretty fucking racist. Um, but it's good to have data. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I'm still like trying to picture of Juvenile Hall in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds. Oh god, right, and I'm just like spiral,
Speaker 1: Like it just got me spiraling and thinks, like, I
Speaker 1: just don't know how anyone survived the eighteen hundreds. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the worst things to think about is
Speaker 1: the degree to which maybe it's it wasn't much worse
Speaker 1: than it is now, at least in a lot of
Speaker 1: these facilities in Texas. Um. But that's a that's something
Speaker 1: we can talk about. So the fact that Texas would
Speaker 1: go on to lead the nation and juvenile incarceration had
Speaker 1: a lot to do with the fact that Texas was
Speaker 1: the only southern state to see a net gain in
Speaker 1: its black population during the first half of the twentieth century. Right,
Speaker 1: That's part of why they're building these facilities is they
Speaker 1: have this huge influx of black UM and Hispanic citizens
Speaker 1: moving to the state. UM. And so you've got, well,
Speaker 1: the Hispanics were already there, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, you do have more like coming in
Speaker 1: from Mexico and stuff. And you also have, um, you
Speaker 1: have a huge number of poor, non white kids moving
Speaker 1: into Texas cities, UM, a lot of whom don't have parents,
Speaker 1: UM for a variety of horrible reasons. UM. And this
Speaker 1: causes a backlash from white Jim Crow supporting citizens who
Speaker 1: don't like seeing all of these kids who are not
Speaker 1: white and what they think of as their cities up.
Speaker 1: Police do the thing that police do, which is responds
Speaker 1: to the demands of middle class white people, and they
Speaker 1: start sweeping juke joints, which is generally how the places
Speaker 1: they sweep to to arrest black kids are described I
Speaker 1: think it's like, you know, it's like a dance halls.
Speaker 1: Like that's just like the club was, like the time joint.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, great music came out of here. Yeah yeah. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the nation's first juvenile court was was established in Chicago,
Speaker 1: and the focus of this court was, at least on papers,
Speaker 1: supposed to be rehabilitating the kids that got interned in
Speaker 1: the system. Texas though, and obviously Chicago like that system,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of flaws and a lot of
Speaker 1: things that they could be criticized. Could probably do an
Speaker 1: episode about that. But it's worth noting that the first
Speaker 1: juvenile court in the nation is in Chicago and it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be focused on rehabilitation from the start, because
Speaker 1: Texas follows soon after. Their juvenile justice system from the
Speaker 1: start very openly is not about rehabilitation. They specifically say,
Speaker 1: that's not our goal here. We are here to punish kids.
Speaker 1: Gatesville became what one activist group described as an instrument
Speaker 1: of torture. In nineteen twelve, a new superintendent for the
Speaker 1: facility ordered the banning of several forms of corporal punishment
Speaker 1: that had started in the late eighteen hundreds, and these
Speaker 1: sound somewhat tortury. I'm gonna read a quote from Who
Speaker 1: Gets a Childhood if you want. This will give you
Speaker 1: some context on what it's like being in a juvenile
Speaker 1: prison in Texas in the late eighteen hundreds, and start
Speaker 1: with the nineteen hundreds, Adams outlawed pulling toes and which
Speaker 1: boys were forced to stand holding their toes with their
Speaker 1: hands indefinitely, and bustings, and which boys were made to
Speaker 1: stand with their arms held over their heads while a
Speaker 1: guard flogged them with a bat. I think that's flogging.
Speaker 1: That's just that's not flogging, flogging something soft, right, it's
Speaker 1: pretty ugly too, but like, that's just hitting a kid
Speaker 1: with a bat. Flogging not flogging, that's just beating a
Speaker 1: child with a heavy stick. I was like, the images
Speaker 1: egregious and the sentence for which you used to explain
Speaker 1: the images egregious because that's not flogging. Now. So in
Speaker 1: nine twelve, this new superintendent orders these things banned, and
Speaker 1: the guards revolt. Um. They initially express their displeasure by
Speaker 1: allowing more than two dozen kids to escape over a
Speaker 1: three day period. Right, so they just stopped doing their
Speaker 1: jobs kids, put them on the streets. You'll see you know,
Speaker 1: um and yeah, they eventually they walk off the job,
Speaker 1: just completely strike, which forces the superintendent to recruit local citizens,
Speaker 1: most of whom supported the guards, to serve in their place,
Speaker 1: and obviously very little gets actually changed because in this
Speaker 1: will be a pattern. These trends will continue through the
Speaker 1: rest of the story. Oh my god, why someone in
Speaker 1: this case, the guy running it like recognizes a problem,
Speaker 1: tries to change it, and a mix of the guards
Speaker 1: working at the facility and the local citizens say absolutely not,
Speaker 1: you ain't improving shit, and nothing gets done. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine that you're unionizing and somebody's like, why you are
Speaker 1: using unionizing because they won't let us beat the kids
Speaker 1: with bats. Yeah, imagine like a couple of like, well,
Speaker 1: we're unionizing because we're all going to die from the
Speaker 1: black log and we'd like our families to get slightly
Speaker 1: more money and maybe have weekends off. Oh, well, we're
Speaker 1: unionizing because people keep burning to death in garment fires.
Speaker 1: They won't let me hit kids with a bat anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, yo, your struggles are the same, solidarity forever.
Speaker 1: Who's man is this? Like? Who invited these foods? Who's
Speaker 1: written I gotta go It's very funny that right around
Speaker 1: the same time, like miners are fighting with machine guns
Speaker 1: and rifles for the right to have a life outside
Speaker 1: of the job and not be beaten by mine by
Speaker 1: the boss's guards, the other guys are striking for the
Speaker 1: right to beat kids with bats. Listen. That is the point, essential,
Speaker 1: the absolute, the perfect example of yo, whose man's is this? Like? Yo,
Speaker 1: who who's man? Who? Who let them in? That's not
Speaker 1: We're not the same fan. Yeah. Well, and probably a
Speaker 1: bleak story is how many of those other union men
Speaker 1: would see this as the same struggle because a lot
Speaker 1: of racism struggle. So, you know, not in favor of
Speaker 1: flogging children with baseball bats. Let me tell you who
Speaker 1: not products and services that support this podcast, unless it's
Speaker 1: the Washington State Highway Patrol. Oh no, yeah, the FBI,
Speaker 1: or I gotta tell you man that they look the island.
Speaker 1: Ain't no game. They're often called the Washington State Highway
Speaker 1: Patrol of the food box industry. Listen, I am team,
Speaker 1: that's right. Oh we're back, um prop Yeah. Juvenile detention
Speaker 1: facilities spread across Texas throughout the first half of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. They came to be known as reform schools
Speaker 1: or training schools, even though neither of those things was
Speaker 1: ever Yes, we will call it a school school. Hard
Speaker 1: knocks this school in the sys that we got some desks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking dude walks in with a baseball bat, slams it
Speaker 1: on the table. Who's ready to learn calculus? Car the one, Martinez.
Speaker 1: It's a kid with a bat, Like, you get this
Speaker 1: one wrong and I'm gonna bunt you. Yeah. Yeah. Gatesville
Speaker 1: remained the most brutal of the juvenile prisons in Texas.
Speaker 1: It was so bad that it had to build a
Speaker 1: cemetery on its grounds because so many boys were dying
Speaker 1: in custody. Yeah, yeah, when you cemetery, maybe maybe we
Speaker 1: got a problem guessing the kids who wind up there,
Speaker 1: Like they don't have any parents left alive or something. Right,
Speaker 1: maybe they're kids that are total awards of the state
Speaker 1: or whatever, and so it doesn't matter what happens to
Speaker 1: them in the eyes of the state. You can just
Speaker 1: throw them in an unmarked grave. There's One of the
Speaker 1: worst cases of this occurred in nineteen one, when a
Speaker 1: guard strangled a fifteen year old named Dell Timm's to
Speaker 1: death in front of two other boys, so not good
Speaker 1: places ninete. Eventually, all the stories of abuse led to
Speaker 1: enough outrage that in nineteen forty eight, the state legislature
Speaker 1: appointed a special commission to study these schools. So the
Speaker 1: State of Texas boy kids are twenty years later could
Speaker 1: get strangled to death, right, Like, Yeah, it takes a while,
Speaker 1: stuff builds, there's other deaths. There's a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of complaints. But eventually the State of Texas is like, well,
Speaker 1: it's our duty. We gotta get in there and really
Speaker 1: look at these these facilities. Um, one guy dies, you know,
Speaker 1: two guys dies. Hey, maybe they were together. Damn guys die.
Speaker 1: Maybe we said, cool, we'll have a guy look into it.
Speaker 1: Like ten kids getting beaten to death is like, that's
Speaker 1: the equivalent of like when you're washing machine floods the
Speaker 1: house for the third time and you're like, all right,
Speaker 1: I gotta call fucking dude. You probably call somebody, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Um So, The Washington Post reports quote when experts and
Speaker 1: reformers visited the facilities, they recommended placing them entirely with
Speaker 1: it within, with smaller facilities located near metropolitan areas. In
Speaker 1: addition to removing the stigma of prison. Such facilities would
Speaker 1: place youths closer to their families and enable the state
Speaker 1: to bring in professionals from the fields of childcare, education,
Speaker 1: and mental health, a community based division similar to today's
Speaker 1: group homes and halfway houses. So that's not that's pretty
Speaker 1: good advice given the state of things. That seems like
Speaker 1: an improvement, But the legislature rejected this advice absolutely not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is the most sensible humane like kid should probably
Speaker 1: be near their parents and experts and stuff who can help.
Speaker 1: Maybe we should get somebody to understands kids around here
Speaker 1: that there was riots when they tried to stop the
Speaker 1: baseball bat beatings. Of course they're not putting these kids
Speaker 1: in a different facility. It's perfect heating the demands of
Speaker 1: the politically well connected leaders of the states youth prisons,
Speaker 1: who used the specter of black and Mexican American criminality
Speaker 1: to insist that young people required imprisonment. Texas instead expanded
Speaker 1: its construction of ever more sprawling prison like facilities, sometimes
Speaker 1: strategically located in the electoral districts of keyge legislators. Abuse
Speaker 1: scandals continued to surface, and television and newspaper reports in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two, a Houston lawyer filed an appeal on
Speaker 1: behalf of a sixteen year old girl who had spent
Speaker 1: nearly two hundred days in isolation in the Gainesville State
Speaker 1: School after being held down by mail guards and forcibly
Speaker 1: sedated with barbiturous Another girl who escaped the same facility
Speaker 1: told a reporter for the Austin and Statesman, I'll kill
Speaker 1: myself before returning. I'll let you know how it's going
Speaker 1: in there. So we've had two attempts to reform things,
Speaker 1: first in nineteen twelve and in nineteen to big attempts,
Speaker 1: uh so far. They both met with massive protests from
Speaker 1: the people who lived in and around and also protests
Speaker 1: from lawmakers who know that if you put a child
Speaker 1: prison in a town where maybe you don't have a
Speaker 1: great electoral ledge, suddenly all the people who get jobs there,
Speaker 1: that's your voting base and you can like lock that
Speaker 1: ship down. It's like, I can't believe what I'm saying this,
Speaker 1: but like, yeah, in Texas defense, they tried at some
Speaker 1: point to do some reasonable and it was like, well,
Speaker 1: Texas going Texas. There was Texas that stopped anything reasonable
Speaker 1: from happening. So I don't know about in the defense
Speaker 1: of the individuals who tried to reform fifty people that
Speaker 1: flew in. Yeah, those folks were at least on the
Speaker 1: right track because oh well, never mind. Yeah. By Night
Speaker 1: Seen sixty four, things were bad enough that a mix
Speaker 1: of parents and former Gatesville employees wrote a letter to
Speaker 1: President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Governor of Texas UM.
Speaker 1: They described the kind of abuse we've discussed already in
Speaker 1: this episode at length and compared the training school to quote,
Speaker 1: a concentration camp, um and man. Statistically, at least one
Speaker 1: or two of those people had to who have known
Speaker 1: what a concentration right. Some of them were World War
Speaker 1: two vets or something like we're talking about. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was somebody in there who was like, I've seen
Speaker 1: a fucking concentration camp on. This place doesn't look good.
Speaker 1: I was there, bro, I was there. So this leads
Speaker 1: to the biggest flurry of investigations yet. The FBI and
Speaker 1: the Texas Rangers both launched investigations into these facilities, Gatesville
Speaker 1: in particular, but also the juvenile justice system in like
Speaker 1: the juvenile um incarceration system in Texas UM, and also
Speaker 1: both Houses of the Texas legislature lawns investigations. You've got
Speaker 1: like four big investigations going on, right, one of them federal. Um.
Speaker 1: And when the FBI starts investigating stuff like this, for
Speaker 1: all of the good triaks we have them, they always
Speaker 1: find ship. Right. Yeah, you're gonna the most, the most
Speaker 1: detailed documentation of a number of different law enforcement agencies
Speaker 1: crimes comes from FBI investigations. Now here's another fun question.
Speaker 1: Doesn't ever lead to anything? No, no, no, no. I
Speaker 1: was like, no, they find a guy, nothing happens, but
Speaker 1: they find him. Um. Like in in Oregon right now,
Speaker 1: the Portland Police are currently in contempt of the Justice
Speaker 1: Department for repeatedly refusing to reform their use of force
Speaker 1: policies and being unconscionably so brutal that these federal criminal
Speaker 1: justice system says, you guys can't do this, and currently
Speaker 1: they've just said, yes, we can, and we'll see if
Speaker 1: anything happens. Yeah it's fine, Yeah, absolutely fine. And of
Speaker 1: course in this case, nothing happens. All of these investigations
Speaker 1: start um and there's like there's again sweeping reports of abuses,
Speaker 1: horrible details about all the bad ship that's happening. The
Speaker 1: FBI is like, yeah, bad shit's happening. Texas Rangers are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: bad ship's happening. Both Houses of Legislature and Tech they
Speaker 1: are like, yeah, bad ships happening. Um, No, very little
Speaker 1: reforms happen. Attempts to make serious reforms are shut down
Speaker 1: at every past by again local and state elected leaders
Speaker 1: who had training schools in their districts and didn't want
Speaker 1: to lose money. By nineteen seventy four, the reform movement
Speaker 1: was desperate enough that a bunch of former inmates, parents
Speaker 1: and activists launched a class action lawsuit in federal court.
Speaker 1: This case, Morales v. Termine, brought another wave of psychologists,
Speaker 1: social workers, and prison consultants to not just Gatesville, but
Speaker 1: other juvenile detention facilities. Now, the guy who winds up
Speaker 1: in charge of this big investigation is a dude with
Speaker 1: the incredible name Judge William Wayne Justice. Dest have boys
Speaker 1: name Judge Justice. That's right, yeah, Judge William Wayne Justice,
Speaker 1: incredible Texas judge name. Yeah, he only had one choice
Speaker 1: for his career. That's that. You will never convince me
Speaker 1: that's not the name of the judge in the best
Speaker 1: little horehouse in Texas. Yeah, that's what you call all
Speaker 1: that guy like retroactively put a judge in there. Make
Speaker 1: that his name, William Wayne Justice. What an incredible name
Speaker 1: for a judge to Um. Yeah, it's everything everything is
Speaker 1: in that name. Um. So he takes this very seriously.
Speaker 1: He tours the Mountaineer School for Boys and he finds
Speaker 1: as he does a surprise inspection of this facility that
Speaker 1: the children there were like this judge is walking around,
Speaker 1: he sees children caked in old blood, like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: like just left on their bodies, covered in bruises, and
Speaker 1: like whenever he tries to talk to them, they like skirt.
Speaker 1: They're terrified just of his presence, like they've been trained
Speaker 1: to just react with like unthinking terror to the presence
Speaker 1: of an adult. M. Howard Omart was also there. He
Speaker 1: was an expert. He was from the LBJ administration. He
Speaker 1: was an expert LBJ sent along Uh to like look
Speaker 1: at things while Judge Justice was there. Um and Howard
Speaker 1: Omart later said, quote, we have never seen anything quite
Speaker 1: as depressing, so deliberately designed to humiliate, to degrade into debase.
Speaker 1: It is surely oppression, and its simplest and most direct
Speaker 1: form that is the worst man. Yeah. Yeah, designed to humiliate, degrade,
Speaker 1: and debase. That's that's lbj's man. And Judge Justice comes
Speaker 1: to the same conclusions. Yeah, And I mean it's not
Speaker 1: like LBJ is like the greatest dude, but for him
Speaker 1: to be like, yo, this is wild. Yeah. I showed
Speaker 1: my dick to a secret service agent this morning. But
Speaker 1: even I think this is beyond this, totally made on
Speaker 1: my own body. Yeah, you have any idea how many
Speaker 1: people I've killed? Yeah, I ordered the firebombing of a country. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this isn't right. Yeah, but that's wild dog. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the extensive investigation sports spurred by the Morale v
Speaker 1: term In case revealed regular use of isolation in Texas
Speaker 1: juvenile criminal justice facilities, um forced psychotropic drugs on children,
Speaker 1: and also rare forms of torture. Among other things, investigators
Speaker 1: found that children were being punished physically for speaking Spanish.
Speaker 1: So called punk dorms had been created for juveniles the
Speaker 1: guards decided, we're homosexual. By this point, a state had
Speaker 1: overcome its squeamishness and incarcerating women, and in one facility,
Speaker 1: guards were found to have forced abortions on pregnant inmates.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, Oh my god. A boy at Gatesville told
Speaker 1: a judge about a hazing ritual. Told the judge Judge
Speaker 1: Justice about a hazing ritual he'd been forced to undergo,
Speaker 1: where a group of boys beat him unconscious while guards watched.
Speaker 1: To his credit, Judge Justice, I don't know about the
Speaker 1: rest of his career judge in Texas in the seventies,
Speaker 1: maybe he got up to some fucked up shit. But
Speaker 1: in this case he is as good as his name,
Speaker 1: and he issues a sweeping ruling that outlaws all of
Speaker 1: the fund up ship found at the facilities and requires medical, psychological,
Speaker 1: and educational services to be made available for any children
Speaker 1: in a Texas juvenile justice facility or juvenile detention facility.
Speaker 1: The entire leadership of the state agent see that oversaw
Speaker 1: these facilities was forced to resign. Texas put money into
Speaker 1: probation and other preventative measures, and the juvenile inmate population
Speaker 1: declined rapidly. So this is this is the first time
Speaker 1: to like real ship does have the right thing. This
Speaker 1: is a this makes the situation better. Judge Justice gets
Speaker 1: credit in this. He's a big part of like why
Speaker 1: less kids are in this system. However, as the Washington
Speaker 1: Post reports quote the impact of Morales and other important
Speaker 1: federal court rulings was blunted by the persistence of structural
Speaker 1: racial disparities and renewed fears of violent juvenile crime. And
Speaker 1: while the Federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquent Delinquency Prevention Act
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy four provided even more funding for state
Speaker 1: and local reforms these kind of like prevention measures and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Historian Elizabeth Hinton has noted that it also labeled quote
Speaker 1: economically vulnerable youths, most of whom were black or Latino,
Speaker 1: as potentially criminal. That's the term used, potentially criminal. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: while removing white middle class offenders from the formal justice system.
Speaker 1: And that's why the juvenile inmate system to clients, right,
Speaker 1: it's because they put less white kids there. Like that's
Speaker 1: the big which is good, right, It's like, no kid
Speaker 1: deserves to be in a lot of it's lesser been there.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't fix anything, you know, No, you don't
Speaker 1: want nobody in that system, like nobody should be displayed.
Speaker 1: The numbers and that is that is the main thing,
Speaker 1: is that the criminalization of white and mainly white middle
Speaker 1: class because I think some white poor kids still white
Speaker 1: up in these places. Yeah. Um, but the criminalization of
Speaker 1: like white middle class kids stops to a large degree. Um,
Speaker 1: they're good. Yeah yeah, there's boys being boys. It's like
Speaker 1: a racist firefighter who only rescues the white kids. And
Speaker 1: it's like, well, it's good that less kids died in
Speaker 1: the fire, but you shouldn't be a firefighter, like you
Speaker 1: pat you on the back for that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess that kid's happy. Yeah, Like I still feel like
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be doing this job. Yeah. Yeah. So in
Speaker 1: the late seventies and early eighties, things where though trending
Speaker 1: in a better direction. Um. And again the decline in
Speaker 1: the prison because it is I should be fair. There
Speaker 1: is a reduction in the number of of of black
Speaker 1: Gaspanic kids who are sent to these facility that does
Speaker 1: go down, Like it's not complete, but it is largely
Speaker 1: the number of the kids who don't who stopped going
Speaker 1: these facilities are largely white, right, it is largely based
Speaker 1: on race. Not to because again I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I also don't want to be like completely shipping on
Speaker 1: the people who achieved this because it's good. Um yeah.
Speaker 1: And the idea that like you can't beat me with
Speaker 1: a bat. No, more like the fact that a judge
Speaker 1: was like, well drop, a judge did say that it
Speaker 1: does not stop, but just say like let me at
Speaker 1: least give him that. You. Yeah, know that they do
Speaker 1: not get they put less kids in these facilities. No,
Speaker 1: they keep beating, they keep right the hell. It was like, no,
Speaker 1: we're worried about volume, like quality was different. We want
Speaker 1: like a more boutique experience where we really give each
Speaker 1: kid the beating they deserve. You know, our guards were
Speaker 1: just hitting too many kids. They were losing their passion
Speaker 1: for it. You do you did you watch uh, did
Speaker 1: you watch the Dave Chappelle Show when it was all oh, yeah, absolutely, okay.
Speaker 1: Do you remember the the Gay Clansman. Yes? Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was just like words like the clan We're just a
Speaker 1: little nicer. Yeah, so we'll just we'll just ask you
Speaker 1: to leave, probably back to Africa, like got it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of what we've done here, um now in
Speaker 1: the late yeah, so again, the things are getting a
Speaker 1: little bit better in the late seventies and early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: like there are improvements, but then, like we talked about
Speaker 1: in our first episode, that's when crime really starts to
Speaker 1: rock it upwards right and all crime, but that it
Speaker 1: does include juvenile crime, and the panic over super predators
Speaker 1: hits the media. Between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 1: forty states expanded the number of juvenile cases that could
Speaker 1: be tried an adult court and given adult punishments, and
Speaker 1: no state went harder than Texas. When he ran for
Speaker 1: governor in nineteen ninety four, George W. Bush campaigned with
Speaker 1: a promise to lock up more children. In nineteen after
Speaker 1: he won, the state legislature passed an omnibus Juvenile Justice
Speaker 1: Reform Bill, which brought even tougher sentencing for kids accused
Speaker 1: of crimes. The state budgeted another two hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: for facilities, which was enough to triple their capacity to
Speaker 1: incarceraate children. So like Texas is like, we gotta have
Speaker 1: at least three times as many kids locked up in
Speaker 1: this fucking state. Yeah, that opening my job. It is
Speaker 1: worth noting. We forget sometimes because the crimes against humanity
Speaker 1: he committed as president were so extreme. He did some
Speaker 1: of that while he was governor. To his mix tastes
Speaker 1: were pretty crazy, Like y'are only looking at his major
Speaker 1: albums oh, his mix tastes were pretty crazy. It's also
Speaker 1: remember like how odd this is tied to like crack.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, and that's that's too much to tell them. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is a and I'm like, let's not let's not
Speaker 1: forget how we got crack. So let's just put that
Speaker 1: on the side. So like, yeah, it's funny how crime
Speaker 1: went up? Well you I mean, well there's well, there's yes.
Speaker 1: We like with every evil thing in American history, the
Speaker 1: CIA is involved, just not directly in this part of
Speaker 1: it though. Yeah. Yeah, and that that is a big
Speaker 1: part of like why there's all of this, like terror
Speaker 1: over juvenile offenders and a big thing that like Bush
Speaker 1: and the Republicans campaign on absolutely. Um So we'll do
Speaker 1: we'll talk, We'll do a Crack episode at some point.
Speaker 1: We really got to get it with me too. It's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there's we need to do a whole thing. I
Speaker 1: ran conscious scandal like crack in his three Nicaragua everything. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's all the other things I'm saying it right now. Yes,
Speaker 1: we'll get a couple of parts in there. Um So
Speaker 1: this period um the nineties, kind of the the mid
Speaker 1: nineties when Bush gets elected and you've got like this
Speaker 1: omnibus Juvenile Justice Reform bill. It's noteworthy in Texas because
Speaker 1: it's when they really everyone stops. It has kind of
Speaker 1: been trending this way, but they this is when people
Speaker 1: really stop calling these places training schools and reform schools,
Speaker 1: those terms die. The idea of like trying to hide
Speaker 1: what these places are dies because the people who want
Speaker 1: more of them just call them youth prisons, and they're
Speaker 1: proud of that. They love the idea that they're making
Speaker 1: youth prisons like they don't want to hide that ship
Speaker 1: because like you get elected for being like, oh, hell yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna throw a bunch of fucking kids and lock
Speaker 1: them up. You think we got youth prisons. Now, when
Speaker 1: I'm governor, way more youth prisons. I'm gonna put all
Speaker 1: your kids, Wayne, I'm gonna put all eight kids. And
Speaker 1: while they tripled their capacity to lock kids up, Texas
Speaker 1: also doubled the number of kids they were executing. Now
Speaker 1: in the United States, prop from n to two thousand five,
Speaker 1: twenty three children were executed. Thirteen of those were in Texas.
Speaker 1: Are you serious? Yeah, Texas fucking loves executing children. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we are Look, the United States has an executing children problem,
Speaker 1: but it's also largely a Texas problem. You know that
Speaker 1: is that's a lot. There's a bunch of other states.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're aware there's like forty nine
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, I did not know that. In Shock
Speaker 1: and Awe, Yeah, we are huge fans of executing children. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't get enough of it really now. This all
Speaker 1: continued swimmingly until February six, two thousand seven, when The
Speaker 1: Texas Observer published an article about a horrific sex abuse
Speaker 1: scandal and a juvenile correction facility near Odessa in West Texas,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote again from Who Gets a Childhood
Speaker 1: News reports revealed that the school's assistant superintendent Ray Brookins
Speaker 1: and its principal John Paul Hernandez had coerced sexual favors
Speaker 1: from several juvenile inmates over a period of at least
Speaker 1: two years. Compounding the alleged crime was an inexplicably slow
Speaker 1: response from authorities between December two thousand three. In February
Speaker 1: two thousand five, staff complaints about Brookens and Hernandez a
Speaker 1: suspicious behavior had fallen on deaf ears in the Upper
Speaker 1: echelons of the Texas Youth Commission t y C, the
Speaker 1: agency charged with administering the state's juvenile facilities. Finally, in
Speaker 1: February of two thousand five, Mark Slattery, volunteer math tutor
Speaker 1: from nearby Midland, was approached by two students who wanted
Speaker 1: to confess something ikey. As Slattery later told a reporter,
Speaker 1: I knew it must have been something bad if they
Speaker 1: had no word for it. Slattery Is soon discovered that
Speaker 1: boys were being led into the administration building each night
Speaker 1: for forced encounters with Brookens, who had used his power
Speaker 1: to unilaterally lengthen or shortened youth sentences to exact sex
Speaker 1: from inmates. He can make you stay longer if you
Speaker 1: don't fuck him, and that's what he does. Oh this
Speaker 1: just yeah, oh my god. Yeah yeah, it's bad as
Speaker 1: bad as it gets right there. Oh man, yeah. Um
Speaker 1: shout out though to Mark Slattery. Uh, it is important
Speaker 1: to note that like, this guy clearly cares about these kids.
Speaker 1: Is volunteering to teach like not getting paid, volunteering to
Speaker 1: teach math to incarcerated kids because it's important for them
Speaker 1: to learn and they clearly it says a lot about
Speaker 1: him that these kids know we can trust mrs. We
Speaker 1: can tell him this and he'll he'll do something about it.
Speaker 1: By god, he does. Yum, so fucking give this guy something.
Speaker 1: The house whatever is a mixed bag this episode where
Speaker 1: it's like some dudes are dope, some dudes are like
Speaker 1: actual bastard. Yeah, you do have to like this is
Speaker 1: an overwhelmingly bleak story. But whenever you get those those
Speaker 1: little heroes, you've gotta like acknowledge that ship because most
Speaker 1: people clearly didn't do what Mark did. Um. So, uh,
Speaker 1: it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And again the Texas
Speaker 1: Rangers get involved, and this time they were a little
Speaker 1: more effective than they had been last time. Brookens and
Speaker 1: Hernandez are charged with a bunch of crimes. Both men
Speaker 1: are forced to resign, but the criminal cases against them
Speaker 1: grind to a halt in the local county prosecutor's office
Speaker 1: and the U. S. Attorney's office in San Antonio refuses
Speaker 1: to get involved. What is like again, why do you
Speaker 1: like this? Is? This is bad for business. It's bad
Speaker 1: for everybody if this becomes a bigger thing that it
Speaker 1: needs to be. And this is thankfully where journalists come in,
Speaker 1: so obviously this gets out. This is a fun as
Speaker 1: everyone's reactions, this is a fucked up story. The Dallas
Speaker 1: Morning News is is like, all right, well, let's do
Speaker 1: a journalism here, because if if this is happening, there's
Speaker 1: probably some other ship that's going on. If there's one,
Speaker 1: there's four. Yeah. Yeah. So they carry out a huge
Speaker 1: investigation which concludes that the Texas juvenile justice system had
Speaker 1: created quote a culture in which prison officials were free
Speaker 1: to abuse their power and punish children who tried to
Speaker 1: complain about them. So this story goes viral. National news
Speaker 1: starts to get on the trail left the Dallas Morning
Speaker 1: News covers gets pretty big paper. Um, the big guys,
Speaker 1: the really big guys, start to get in there. Follow
Speaker 1: Up investigations would eventually find more than two thousand confirmed
Speaker 1: allegations of staff on inmate violence between two thousand three
Speaker 1: and two thousand six, including more more than sixty cases
Speaker 1: of kids with suspicious broken bones. To try and quiet
Speaker 1: up outrage, Texas launched an abuse hotline for their child prisons,
Speaker 1: which racked up eleven complaints in its first month. So
Speaker 1: you know, it gets big. It reveals a bound. The
Speaker 1: tip of the iceberg is revealed. Obviously, I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: more than two thousand times staff beat kids in a
Speaker 1: three year period in all the Texas prisons, probably a
Speaker 1: couple of times. I'm gonna guess more than sixty kids
Speaker 1: had broken bones, more than sixty, because you know these
Speaker 1: are also kids, their teens. There's a lot of oppositional definance.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's some kids who get bones broken and
Speaker 1: don't want to tell anyone because like I don't want
Speaker 1: you to know you, I don't want you to know
Speaker 1: you hurt me, you know, or I don't want anyone
Speaker 1: like you know. And obviously ship gets covered up, it
Speaker 1: gets hidden. Um, I'm sure it's a lot higher the
Speaker 1: actual umber. They started releasing child prisoners. Tech this did,
Speaker 1: and in March of two thousand seven, a Department of
Speaker 1: Justice investigation concluded and found that conditions in the Evans E.
Speaker 1: V I. N S. Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburgh, Texas
Speaker 1: were bad enough that they had violated the constitutional rights
Speaker 1: of imprisoned youth to be protected from harm while in
Speaker 1: state custody. Evans had an assault rate five times the
Speaker 1: national average. Once this news broke, there were more stories
Speaker 1: about the horrific conditions in the facility, William Bush writes.
Speaker 1: One of the most watched cases was that of Chakwanda Cotton,
Speaker 1: a fifteen year old African American girl from the East
Speaker 1: Texas town of Paris, who received an indeterminate terminate sentence
Speaker 1: an indeterminate sentence up to age twenty one for shoving
Speaker 1: a hall monitor in school. Portrayed in the net. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she shoves a hall monitor and she gets an open
Speaker 1: ended sentence. We can keep you up until you're twenty
Speaker 1: one if we want to end sentence. Yeah, this happens
Speaker 1: a lot. So because of the way the Texas juvenile
Speaker 1: justice system gets a lot of these are for like
Speaker 1: up to five years. Again, that's why those that's what
Speaker 1: we talked about, Like those people, those are the superintendence
Speaker 1: of those facilities, of that facility being like, hey, if
Speaker 1: you don't fuck mail, keep you here longer. That's why
Speaker 1: they can keep them here longer. They have they get
Speaker 1: to decide how long the sentences up to this long
Speaker 1: in prison. That's the difference. Okay, now I'm seeing like
Speaker 1: difference between California and because I'm like eighteen, you like
Speaker 1: it gets your record sealed, like when you're a juvenile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean it's it's fucked up. Um. I mean
Speaker 1: you could get transferred to the like the adult prison,
Speaker 1: but like dang for them to be like, no, I'll
Speaker 1: keep you to one because hey crazy, So Chakonda Cotton,
Speaker 1: this story goes really viral. People are horrified, The national
Speaker 1: press covers it. Um. It gets looked at as a
Speaker 1: victim as like racially motivated um, and she gets a
Speaker 1: release in March two thousand seven. She becomes kind of
Speaker 1: a cause celeb for how like racist the Texas juvenile
Speaker 1: justice system is. Um. She subsequently described conditions at the
Speaker 1: Ron Jack's and State Juvenile Correction Complex in Brownwood, UH,
Speaker 1: during an interview in seventeen magazine. Quote. Seeing the barbed
Speaker 1: wire fences and guards terrified me. I was given an
Speaker 1: orange jumpsuit and socks and taken to my quarters, a
Speaker 1: tiny room that had only a bed, a bookshelf, and
Speaker 1: a desk. Some of the other inmates had committed serious
Speaker 1: crimes like murder. This was wait, you said seventeen magazine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she does an interview for seven seventeen. That's kind of wow,
Speaker 1: But yeah, good for seventeen. Yeah, I don't know seventeen
Speaker 1: was left some teen Vogue ship right there. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: guess Team Vogue is doing some seventeen ship. I don't
Speaker 1: know that's really because I'm like seventeen pre dates them.
Speaker 1: I remember. I remember seventeen magazine running around the hood
Speaker 1: and it was just the stuff that like for the
Speaker 1: for the little girls, and like, dang, I didn't know
Speaker 1: they was about it like that. What year was this?
Speaker 1: Um god, this is like two. It's a little more
Speaker 1: recent than Yeah, yeah, the internet kind of. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're still body shame and girls, but at least they
Speaker 1: doing these articles about girls and HSIT did this so
Speaker 1: people start to care again about abuses in Texas state facilities,
Speaker 1: whistle blowers come forward. Randall Chance, a former inspector for
Speaker 1: the state's juvenile correction facilities, says in an interview that
Speaker 1: quote and this is him, Randall Chance, like works for
Speaker 1: the state Juvenile Correction agency and he's in he inspects facilities.
Speaker 1: He gives an interview where he says, staff are being
Speaker 1: paid your tax money to rape your children. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Oh not very scary, straight shot, no chaser, homie, he
Speaker 1: cut it very clean for you. That's what's happening. He
Speaker 1: describes t y C, the agency he works for, as
Speaker 1: a dynasty of corruption that condone condones the mistreatment of
Speaker 1: youth and its care. So again, reforms are demanded. The
Speaker 1: t y C governing board is overhauled. They throw out
Speaker 1: the old guys running it, bringing new ones. A state
Speaker 1: investigation is ordered, and as you'd expect, it found a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence of individual wrongdoing. The blame was placed
Speaker 1: on the culture of the agency, which was described as
Speaker 1: having somehow become uniquely toxic. Little discussion focused around the
Speaker 1: fact that Texas had been this bad for two thirds
Speaker 1: of a century. So again, this keeps. This is what
Speaker 1: happens every time when they're when something gets done, it's
Speaker 1: we're gonna arrest and charge these individual guys who committed
Speaker 1: crimes um and we've got to you know, there's a
Speaker 1: problem with the culture. We have to fire these dudes
Speaker 1: at the top, and we have to reform the agency
Speaker 1: to fix the culture because it's a culture problem. And
Speaker 1: I think at this point in the story it should
Speaker 1: be clear it's not a culture problem. It's a child
Speaker 1: prison problem. This is what happens when you have them.
Speaker 1: They keep trying to reform the culture, and the exact
Speaker 1: same thing happens over and over again. Reforms are fought
Speaker 1: by the people who live there because there's money in there,
Speaker 1: and by local politicians because that's where they get voters
Speaker 1: and and fucking campaign donations from UM. And the abuse
Speaker 1: continues because the kind of people who are going to work,
Speaker 1: the kind of jobs that are available at these facilities
Speaker 1: in the middle of o or which don't pay well.
Speaker 1: Are people who get UM are willing to take a
Speaker 1: pay cut to get to hit kids or molest them. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not a culture problem. It's a child prison problem
Speaker 1: with the god thing staff. Yeah, it's that the culture
Speaker 1: of this toxic planet. Yeah, it's the fact that you're
Speaker 1: on a toxic planet. It's a culture in that. Like
Speaker 1: if you design a gun that can only shoot seven
Speaker 1: year olds and the people who buy them, Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a culture problem among the people who buy the guns
Speaker 1: that can only shoot seven year olds, Like, but I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're probably all very unpleasant people. But that's not really
Speaker 1: the problem, is it. It's that we built a gun
Speaker 1: to shoot seven year olds. Yes, the issue is is
Speaker 1: is not the people buying these are bad, like they are, sure,
Speaker 1: but that's really not where the problems started. As both
Speaker 1: in situation here, guys, do we need these things? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not either or I feel like it's a both
Speaker 1: end Yeah. Um, but you know who doesn't shoot seven
Speaker 1: year olds? Prop unless it's the Washington State would patrol again,
Speaker 1: in which case they do. Um, but probably not unless
Speaker 1: it's also unless it's then potentially yes, uh we're back.
Speaker 1: So if you were an optimistic type, you could be
Speaker 1: forgiven for looking at the fallout from the two thousand
Speaker 1: seven revelations of horrific abuse in Texas facilities and thinking,
Speaker 1: like ship things are headed in the right direction again,
Speaker 1: like this might, we might, we might fix a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, and a lot of good stuff does happen.
Speaker 1: I should say that Texas closes more than half of
Speaker 1: their youth prisons. They gut the juvenile justice system. They
Speaker 1: dramatically reduced the number of incarcerated kids, and resources are
Speaker 1: diverted from incarcerating kids to programs to try and prevent
Speaker 1: youth crime. This is great, Like again, this is a
Speaker 1: big deal. But it's a big deal because it removes
Speaker 1: kids from the system. Um. Journalists and politicians who demanded
Speaker 1: change and brought out this information improve material conditions for
Speaker 1: the kids who get released and the kids who don't
Speaker 1: go to juvenile prison because that becomes less common. That
Speaker 1: is undeniable. But it is not a reform of these facilities,
Speaker 1: because if it was a reform, it would mean that
Speaker 1: the facilities themselves are getting better, and that's not what happens.
Speaker 1: The facilities continue to be a fucking nightmare. There's less
Speaker 1: kids in them. Again, that's huge, really big deal, but
Speaker 1: for those inside, it's a lot of basically might I
Speaker 1: don't have a way of claiming this in any objective
Speaker 1: sense because again, our data is always imperfect here, but
Speaker 1: like the same problems continue to persist. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: like the statistics go down because there's just less humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the reform is we've got to take kids out of
Speaker 1: this thing, which might suggest that, like, if we really
Speaker 1: wanted to reform it, we would not let any kids
Speaker 1: be in these places. Yeah, we can close it forever,
Speaker 1: I mean, then would be no kids in it. That
Speaker 1: might work, That would be my argument um. And again,
Speaker 1: obviously the people who succeed in this, it's not abolition,
Speaker 1: but it's a lot less kids in prison. That's great.
Speaker 1: But again the facilities stay exactly the same as they've
Speaker 1: been for a century. So fast forward ten years, two
Speaker 1: thousand seventeen, the Dallas Morning News publishes a blockbuster investigation
Speaker 1: into abuses at the Gainesville State School, which, despite its name,
Speaker 1: is a child prison. It just happens to have some desks.
Speaker 1: Here's how that article opened. Proper. Youths at the Gainesville
Speaker 1: State School say staff paid them with drugs and cash
Speaker 1: to assault one another. A psychologist at the campus gave
Speaker 1: pornography to a boy there to encourage the young man
Speaker 1: to masterbait. In front of him, youth attacked a guard
Speaker 1: and stole his radio so he couldn't call for help.
Speaker 1: By the time he had the help arrived, the officer
Speaker 1: had a broken nose and needed four stitches over his eye. So, wow,
Speaker 1: West and there, Yeah, it's the wild West in there,
Speaker 1: and like the same abuses are happening, And like that
Speaker 1: staff paying kids with drugs and cash to assault each other,
Speaker 1: that's bounties. It's like there's this whole system where the
Speaker 1: guards when kids will like funk with them. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: cases like this where they beat up a guard, but
Speaker 1: oftentimes it's just a kid they find annoying. They will
Speaker 1: pay other kids with drugs, but like give kids cocaine
Speaker 1: and heroin to beat the ship out of kids who
Speaker 1: annoy them. That's an endemic problem in this facility. That's unfortunately,
Speaker 1: well yeah, rant not not common normal, Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's everywhere. Um, but it's usually not kids. It's usually
Speaker 1: not children, is yeah to um. But again Texas doesn't
Speaker 1: really see the need to treat them as children. Uh.
Speaker 1: Now that article had a lot of really good stuff
Speaker 1: in it, very important piece of journalism, um, but it
Speaker 1: still contains some of the same problems we've seen over
Speaker 1: and over again. Here's one line I found particularly frustrating.
Speaker 1: It's a bad culture, said Debbie Unrah, an independent watchdog
Speaker 1: charged with ensuring the safety of youths in the Texas
Speaker 1: Juvenile Justice Department's custody. It's a dangerous culture. And again
Speaker 1: that's true. It's a add culture. The culture of like
Speaker 1: guys who were guards and child prisons is bad. Um,
Speaker 1: But that's not the central problem. Um. The claim that, like,
Speaker 1: it's a problem with the culture at this prison might
Speaker 1: hold water if we didn't have a century of documentation
Speaker 1: that this happens in every one of these facilities the
Speaker 1: state of Texas operates. It's constant, and it's for generations. Um.
Speaker 1: The article quoted juvenile justice advocates who once again complained
Speaker 1: that part of the problem was locking kids in remote
Speaker 1: rural facilities far from home. UM. Which is absolutely absolutely true. Right,
Speaker 1: if you are looking at ways to minimize harm, don't
Speaker 1: put him so far away where there's no services. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And like the um frequency of your family visiting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to be yeah. Yeah. Now that article also
Speaker 1: contains more detail about the staff psychologist who gave a
Speaker 1: child pornography so that he could watch that child masturbate. Um.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read a quote about that now. Vincent Rager,
Speaker 1: now third one, began working at Gainesville in two thousand fifteen.
Speaker 1: His online resume indicates he provided individual psychotherapy to boys
Speaker 1: at the school. Rager resigned during the investigation. Officials said
Speaker 1: records show he resigned in lieu of vault of involuntary separation,
Speaker 1: so he resigns in order to avoid being fired. Reached
Speaker 1: my phone earlier this week, Ranger said he resigned because
Speaker 1: he wanted to move to California. Ranger now works as
Speaker 1: a clinical psychologist treating male prisoners at current Valley State
Speaker 1: Prison in Bakersfield, California. Now they're adults. Well they're grown up,
Speaker 1: so that's better. Oh my, I might say you should
Speaker 1: never get to work as a clinical psychologist, like like
Speaker 1: that might that might disqualify you for doing that. Ever,
Speaker 1: you should you should not have a license to do
Speaker 1: any of this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so again we should
Speaker 1: consider perhaps the possibility that like this is not just
Speaker 1: a problem with like Texas, it is also an American problem. Right,
Speaker 1: he goes right away and gets a job, and fucking California.
Speaker 1: You like, are we that hard pressed for people to Yeah,
Speaker 1: like we're that hard pressed for like employment. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: facilities are in the middle of nowhere. They pay for ship. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not enjoyable work. It's not very well respected, respected work.
Speaker 1: So like there, I know there are good people doing
Speaker 1: that job in in the system, but like a lot
Speaker 1: of bad people get that because it's like you're not
Speaker 1: getting the very best generally. Yeah, you have to be
Speaker 1: mission driven, Yeah, if you're going to stay in the
Speaker 1: that work because the work is trash. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: like you obviously you get great teachers in these juvenile
Speaker 1: facilities sometimes like the guy we already taught, Marked Slattery,
Speaker 1: the guy we talked to. I'm saying, like, that's where
Speaker 1: I started teaching. I started teaching in juvenile facilities. I
Speaker 1: was like, but also, you're gonna get a bunch of
Speaker 1: basket cases who this is the gig they could get
Speaker 1: because they did something. Yeah, and it's not if it's
Speaker 1: easy to not like you're as this whole episode is.
Speaker 1: It's easy to not care and still get away with
Speaker 1: it because you're just from a teacher perspective, It's just
Speaker 1: a couple of packets. It's like continuation school. If anybody
Speaker 1: ever been to that, It's like it's packets. You just
Speaker 1: felt the packets. And I just make sure you guys
Speaker 1: don't hurt each other. And the way that I'm sitting
Speaker 1: right now, y'all can't see this listeners, but like my
Speaker 1: feet are like leaned up against the wall. I'm leaning
Speaker 1: back with the mic and I don't have to care
Speaker 1: about I can sit like this for the thirty minutes
Speaker 1: of class and just make sure you don't stab each other.
Speaker 1: And if you do, all I gotta do is call
Speaker 1: the p O and he comes in. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: you'll have then you'll go, you know, to a worse
Speaker 1: place potentially. Yeah, basically like don't have to, so you
Speaker 1: have to you have to care if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, and you get in these places special
Speaker 1: that isn't all that different. You get this mix of
Speaker 1: like the most dedicated, wonderful, caring people, imaginable and every
Speaker 1: like people who are either just waiting out a clock,
Speaker 1: and then a tiny number of people who are sucking
Speaker 1: monsters and know that that's where the least lies are
Speaker 1: eyes are on them, you know, um, and perhaps more
Speaker 1: could be done to make more caring and wonderful people
Speaker 1: able to do that job. And few were at least
Speaker 1: few were monsters. I'm not gonna say like, look, you're
Speaker 1: always gonna have some people waiting out the clock, but
Speaker 1: you don't have to have the monsters exactly. We can
Speaker 1: avoid having we can avoid like, let's set hire few
Speaker 1: monsters and as much as you can. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: because some people get through the cracks, Like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: go a lot. I know personal information about that, but
Speaker 1: like people get through the cracks. Sure, you know, some
Speaker 1: lies obviously a monster maybe like that's maybe don't hire Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe I don't hire monsters speaking of monsters that
Speaker 1: somebody hired Governor Greg Abbott. Um, there's all these well
Speaker 1: this is I mean, he's not the bad guy or
Speaker 1: the good guy here. He does the thing that everyone
Speaker 1: else does every time something like this happens. There's this
Speaker 1: big investigation and all of this press about how bad
Speaker 1: Texas juvenile justice system is and he fires the person
Speaker 1: in charge. Right, how many times does that happen? This
Speaker 1: fucking story. Yeah, there's a bunch of talk of reform
Speaker 1: and YadA YadA YadA. Uh that nothing significant changes, um,
Speaker 1: or at least the changes do not fix all the
Speaker 1: problems that we have been talking about all episode. Um.
Speaker 1: Here's the New York Times reporting in two thousand nineteen. Quote.
Speaker 1: In October twenty nineteen, a prison officer who worked at
Speaker 1: a juvenile detention facility in central Texas was charged with
Speaker 1: sexual assault and accused of forcing a boy in custody
Speaker 1: to perform oral sex on him in his cell. The
Speaker 1: incident came to light the day after the alleged crime
Speaker 1: when the boy tried to kill himself. Two months before that,
Speaker 1: at another detention facility in Texas, a corrections officer was
Speaker 1: fired after a teenage girl said she was pregnant with
Speaker 1: his child. He was later charged in connection with that case,
Speaker 1: and in May of last year, another prison worker was
Speaker 1: arrested on charges that he had carried on a relationship
Speaker 1: with the teenager who was on parole. At five state
Speaker 1: juvenile detention centers, the day to day conditions are relentlessly
Speaker 1: violent and oppressive, with guards often resorting to force. According
Speaker 1: to a complaint filed to the Justice Department in two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, prison staff used force on incarcerated children almost
Speaker 1: seven thousand times, equivalent to six times per child who
Speaker 1: was confined there. Oh my god. Yeah uh, this it
Speaker 1: just feels so personal, like, oh my god, dude. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So these findings came courtesy if yet another Justice Department investigation.
Speaker 1: How many of those? Have we seen? This episode? Right?
Speaker 1: The DJ investigated who hooray and like like we here
Speaker 1: in the date, like this is two thousand nineteen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, with COVID and make it that feels like
Speaker 1: eight you know, because of COVID. But that's three years ago, guys,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah yeah. Um. Now that Justice An investigation had
Speaker 1: started in two eighteen, when two Texas advocacy groups begged
Speaker 1: the federal government to intervene, arguing that Governor Abbott's promised
Speaker 1: to personally monitor the juvenile justice system would not be sufficient.
Speaker 1: It wasn't, which is why everything I read you you know,
Speaker 1: was found UM. And obviously it's good that the Justice
Speaker 1: Department documented this UM. But at the same time, I
Speaker 1: think this is kind of a perfect example of the
Speaker 1: actual logic behind a CAB. I think that slogans a
Speaker 1: lot less useful politically than it than it ever has been,
Speaker 1: but the sentiment behind it applies because these investigators, these
Speaker 1: Justice Department people, document this. This is important work. It's
Speaker 1: important to document this. It's critical, UM. And I think
Speaker 1: these I'm sure these people care. I'm sure they see
Speaker 1: horrific abuse, they want to stop it. They documented, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure they go to bed each night exhausted and sad,
Speaker 1: but certain that they're doing work that needs to be done.
Speaker 1: But as we've seen over and over again in this story,
Speaker 1: all of these investigations are part of how the system
Speaker 1: perpetuates itself. Guards rape and beat children, whistleblowers and watchdogs complain,
Speaker 1: government investigation leads to reform, and then guards keep raping
Speaker 1: and beating children. These investigations and the media cycle that
Speaker 1: follows them are a necessary part of the cathartic loop
Speaker 1: that Texas has been stuck in for more than a
Speaker 1: hundred years. This is a part of the loop. This
Speaker 1: is how people how it gets perpetuated again and again,
Speaker 1: not that like they're they're bad people for investigating this ship,
Speaker 1: but it also is like that when I say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, all whatever whatever are bastards or whatnot in
Speaker 1: the system. That's what we mean the system. The system
Speaker 1: eliminates the possibility of being good because the system cannot
Speaker 1: be reformed. So even if you're working for something that
Speaker 1: looks like reform in the system, a lot of what
Speaker 1: you're going to be doing is keeping the loop going.
Speaker 1: And it's not that simple because obviously some of these
Speaker 1: investigations are part of why there's a massive reduction in
Speaker 1: the number of kids who are in car Sward and
Speaker 1: that's huge. Um So it's not I don't want to
Speaker 1: be painting it is that simple, but like it does,
Speaker 1: it's just doesn't get better. The actual prisons themselves don't
Speaker 1: get better. That there are less kids in them, and
Speaker 1: that's good, but the things keep happening because we just
Speaker 1: can't have these places and those things not happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the like the argument about like abolition, it's just
Speaker 1: like we just have to start over, like because reforms,
Speaker 1: you're just it's just duct tape, and it's not and
Speaker 1: it's not stopping, it's not fixing the problem. You'll just
Speaker 1: keep adding duct tape and it's and sometimes the duct
Speaker 1: tape muffles the sound from inside. Yeah, you know, makes
Speaker 1: people think that we've fixed it. Yes, and pretty poetic there, Robert,
Speaker 1: every now and then. Yeah, Yeah, there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that questions the value of continuing to loop through
Speaker 1: all of these stories, all of these details of abuse,
Speaker 1: all of these statistics, over and over again, every cycle
Speaker 1: that this happens. And um, because again, I think the
Speaker 1: only real thing to do is empty these facilities out,
Speaker 1: burn them down, and throw any person who suggests rebuilding
Speaker 1: them into the Gulf of Mexico. But that said, I
Speaker 1: also don't want to ignore the work that these these
Speaker 1: journalists in these Department of Justice people do and in
Speaker 1: documenting this because the stories of these victims, these victims
Speaker 1: are important. And so to close us out, I'm going
Speaker 1: to read one more quote from that article that I
Speaker 1: decided from about Christie Dennis. Her son was fifteen when
Speaker 1: he was sent to the McLennan County State Juvenile Correction
Speaker 1: Facility and marked Texas quote. Miss Dennis was horrified when
Speaker 1: she called one day in two thousand nineteen and learned
Speaker 1: that her son had been beaten and taunted as guards
Speaker 1: apparently stood by. Her son was sent to the jail's
Speaker 1: doctors on one occasion, she said, and she was later
Speaker 1: told that many guards did not intervene because they were
Speaker 1: afraid of the youth themselves. Miss Dennis said her son
Speaker 1: ended up at the center after taking her car without
Speaker 1: permission several times and money from her purse. After talking
Speaker 1: to the authorities, she was advised that if she wanted
Speaker 1: to teach her son a lesson, he needed to go
Speaker 1: to a juvenile facility. A decision, Miss Dennis said, a
Speaker 1: decisiency ended up regretting. The attacks against her son escalated
Speaker 1: to the point where he begged guards to keep him
Speaker 1: in solitary confinement. Released in July, months before his seventeenth birthday,
Speaker 1: he now works at a fast food restaurant and his
Speaker 1: earning his g e D with plans to pursue welding.
Speaker 1: But he is not the same as he was before
Speaker 1: his detention. She said. He has PTSD, he hears a noise,
Speaker 1: and he panics. And that's another important when we talk
Speaker 1: about the complicity in the system and the degree to
Speaker 1: which maybe some of these people documenting these abuses or
Speaker 1: even complicit, another person or group of people who are
Speaker 1: complicit are parents in these communities, parents who turn in
Speaker 1: their kids, parents who support these laws, parents who who
Speaker 1: support funding these places. UM. I think it's probably fair
Speaker 1: to say that of the adults I knew as a child,
Speaker 1: UM were to that degree complicit in this system because
Speaker 1: they supported keep opening more places. The politicians who supported
Speaker 1: these places, and they were convinced that it was the
Speaker 1: right thing to do. And the result of a lot
Speaker 1: of people being convinced that this is the right thing
Speaker 1: to do. It's not just the rapists and the murderers
Speaker 1: and the pedophiles, UM, or the venal politicians who make
Speaker 1: this possible. It's the people who think they're doing the
Speaker 1: best thing for society. And the result of everything of
Speaker 1: both the actions of these horrible rapists and whatnot in
Speaker 1: pedophiles and the actions of what I'm sure loving parents
Speaker 1: and dedicated employees and the justice part whatnot the result
Speaker 1: of all of that is a system that rapes, beats,
Speaker 1: and murders children on an industrial scale. That's why I
Speaker 1: opened this episode with, like, I am a parent, and
Speaker 1: the part of me that understands at least can empathize
Speaker 1: what it what it feels like to have a child
Speaker 1: that you don't know what to do with, Like I
Speaker 1: deeply understand that, you know, um, and the part of
Speaker 1: you that like the reality that you're still unpacking your
Speaker 1: own trauma, Like just from just the time of age
Speaker 1: of civilization we're in, it was like, like you said,
Speaker 1: we were odd enough to where we could get spanked
Speaker 1: at school, Like that's that Like we're like, it's not
Speaker 1: that long ago that we actually realized that that was barbaric,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. So so you're you're you're
Speaker 1: processing your own upbringing realizing, and then the parts of
Speaker 1: you that feels like like even with me, where I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: there's a been times that I've been like, well, I
Speaker 1: kind of earned that spanking, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: Like I probably should have got spank for that, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying That now I can't. I look
Speaker 1: at both my children and I'm like, ain't in a
Speaker 1: damn world I would put my hands on my kids,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, Like it just seems so
Speaker 1: like unthinkable like that, I don't. I just don't think
Speaker 1: I could. I could never do it, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. But when I got married again I'm black,
Speaker 1: like black people spank their kids. When I got married
Speaker 1: Southern people, they spanked their kids, is so normal. And
Speaker 1: then so I'm like that no doubt in my mind,
Speaker 1: and my parents loved me like I'm not. I would
Speaker 1: never take that for my parents loved me. I have
Speaker 1: great relationship with my with my mom at least, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, but like you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and and a better one with my father now. But like, um,
Speaker 1: that being said, I'm like the part of me that
Speaker 1: understands that you're just like I don't. And I'm from
Speaker 1: the city, so I'm just sometimes we'd be like nah,
Speaker 1: and how we need to go to jail, you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. And then but then you get there,
Speaker 1: which is why I feel like sometimes for me and
Speaker 1: my wife, like us who've been advocates who have like
Speaker 1: you know, been to the Congress, like stood to our
Speaker 1: our front of our our councilmen and been like, you know,
Speaker 1: our our senators and been like, this ship got to stop,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. They have like done the work,
Speaker 1: done the therapy for ourselves. We've made enough money to
Speaker 1: be able to do therapy for ourselves, to be able
Speaker 1: to be like to come to the conclusions that we're
Speaker 1: at now, to be like, this ship isn't working, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, And having the experience of like
Speaker 1: having friends that have been through the system, you know,
Speaker 1: ourselves somehow, you know, have in our own interactions with
Speaker 1: the system to be able to look at our own
Speaker 1: children and everybody else's children and be like, listen, this
Speaker 1: is not the answer. You know what I'm saying. And
Speaker 1: it's not it's it's not doing what you think it's doing.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I feel like that's a privilege of mine, even
Speaker 1: coming from poverty, coming from the hood, is having a
Speaker 1: privilege of understanding that, like, yo, the system you think
Speaker 1: is gonna rehabilitate your children have has no that was
Speaker 1: never in their purview. Joe saying that was never that
Speaker 1: was never on the table was rehabilitating them. You know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Um, so I raised my children in
Speaker 1: a different like even tho it's looking at like my
Speaker 1: own like like friends being like, yeah, we don't spank
Speaker 1: our kids and being like friends being like what like yo,
Speaker 1: I was like no, like we've you know, saying we
Speaker 1: it's a we're in a it's all that say. I'm
Speaker 1: stuttering now because I feel so passionate about this to
Speaker 1: where it's like the complicity because you talked about the
Speaker 1: complicency and that's the complicency that like sits as a
Speaker 1: parent to where you're like, but I'm also terrified for
Speaker 1: my child and I don't want them to make bad decisions,
Speaker 1: and I feel like they're not listening to me. And
Speaker 1: I know what scared me straight was being scared. So
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, maybe that's gonna But then you realize
Speaker 1: it's like, no, you're creating a criminal. You're traumatizing your
Speaker 1: child and not understanding how you're traumatizing your child because
Speaker 1: you think they know you love them. But like all
Speaker 1: of that put together and then and then like you said,
Speaker 1: like coming out of the other end and being like
Speaker 1: I'm trying to do my best I'm I'm, I'm I'm.
Speaker 1: I'm saying a lot here because like, again, it's so
Speaker 1: important to me. I just like I just went through
Speaker 1: a situation on another on a nonprofit. I'm on the
Speaker 1: board of that, Like you know, we had to go
Speaker 1: through a moment to where it was like when you
Speaker 1: sit that, I've never been in a situation where I'm
Speaker 1: actually at the part of the table where I have
Speaker 1: the range, like I can actually make change here, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, where I'm like, I'm actually the
Speaker 1: one in power now, like I'm usually one outside of
Speaker 1: the door. Now I'm actually in it. But then once
Speaker 1: you're sitting at that and you're like, oh man, there's
Speaker 1: like there's really a lot at steak here when I
Speaker 1: if I make this decision that seems so easy when
Speaker 1: I was outside, you know what I'm saying, But now
Speaker 1: that I'm in and you're like, that's like you like
Speaker 1: how you keep trying to like balance your understanding of
Speaker 1: like these journalists and these like justice workers that were like, yo,
Speaker 1: like we're doing what is obviously the right thing, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, But like at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, you're still laying your head like, but we ship, dude, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean I can't. I mean, what we really need
Speaker 1: to do, you know what I'm saying, Like you said,
Speaker 1: which really is close them all, but you're like, but funk,
Speaker 1: like I don't have the I mean, this is the
Speaker 1: best I could do, you know what I'm saying. It's
Speaker 1: just like I understand so much more now at this
Speaker 1: stage in my life, in my career and my parents
Speaker 1: being like all of those nuances. You know, I just
Speaker 1: wish I could just rap about it. I wish I
Speaker 1: could just wrap about it. Do podcasts, you know, saying yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you do. You do have a podcast. I
Speaker 1: do have a podcast, and I do talk about the ship,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, I wish I had some cathartic
Speaker 1: way to deal with it. Yeah, rapping sounds actually extremely cathartic.
Speaker 1: It really is. Bro But I still think I think
Speaker 1: I said that when the first time I was on
Speaker 1: the show, like, yo, let me write a rap for
Speaker 1: you man, Like, yeah, yeah, I hear you're rid them
Speaker 1: though I don't know you're RIDM Like if you if
Speaker 1: I could write it, but if you got rid of them,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, absolutely not, Um, Yeah, that's that
Speaker 1: that that that that that will always just be something
Speaker 1: I have to admire from afar Um. But I don't
Speaker 1: know what do you you got anything to plug PROP
Speaker 1: at the end, at the end of this very bleak
Speaker 1: day of talking about child prisms that proud right there
Speaker 1: for you, and then we should perform it at the
Speaker 1: live show. I do have something to plug. I'm happy
Speaker 1: with PROP performing at the live show. I don't think
Speaker 1: any that's that's not what they're paying for. So I
Speaker 1: bet you right now if I were to throw on
Speaker 1: because you've mentioned it already on our shelves, I to
Speaker 1: throw on like a most like a black on both
Speaker 1: sides record, but you could probably wrap along. There are
Speaker 1: songs out there, some some of the doom Tree stuff.
Speaker 1: I bet you have to throw on both few of
Speaker 1: them tracks, few of them atmosphere songs. You already know
Speaker 1: that you could probably wrap a love Yeah. I may
Speaker 1: have listened to an astop rocker two in my time. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's listen, that's some complex rapping, like you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. That ain't that ain't some easy that
Speaker 1: ain't some that ain't some easy bars Like that's some
Speaker 1: complex rapping anyway. Yes, dot com, we'll see how drunk
Speaker 1: I get during the live stream. But that's one more
Speaker 1: reason to check out the live stream. Yeah, absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and hit me on Twitter. I'm trying to come up
Speaker 1: with a game for us to play during the live
Speaker 1: stream that might involve how drunk. I feel like all
Speaker 1: the ones are like the boy Howdies and like the
Speaker 1: Hitler calls. I'd be like, man, Luckily nobody calls me
Speaker 1: out on my life. You know what I'm saying, because
Speaker 1: I felt like you wasted, wasted immediately first ten minutes. Yeah. Anyways, Yeah,
Speaker 1: profit pop dot com. I got some new coffee content
Speaker 1: coming out, like got some uh, got some you know,
Speaker 1: music and politics, pod Man, we're getting got renewed, thank you.
Speaker 1: Cool more shows coming, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: check it out. Check out prop check out props book,
Speaker 1: check out check us out for our live stream on
Speaker 1: check out our live stream on February seventeenth, Moment dot
Speaker 1: com slash behind the Bastard. Yeah, check that out. And also,
Speaker 1: I have a fiction book that is on pre sale
Speaker 1: right now. If you order during the pre sale for
Speaker 1: the next couple of months, you will get a signed
Speaker 1: copy when it comes out in May. Google a k
Speaker 1: press after the revolution, and that's where my book will be,
Speaker 1: a K press after the revolution. By a copy of
Speaker 1: my novel I learned about a skull fucker, Mike, school
Speaker 1: fucker Mike. All right, Yeah, that's a great book. Man.
Speaker 1: You're like, fiction is hard to write. It really is. Boy,
Speaker 1: howdy that You're like, well, I'm making up a story.
Speaker 1: Like we've been making up stories since we've been sneaking
Speaker 1: out in front of our parents, Like we've been making
Speaker 1: up stories. But like it's really hard. So like yo,
Speaker 1: kudo's way easier to just be a judge. Apparently money
Speaker 1: shim great boy. Alright, boy, howdy indeed, I am Texan. Alright,
Speaker 1: that's the episode. Bam