Texas youth prison lockdown criticized in state oversight report

The report follows the sudden resignation of the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s director and a days-long lockdown at all five of the state’s youth prisons.

Official response and confirmed impact

The unprecedented lockdown of all five youth prisons in Texas earlier this year led to “increased self-harm by youth, delayed treatment including for youth on suicide alert, and escalated use of force” against children, according to a report published Friday by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission.

“Isolation heightens the probability of a youth acting out,” says the report from the commission, which evaluates the performance of state agencies.

The report also indicates that county juvenile probation departments (JPDs), which have custody of the children before they go to the state’s youth prisons, were kept in the dark about the lockdown conditions for five days.

So were juvenile judges across the state.

Incident under investigation

Officials at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) had defended the lockdown as a way to improve safety at youth prisons following assaults against staff, but an investigation by KERA and The Texas Newsroom, cited by the Sunset Commission report, revealed that the children subjected to the lockdown harmed themselves scores of times over a period of just a few days and that staff struggled to get a handle on the situation.