For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or you can reach the Crisis Text Line by texting “HOME” to 741741.
Texas’ juvenile prison system is nearing total collapse.
Its five lockups are dangerously understaffed, an ongoing problem that worsened dramatically last year when its turnover rate hit more than 70%. The state has desperately tried to recruit employees, but most new hires are gone within six months.
Teachers and caseworkers routinely work in security roles so the prisons’ nearly 600 youth can get out of their cells to go to the bathroom or take showers. Still, children have reported being left to use water bottles as makeshift toilets.
On weekends, youth are often locked alone in cramped cells with only a mounted bookshelf and a thin mattress on a concrete block for up to 23 hours a day. The lucky ones have a small window to the outside.
The agency has largely stopped accepting newly sentenced teenagers from crowded county detention centers, fearing it can’t even protect the children already in its care.
And more and more, children are hurting themselves — sometimes severely — out of distress or as a way to get attention in their isolation. Nearly half of those locked in the state’s juvenile prisons this year have been on suicide watch.
The emergency is the predictable result of a…
For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free help line at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or you can reach the Crisis Text Line by texting “HOME” to 741741.
Texas’ juvenile prison system is nearing total collapse.
Its five lockups are dangerously understaffed, an ongoing problem that worsened dramatically last year when its turnover rate hit more than 70%. The state has desperately tried to recruit employees, but most new hires are gone within six months.
Teachers and caseworkers routinely work in security roles so the prisons’ nearly 600 youth can get out of their cells to go to the bathroom or take showers. Still, children have reported being left to use water bottles as makeshift toilets.
On weekends, youth are often locked alone in cramped cells with only a mounted bookshelf and a thin mattress on a concrete block for up to 23 hours a day. The lucky ones have a small window to the outside.
The agency has largely stopped accepting newly sentenced teenagers from crowded county detention centers, fearing it can’t even protect the children already in its care.
And more and more, children are hurting themselves — sometimes severely — out of distress or as a way to get attention in their isolation. Nearly half of those locked in the state’s juvenile prisons this year have been on suicide watch.
The emergency is the predictable result of a…Read Morelocal_news
