The Debate Over How and Whether to Jail Kids in Austin Is Just Getting Started
Travis County proposes a new facility to hold kids accused of crimes
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., Jan. 26, 2024
On Nov. 23, 1996, high school sophomore Bill Wallace was involved in a dispute between two groups of men near Rundberg Lane in North Austin. Both groups drew guns and shot. A 32-year-old man lost his life. Wallace was arrested six weeks later, taken to the Gardner Betts Juvenile Justice Center, and held on suspicion of murder.
Gardner Betts is essentially a jail for children who commit crimes in Travis County. It sits on several acres drawn back from Congress Avenue near Oltorf Street in South Austin, in such a way that most people don’t know it’s there. Wallace was held at Gardner Betts for three months as prosecutors worked to get him certified as an adult.
“Right now, I don’t think it’s even the practice of Travis County to certify juveniles as adults,” Wallace told the Chronicle recently. (It hasn’t happened since 2014, Juvenile Probation told us.) “But back then that was a thing. It was the Nineties, and it was very in vogue to be as harsh as you could on juveniles, with the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘superpredators’ type of language.”
Wallace remembers being scared as he sat in Gardner Betts. But the county had provided him with a free attorney, Kameron Johnson, from the Juvenile Public Defender’s Office, who was able to comfort him. After a judge declared Wallace an adult for purposes of his trial, he was provided another attorney, the current head of the district attorney’s civil rights unit, Dexter Gilford.
To this day, Wallace is grateful for Johnson and Gilford. “I’m Black, I’m African American, and those two Black guys really impacted my life,” he said. “They treated me as a human being, just as a person, at a time when I was very vulnerable. And I love them for that. I’m indebted to them. I don’t know how that happened, how the universe allowed that to happen.”
A year after his arrest, Wallace was tried for murder. He was found guilty, and prosecutors asked for a 45-year sentence. They asked the jury to send the message that Austin does not tolerate juvenile violence. Gilford humanized Wallace to the jury. He reminded them that Wallace was 15 years old at the time of the offense, that he had been in the National Junior Honor Society, had played football in school, and had never been in trouble before. The jury gave him 25 years in adult prison.
Johnson and Gilford went on to become leaders in what, for the last 20 years, has been a countywide rejection of the myth of superpredators and harsh sentences for children who commit crimes. Wallace is now part of that movement. He was released from prison in 2017 after 20 years of confinement and started the nonprofit Tomorrow’s Promise Foundation, which mentors at-risk youth, virtually all of them people of color living in poverty.
Wallace recently learned that Travis County is proposing the construction of a new facility to hold kids accused of crimes. It would sit across the street from the Gardner Betts building and that building’s twin facility – the Jeanne Meurer Intermediate Sanctions Center, called the ISC. The new building is conceived as an innovative, homelike alternative to incarceration at the ISC. Its backers say it will be “non-secure,” meaning the kids committed to it would not be locked up. They hope it becomes the latest advance in the county’s years of effort to keep kids out of the juvenile justice system.
Wallace is familiar with the plans and the reasoning behind them. But he has no faith that the new building would be different from the ones in which he spent half of his life. “I think these buildings strip young people of their identity and try to turn them all into the same thing, which just prepares them for prison,” he said. “It’s systemic. It’s in the rules and regulations. It’s in the structure and code. It’s in DNA. It’s in the walls.
“These places are made to break human beings, to separate families. And they cause them to come back and make this a cyclic thing. They’re not made to redeem people.”
Gardner Betts and the ISC
Rubén Castañeda has represented thousands of kids over more than two decades as an attorney for the county’s Juvenile Public Defender’s Office, which provides free representation for kids accused of crimes. In May, he became the leader of the office – taking over when Kameron Johnson stepped down as chief after 22 years. Castañeda told us that, by state law, kids as young as 10 years of age can be arrested and held at Gardner Betts. He has personally represented 11-year-olds.
The offenses kids are arrested for can be relatively small matters, like shoplifting. In Travis County, those arrested for the first time on this kind of misdemeanor are offered diversion programs and never see the inside of a courtroom, Castañeda said. But those accused of violence, or who have repeatedly broken probation agreements for nonviolent offenses, are placed in Gardner Betts – a term used by those who work in the county’s juvenile justice system to refer to the system as a whole and the actual building, a 120-bed detention facility with its own courthouse.
The Jeanne Meurer Intermediate Sanctions Center sits next to the Gardner Betts building and is also used to hold kids. The population in both buildings is dramatically disproportional to the community at large. Attorneys and judges told us that in recent years about half of the kids have been Hispanic, and 30% to 40% have been Black, though Hispanic and Black Austinites make up only about 32% and 8% of the population, respectively. Our sources say practically all of these kids are disadvantaged and come from the east side of Austin and Pflugerville.
“Gardner Betts is basically for kids who were just recently arrested or are awaiting their court appearance,” Castañeda told us. “It is like jail. The kids wear uniforms. The uniforms are like jail uniforms.
“The ISC is for kids who have been adjudicated and ordered to be placed in the ISC by the court. They also wear uniforms, but the uniforms the ISC kids wear are not like prison uniforms. They are closer to street clothes, but they’re still uniforms. Their day is very structured. They have different units. And when they go to bed at night they’re locked in, like jail.”
The kids ordered by a judge to be held in the ISC are often there for sentences of nine months to a year, according to Castañeda. During their detention, they receive different kinds of counseling and treatment, referred to as programming. Programming may include mental health services, anger management counseling, courses to prevent gang violence, and life and social skills training. The ISC, like Gardner Betts, also provides regular school instruction for detained kids. Both buildings have classrooms. Together, they constitute a designated campus of the Austin Independent School District. (AISD did not respond to our interview requests for this story.)
Dr. Daniel Hoard is a psychologist and the deputy chief of the probation department’s Health Services Division, which provides clinical services to kids and their families. He described the types of offenses that cause kids to be placed in the ISC. “The youth that we work with are most typically here following serious, felony-level offenses,” he said. “These are not adolescents who have engaged in teenage misbehavior but in serious offenses that place the community at risk.”
These kinds of offenses almost always include an element of violence. Channing Neary of the District Attorney’s Office recently analyzed 10 years of records and found the most frequent offense was family violence. In many counties, children who commit this kind of offense are sent to the youth prisons managed by the dysfunctional Texas Juvenile Justice Department. (Formerly known as the Texas Youth Commission, The Texas Tribune described TJJD in 2022 as “on the brink of collapse.”) Hoard told us that the county’s juvenile justice leaders broadly agree that it’s preferable not to send kids to the state system but to work with them locally.
“Travis County doesn’t typically send away our kids,” Hoard said. “That’s why we have the ISC. We keep them here with us on probation, working to provide education and vocational services and treatment for them and their families, while preparing for their reentry into the community. We really don’t want to send kids away from their families because we’ve come to understand the importance of family work and addressing needs at that level. Those are needs we can address.”
A couple of important points about Hoard’s employer, the Juvenile Probation Department: First, it is huge and complex. With over 500 employees, it is far larger than the Juvenile Public Defender’s Office and the county court system. Second, it is, as Hoard calls it, a “one-stop shop for juvenile services.” The department cares for kids from the moment they are brought to Gardner Betts to the time they’re released – and afterward.
The Gardner Betts campus has courtrooms, probation offices, detention areas, and spaces for many types of therapeutic services. Hoard and his team screen every kid brought into the system to determine what level of risk they might present to the community and what needs they have. The department has diversion programs at different steps of the process to prevent kids from getting more deeply involved in the system. It provides services including mentorship, mental health assessment, and individual, group, and family therapy, among other things. It is, many told us, the most respected and innovative probation department in the state.
And, of course, Hoard is just one of many compassionate people who work at Gardner Betts and the ISC. But that doesn’t mean the detention facilities aren’t frightening places for kids, especially those locked up for the first time. Angel Carroll is a former foster kid who works as the director of advocacy for the Austin nonprofit Measure (she’s also running to represent Round Rock’s House District 52 in the Texas Legislature). Carroll said she lived in a dozen child detention facilities in her teenage years. She spent time in Gardner Betts in 2009 and remembers it as cold and traumatizing.
“I had been accused of a crime but then they had recanted and I had to stay there while CPS found a placement for me,” Carroll said. “And I’m not saying this about any one particular facility, but none of them are supposed to be warm and comforting. As a whole, there’s a lot of abuse that goes on. And the abuse is not always physical or sexual abuse. It’s turning kids against each other, favoritism, playing on food insecurity. For me, reading was an escape. And there were times when a book was taken away as a consequence. Like, ‘Oh, you didn’t do this, so we’re going to take your book away.’ There’s a lot of illogical things that happen.”
A New Vision?
Travis County’s judges, probation officers, attorneys, and advocates have heard stories like Carroll’s before. They’re the reason the probation department and some judges are proposing a redesign of the Gardner Betts campus. The redesign is called the comprehensive facilities plan. The central element of it is the construction of a new, large, multifloor building across the street from Gardner Betts and the ISC. The plan has existed since 2016 but went mostly unnoticed until last summer, when the Juvenile Board voted to reserve $3 million from the county budget to push the project forward (more on that later).
In recent months, Hoard and his boss, Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Cory Burgess, have made a pair of PowerPoint presentations laying out their vision for the new facility – one to the Juvenile Board judges, the staff of Gardner Betts, and the Juvenile Public Defender’s Office; and another to criminal justice advocates. The PowerPoint is not yet public, but Burgess told us the goal is to create a softer facility for kids in the system, something nonsecure – that is, no locked doors – that fits the national trend of moving kids out of jail-like settings. He explained that there is no available facility for kids who need services but don’t need to be locked up, and calculated that about 40 Travis County children currently fall into this category.
“If a judge wants to order a kid to a nonsecure facility, we have to send that kid to a private provider outside of Travis County,” Burgess said. “So the goal is to build some nonsecure residential placement buildings so we don’t have to send kids away. If we don’t have a nonsecure place to send a kid, we may have to consider a secure placement.” That placement would be the ISC.
Hoard said the proposed building would keep kids closer to home, so their families can be involved in their programs. He believes it would help the department take the lightest touch possible in addressing kids’ needs while preventing future recidivism. Of course, the building is not yet designed, but the probation department wants it to have four main elements: new courtrooms to replace those at Gardner Betts; an activities space for programs and services for youth; an unlocked space for therapy and services; and independent and assisted living spaces. Hoard said that in addition to providing services for the kids who are currently sent to private program providers, he believes the new facility could result in fewer kids being held in the ISC.
“The intent would be to work with youth in the ISC towards a successful transition into a less restrictive, non-institutional setting,” Hoard said. “Or, ideally, they would never get to the ISC in the first place because there would be a local nonsecure option to address their needs.”
Hoard described the two kinds of living quarters the department wants to see in the building. “The assisted living and independent living plans are actually two separate things that we’re proposing to be able to have options available for two different types of kids, the kid who can be pretty independent – and what that would look like is almost a mini studio apartment – and then the kid who needs a little more support. That would be a dorm-style space. We want to develop somewhere to live – likely for a matter of months – while we work to transition them to stable housing.”
Guards would be stationed at the new facility – Hoard said that is required by state law – but he and Burgess emphasized that kids could walk out the door anytime they choose. The chief told us the new building could also provide room for offices, allowing the department to remodel the courtrooms at Gardner Betts and enlarge the classrooms, visitation areas, and counseling rooms there and in the ISC.
“Ultimately, the vision is just to more effectively address issues with kids,” Hoard said. “Philosophically, I think the impact would be that kids would have less juvenile justice involvement because they would have spent fewer days behind a locked door.”
The Case Against Building
At some point in the next couple of years, the Travis County Commissioners Court may be asked to provide the money needed to create the building. Before that happens, Travis County’s elected judges will have to vote to approve it. There are 22 of these judges: 21 heading civil and criminal courts, plus the county’s general manager, County Judge Andy Brown. All of the judges sit on the Juvenile Board. That body makes decisions on the county’s juvenile justice system at public meetings every three months.
It was at one of these meetings last August that it became clear that several judges have doubts about the need for a new building. When the board was asked to reserve $3 million in this year’s budget to pay for the building’s design, three judges – Aurora Martinez Jones, Maya Gamble, and Selena Alvarenga – began asking questions. The judges ultimately agreed to reserve the money, but only after being assured that it wouldn’t be spent if they decide the county doesn’t actually need a new building.
Judge Martinez Jones told us that she and some of her colleagues see a cognitive dissonance in creating a new space to house kids when diversion programs and changing state laws are keeping more and more children out of the system in the first place.
“We’ve had years of changes to the state statutes – for example, truancy is no longer treated as a crime. Certain other charges, like for runaways and things like that, are not being treated as crimes,” Martinez Jones said. “There are certainly less cases being filed than there were 10 years ago. So we have that question – and it’s been an ongoing question – about the drop in the number of cases being filed. We are wondering: Are we still in a situation where we feel like a new facility is what we need?”
Castañeda said it’s been years since the Gardner Betts and ISC buildings have been anywhere near capacity. He gave us representative numbers in a conversation in late December: “The Texas Juvenile Justice Department website says the ISC has a rated capacity of 118 beds. Right now, there are 27 kids in it. For Gardner Betts, the TJJD says they have a rated capacity of 120 beds. I checked this morning and right now there are 38 kids there. They’ve been averaging between 30 and 40 kids for quite some time. There are units in Gardner Betts that are completely empty, that are unused. Which is a good thing.”
Castañeda speculates that it could cost $100 million or more to erect a new building. He thinks that sum would be better spent on treatment services, counselors, and programs. He said that in some ways the county provides fewer services for kids now than it once did.
“Twenty years ago there used to be four levels of drug treatment in Travis County. There were drug education classes, outpatient treatment facilities, and there was day treatment, where the kids attended school five days a week and received treatment. And then the most restrictive level was inpatient treatment. Right now, there’s really no drug treatment for juveniles with these issues. So instead of pouring money into a brand-new facility, why don’t we pour some money into trying to get resources such as these to help these children? I think it’s better to pour money into humans, rather than concrete and brick and mortar.”
Some have asked whether the ISC, or a portion of the ISC, could be remodeled to create unlocked residential spaces for kids. Hoard doesn’t believe the cinderblock building would work for this purpose. “The ISC was built in 2001, and we’ve tried really hard to make it less institutional feeling, to soften it up with colorful paints, carpets. But it really has limitations in terms of its layout and overall design, including insufficient natural light. It simply was not built to support a modern, nonsecure, non-institutional-feeling program.”
More to Sort Out
Alycia Castillo of the Texas Civil Rights Project has worked for years to close down the TJJD’s youth prisons. She’s not a fan of incarceration, but there are elements of the facilities plan that intrigue her.
“The plan, as I understand it so far, is unique, specifically in that the facility promises to be a ‘nonsecure’ detention center,” Castillo said. “And I agree we need more loving, safe, noncarceral placements for when a child has nowhere safe to go. But 130-plus years of juvenile detention reform in Texas has shown that as long as a law enforcement agency builds and runs it, it will be carceral.”
Castillo thinks the money for a new building would be better spent on expanding programs that are separate from the juvenile justice system, including the behavioral health diversion center, currently under development, and violence interruption programs. She’s also enthusiastic about the new Travis County Transformation Project, which seeks to remove kids accused of family violence from the justice system.
Martinez Jones told us she is dead set against any new detention facility (and that she remains uncertain to what extent the probation department’s proposed building would resemble one) but that she’s not opposed to the idea of building something.
“I want to look at community-based housing – not a facility, not a hard space, but a soft space that’s a homelike environment, that’s an alternative to having to go to detention. I would love to see our community be at the forefront of that. But when I went to the presentation for the current facilities plan, I had a lot of concerns about the dormlike and apartmentlike buildings. The plan still felt like ‘facilities.’ It didn’t feel soft. It still felt hard.”
Martinez Jones said a soft residential space could be helpful for the “dual status” kids that she works with – those who are in the juvenile justice system and in Child Protective Services, because they have been taken out of their homes. She thinks a new facility could help some of these kids avoid entering the foster care system by creating a “cooling off” period for disputes between them and their families. She believes if the county offered outpatient care that some parents might be able to take their kids back.
Castañeda and Martinez Jones share a major reservation about the plans as they understand them. They say the Gardner Betts building has an advantage the proposed facility would lack: it doesn’t require kids to be shackled for their court appearances because its detention areas are located next to its courtrooms. The pair are worried the new facility would make it necessary to shackle kids because it replaces the courtrooms at Gardner Betts but does not include secure detention spaces. So children would have to be driven across the street from Gardner Betts to the new building’s courtrooms for their court appearances, and they would be shackled for those transports.
“Shackling means leg irons, it means handcuffs, it means belly chains,” Castañeda said. “There’s a lot of research on how that is traumatic in many ways. It makes the children – and the parents for that matter – suspicious of the system and less trusting. And it would have to happen every time a kid appeared before a judge – twice. When I heard about this, I made the comment that it is unacceptable. And it still is. Shackling children is inhumane. It’s undignified. It’s traumatic.”
Hoard acknowledged that shackling children is a problem. “I don’t disagree with Rubén on that one,” he said. “That’s something we would need to think about. I would like for us to come up with what would be the best proposal, and I don’t know what that would exactly mean. But there might be, if we think of the worst-case scenario, some trade-off there to where kids do have to be shackled.”
Castañeda also worries that creating a new facility will inevitably lead to Travis County detaining more kids. Wallace agrees. “It’s like that old saying – ‘If you build it, they’ll come,’” Wallace said. “And that’s just the truth. And you know why they’ll come? Because we’ll make sure they come. And we’ll hold them longer when they do, because we’ve got to have somebody in these big buildings we’re making.”
Burgess told us he has been surprised by the doubts about the facilities plan but he’s eager for continued discussion with the Juvenile Public Defender’s Office, judges, and advocates. He stressed that an unlocked residential facility would be a major innovation for the community.
“I assure you, there’s a stark difference between being in what is essentially a juvenile jail versus being behind a door that’s not locked, where a kid could walk out of the building at any time that they wanted to,” the juvenile probation chief said. “That’s a difference. But the probation department is committed to working with everyone to make sure that we meet the needs of the community. So we will be open to continue having discussion and dialogue with our partners, including JPD and the advocates in the city.”
In December, Judge Rhonda Hurley, who has led the Juvenile Court since 2009, announced that she would not seek reelection when her current term ends in the fall. She has already resigned as the chair of the Juvenile Board. Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel became the new chair this month. She is one of a group of recently seated judges including Martinez Jones, Gamble, and Alvarenga who promise a wave of change in the county’s juvenile justice system.
“It’s a time of transition,” Judge Cantú Hexsel told us, “and that provides a really good opportunity to assess where we are in this work. I look forward to talking with all the stakeholders, including the people who don’t think they want or need a building now. The facilities plan exists to serve our youth and focus on programming that diverts them out of the juvenile justice system. So the question is, how could the building add to all that? It could be great. We just need to figure out what that is exactly.”
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