Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Child Prisons of Texas

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Robert is joined by Propaganda to discuss The Child Prisons of Texas.Join us on 2/17 for a live digital experience of Behind the Bastards (plus Q&A) featuring Robert Evans, Propaganda, & Sophie Lichterman. If you can't make it, the show will be available for replay until 2/24!Tickets: https://www.momenthouse.com/behindthebastards Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's fucked my home state? Whoa. Yeah. You caught me on Texas. I wasn't ready for that. This is behind the bastards podcast. Bad people tell you all about them. We have an opening schema that I used in the last episode that dates back several years where I would essentially say what's xing my y's. It started with generic introduction, what's cracking my peppers and

stuff. And now it's become completely atomized from its origins and probably makes no sense to people who are just like hopping into an episode. But that's how we introduce shows sometimes. So hello. It's quite a joy, man. I'm not going to lie. And we don't usually introduce ourselves and sometimes we forget to introduce our guests. Yep. Our guest who is, of course, Prop. I will not be saying your government name. Appreciate that. Prop, how do you feel about Texas? How truthful do you want me to answer this? It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. I can't stand this place. Yeah. I couldn't. You know, there's things about it that are nice. Yeah. Now, as a caveat, there are plenty of lovely people that I adore that live in Texas. One of which is my grandmother,

you know, was from Sulphur Springs and moved to Dallas. And my father's born in a big D, you know what I'm saying? And like, so I got some, I got some, some roots out there. That being said, I don't know nobody in my family that still lives there because pretty much strange from that side of the family. That being said, the ones that were from Texas that I do know all came to California in the 60s. So in my mind, they Californians. So yeah, I moved from Texas to California. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in my fucking life. I mean, just like my great grandma. There is a thing that you get. I mean, I say it's about half of the people that I love in the world still live in Texas. There's wonderful things about it. There's stuff that only Texas has,

but like there is a feeling a lot of people get living in Texas that more or less I would sum up as I got to get the fuck out of here. I got to get the fuck out of this place. One of my DJs is from San Angelo that I work with. And same thing. He was just like, I'm a Texan, but I cannot wait to leave. Yeah. And it is indelibly printed on my soul. There's all sorts of things about me that are very deeply Texan, but like, well, I just hit a point where I was like, I'm gone. Yeah, I got to get out of here. And what else coffee is great? Yeah. Davis Dressel in Dallas is Marfa's dope. I like a lot of West Texas. Had some real good times in Hill Country. There's kinds of freedom that you can have in Texas if you're a white person. I should state that if you are a white person.

That you don't often find other parts of this country, even as a white person. There's like things that you can get up to in Texas that are absolutely nuts. But it comes with a couple of caveats. One of them being the fact that Texas has probably the most nightmarish juvenile justice system in the entire United States, which as we have discussed a number of times in this podcast, including earlier this week, has a pretty shitty history with juvenile justice. Texas is unquestionably the worst. Like the state that has the worst history with juvenile justice. And Texas is winning in a contest that includes fucking Florida. It's crazy. Like, fuck, do you know how much Florida hates kids? Yes, Florida really, really hates kids. Texas. Woo boy. Yeah, that's what

we're about to talk about today. So in our last episode, I opened up by giving a history of the term super predator. And while that specific term was the creation of a single man, he was simply the latest in a line of men who have spent generations building and reinforcing a narrative that some children are inherently dangerous and must be policed brutally for the safety of all. William S. Bush is a PhD U.S. history professor from the University of Texas at Austin, and he's a good guy. I introduced him after talking about the super predator thing. No, he's like, he's a, he knows his shit. He wrote a book that is one of the major sources for this episode with one of the most chilling titles for a book I've ever heard. It's called Who Gets a Childhood? And it is

about the criminal justice system in Texas. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's interesting, dude, because it's like one of the things among like black activism is the idea that like black and brown children are forced to be adults in the eyes of the law way before we're ready to be it. So yeah, okay, this is crazy. And bull boy, he does focus. A lot of it is about racism in the Texas criminal justice or juvenile justice system. It's a good book. I recommend it. It's very readable. It is kind of an academic text, but it's a very readable one. That's dope. Now, Bush and it focus, this focus, this is a book about Texas specifically. Bush notes that historians of childhood claim that the or tend to agree that the concept of what they call protected childhood started in the

United States around the 1820s. Obviously, this is a thing happening in different parts of the world in different ways. But like we now see childhoods like you have to not just that like you have to protect children, which is a thing people have always done, but you have to protect children from certain things like understanding and interacting in the world the same way an adult does, right? Kids don't work. They shouldn't. Most people agree on that now. Kids should not recently labor like adults labor. Kids should not be subject to some of the realities that adults are subject to. These are we can always debate some of this stuff like particularly hiding certain realities of the world from kids. But these are things society broadly agrees upon now.

This is what a protected childhood is, right? The idea that you protect kids from some of the things that adults have to deal with and know the movement towards this concept of a protected childhood in the United States. And again, we're talking in the US here. It happens other places different ways. There's a lot of academics here. Please. I'm not trying to this is this is a broad overview. This movement starts with the free school and Sunday school social movements, which again in kind of the 1820s come down as we've talked about actually in a couple of recent episodes. These all start in like the northeast and kind of spread to the rest of the country. These ideas that like school should be free. Every kid should get an education and it shouldn't cost them anything.

And also the idea that like Sunday school is a thing, which is tied to religion, but also also tied to this idea that like this very new idea that like education is a thing that every kid deserves. So people died all the time back then for basically no reason, which also meant that like in this period, there's a ton of orphans. And so when people started this kind of long process of giving a shit about childhoods for children, it leads to a bunch of facilities getting opened, not just to deal with orphaned kids, but to deal with like kids who were delinquent, kids who have various kind of behavioral issues. They all kind of get shoved into the same place. These generally called houses of refuge. Yeah. And it's a mix because obviously they are saying

like, well, if you're homeless or if you're a kid committing petty crimes, you belong in the same place, which is not great. But also it is it is good in that it's kind of as a society, people being like, well, even though they're not my kid, I as a member of society have some responsibility towards it. It's just to fund this facility, which is not a bad development. Again, it's problematic. But yeah, but it's a communal understanding that like the children are ours. Yeah. Not just yours. They're ours. And if we want to live in a community that we enjoy, like I should invest in the other units around me, you know what I'm saying? I think often when we talk about movements like this, it is easy to focus on like the

horrible negatives, which we'll be talking about everything today we're going to talk about comes from this. But it's not one thing or the other entirely. There's a lot that's fucked up about this. It also is coming from this place of like, oh, there's all these children on the streets. And like, maybe we have a responsibility to them. We can probably do something about this. Because we live here, too. Where your mama at? Yeah. Yeah. What are you doing out there? Where your people? What are you doing on the court? Are you three years old? Why are you on the court? Yeah. Yeah. I would even say this, man, like even just going through as a parent, like I'm saying this as like a now a parent is like, even when going through just the history of the decisions other

parents or societies have made for their kids, obviously that weren't preposterous. But ones that are like, the reality is like, there's no, this is a whole ass human. And you're like, there's nothing more terrifying than the idea of like, their life is in my hands. And I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Like that existential dread. I feel like if you're going to be a good parent, you have felt that fear where you're like, I don't know what I'm doing. You're like, where do what do I, I can't, I don't know what I'm, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to fuck this kid up. You know what I'm saying? And you know, you're like, well, I'm fucked up. You know what I'm saying? Like, I mean, I don't know. I just, I think like, I think you're like, I don't

know what I'm doing, but at least I know, you should live on a damn streets, man. Like, there needs to be some sort of adult in your life, right? Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that, that's kind of happening on a really broad scale here. A lot of it's made possible because of industrialization, but there's a lot more people from industrialization kind of resources. And so like, yeah, these facilities kind of grow in size and pop up, start popping up all over the United States throughout like the mid to late 1800s. Now, at the same time, all this is happening and part of why it's happening is that the US is creating its middle class. And in fact, the very concept of a middle class, parents start having fewer kids and devoting a lot more time and attention

to the development of the kids that they do have. And the idea starts to spread as a result of all this, that children not, not, don't just deserve maybe to be house, but deserve to learn and play and not to die in coal mines or like bang drums, well, don't shoot rifles at each other, right? At some point, we maybe shouldn't be doing some of the things we're doing with kids. At some point, you said to yourself, you know, my childhood was trash. You know, I didn't really get to, that look, I wish I could have been able, you know what, when I have kids, I'm gonna let them play outside. You don't need to go to no coal mine and die. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that's happening in this period. And the kind of the people who these early advocates of the

concept of a childhood, these early like people who are supporting the idea that there should be restrictions on like what we can make kids do. They're generally called child savers. And most of them are middle class moms. And it's from them and this advocacy and kind of the late 1800s that we get stuff like age of consent laws, child labor bans and compulsory education. That's all good stuff, broadly speaking. But these positive moves occur along more muddled developments too, because these women are also responsible, these activists are also responsible for the concept of youth curfews, the idea that like, well, we shouldn't let kids out at night sometimes and they should be punished if they are out at night. And the juvenile justice

system, which is a very mixed bag. William Bush writes, many of these reforms were aimed at extending the protections of childhood to working class and poor children. Moreover, they sought to broaden the years of protection and semi dependence on adults upward into the adolescent years, a reflection of the slowly spreading idea of adolescents itself at the turn of the 20th century. One of its leading proponents, the Clark University psychiatrist and child study movement leader, Granville Stanley Hall, described the life stage of adolescents famously as a time of storm and stress, a time of risk taking, rebellion, awkwardness, and self discovery. Adolescents he and other psychiatrists such as William Healy proposed

needed to be treated individually, especially when they ran afoul of rules as seemed almost inevitable. Early juvenile court judges such as Denver's Ben Lindsay helped popularize the idea of the tough but fatherly juvenile justice official for whom understanding his wayward charges was a specialty. Meanwhile, courts for delinquent girls headed by matronly figures such as Mary in Barthelm of Chicago preoccupied themselves with curbing the precocious sexuality of working class girls whose families were often recent arrivals in American industrial cities. So again, lot going on here, you know. Yeah, still products of your time. Of its time. But yeah, this is this is kind of how this starts to look.

Yeah. And it's it's important to note that like, because we're talking about how bad the juvenile justice system, the idea that we should have one came from a really good place, which is that like kids shouldn't be treated as adults when they come in crime. You shouldn't be in prison with grownups. Yeah, you shouldn't be in prison with grownups. You shouldn't be judged by the same judges who judge grownups like we should have a separate thing for you in part because kids are going to fuck around and like they're like the finding out part of that shouldn't be as brutal as it is for adults. Judge Lindsay even complained, quote, this business of punishing infants as if they were adults and have maiming young lives by trying to make the gristle of their unformed

characters carry the weight of our iron laws and heavy penalties. Yeah, that's a good place. Yeah, yeah, there's some people who are saying really good shit. Now in Texas, juvenile and adult offenders were first separated in 1886 after protests from the local women's Christian temperance union, which is right around the same time it starts happening in a bunch of other places. The next year, the legislature in Texas passed a bill approving a dedicated house of correction for children. Gatesville opened in January of 1889. And it was one of the first dedicated juvenile detention facilities anywhere in the United States. It was followed later that year by facilities from in Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama. Gatesville opened with 86 inmates. It was

immediately popular with the locals who saw rightly that it would bring a lot of jobs to their town. Local residents actually raised money so the state can't pay like their budget runs short and they can't pay for all the land they need to buy this facility. And people who live in the town nearby raise the money to buy it for the state because they're like, well, this is going to provide us with jobs forever if we have a child prison in town. Oh my god, why is that their first thought was like, yeah, it's everybody's first thought when this shit happens. Spoilers, that's where this is going for the next century. That's why I went, what? It's like, I thought they're going to be like, oh, that's cool, man. You know, yeah, kids and I got it. You shouldn't have to

go to jail. No, there's money in this shit. Oh, wait, we can make some money off this money. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yo, hit the leg, bro. Like what? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. So the boys who were interned in Gatesville were overwhelmingly city dwellers. And there's this idea at the time that Texas never gets passed that kids who are juvenile delinquents, most of whom are urban kids, need to be put in prisons far away from their families in isolated rural communities. Basically, all of these kids were poor too. One survey of early Gatesville inmates found that 119 out of 195 listed their mother's occupation as housekeeper, while the leading descriptions of their fathers were unknown railroad men, laborers and farmers. Unknown,

being up there is, should tell you something about what's going on. Two thirds of these boys had lost one of their parents and slightly less than half of their parents had criminal records themselves. William Bush goes on to note that the racial disparity in who went to Gatesville was pretty blatant. African Americans comprised 46 of the first 48 inmates, all of whom were transferred from the adult prison system. Although Gatesville admitted inmates regardless of race or ethnicity, it strictly segregated every aspect of their daily lives, housing, schooling, dining and religious services. As a result by 1917, about 250 black inmates crowded into Harris Hall, the Jim Crow congregate dormitory built to house about half that number. By contrast,

when the state opened its first and only training school for girls before World War II, it excluded black females altogether. Black girls charged with committing a crime in this period may have had their cases heard in local juvenile courts, but the available remedies were limited to the county jail or released back into the community. There is nothing new. Yeah. I mean, not exactly news that Texas in 1917 was pretty fucking racist. It's good to have data on how racist. I'm still trying to picture a juvenile hall in the 1800s. Oh, God. Right? And I'm just like, it just got me spiraling. I think I just don't know how anyone survived the 1800s. Yeah. And one of the worst things to think about is the degree to which

maybe it wasn't much worse than it is now, at least in a lot of these facilities in Texas. Yeah. But that's something we can talk about. So the fact that Texas would go on to lead the nation in juvenile incarceration had a lot to do with the fact that Texas was the only southern state to see a net gain in its black population during the first half of the 20th century. Right? That's part of why they're building these facilities is they have this huge influx of black and Hispanic citizens moving to the state. Well, you've got... Well, the Hispanics were already there, but... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, but... Yeah. But yeah, not really. I mean, you do have more, like, coming in from Mexico and stuff, and you also have... You have a huge number of poor,

non-white kids moving into Texas cities, a lot of whom don't have parents for a variety of horrible reasons. And this causes a backlash from white Jim Crow-supporting citizens who don't like seeing all of these kids who are not white in what they think of as their cities. Police do the thing that police do, which is response to the demands of middle-class white people, and they start sweeping juke joints, which is generally how the places they sweep to arrest black kids are described. I think it's like, you know, it's like a dance hall. Yeah, I was like, that's just like the club. Yeah, it's what they've got at the time. The juke joint. Yeah. A lot of great music came out of there. Yeah, yeah. Now, the nation's first juvenile court was established in Chicago, and the focus of this

court was at least on paper, supposed to be rehabilitating the kids that got interned in the system. Texas, though, and obviously, Chicago, like, that system, you know, a lot of flaws in it, a lot of things that could be criticized, could probably do an episode about that. But it's worth noting that the first juvenile court in the nation is in Chicago, and it's supposed to be focused on rehabilitation. From the start, because Texas follows soon after, their juvenile justice system, from the start, very openly, is not about rehabilitation. They specifically say, like, that's not our goal here. We are here to punish kids. Gatesville became what one activist group described as an instrument of torture. In 1912, a new superintendent for the facility

ordered the banning of several forms of corporal punishment that had started in the late 1800s. And these sound somewhat torturing. I'm going to read a quote from Who Gets a Childhood. If you want, this will give you some context on what it's like being in a juvenile prison in Texas in the late 1800s and start of the 1900s. Adams outlawed pulling toes in which boys were forced to stand holding their toes with their hands indefinitely, and bustings in which boys were made to stand with their arms held over their heads while a guard flogged them with a bat. I don't think that's flogging. That's just hitting a kid with a bat. That's not flogging. A flogging is something soft, right? It's pretty ugly too, but like, that's just hitting a kid with a bat. That's not flogging.

That's just beating a child with a heavy stick. Yo, I was like, the image is egregious and the sentence for which you used to explain the image is egregious because that's not flogging. Now, so in 1912, this new superintendent orders these things banned and the guards revolt. They initially express their displeasure by allowing more than two dozen kids to escape over a three-day period, right? So they just stopped doing their jobs. We'll show you. You always be nice to these kids. We'll put them on the streets, see how you like it. We'll put them on the streets, and then you'll see. Eventually, they walk off the job, just completely strike, which forces the superintendent to recruit local citizens, most of whom supported the guards to serve in their place. And obviously,

very little gets actually changed because in this will be a pattern. These trends will continue through the rest of the story. Oh my God. Why are you always right? In this case, the guy running it like recognizes a problem, tries to change it, and a mix of the guards working at the facility and the local citizens say, absolutely not. You ain't improving shit and nothing gets done. Can you imagine that you're unionizing and somebody's like, why are you using unionizing? Because they won't let us beat the kids with bats. Yeah. Imagine like a couple of like, well, we're unionizing because we're all going to die from the black lung and we'd like our families to get slightly more money and maybe have weekends off. Oh, well, we're unionizing because people

keep burning to death and garment fires. They won't let me hit kids with a bat anymore. Yeah, you're like, yo, yo. Our struggles are the same. Solidarity forever. Whose mans is this? Who invited these fools? Who's written, I gotta go. It's very funny that right around the same time, like miners are fighting with machine guns and rifles for the right to have a life outside of the job and not be beaten by the bosses' guards. Other guys are striking for the right to beat kids with baseball bats. What a beat is with bats. Listen, that is the quintessential, the absolute, the perfect example of, yo, whose mans is this? Like, yo, who let them in? That's not, we're not the same, fam. Yeah. Well, and probably a bleak story is how many of those

other union men would see this as the same struggle because there's a lot of racism in that struggle. So, you know, but you know who's not in favor of flogging children with baseball bats. Let me tell you who not. Products and services that support this podcast unless it's the Washington state highway patrol. I don't know. Yeah. The FBI or I gotta tell you, man, that look that island ain't no game. They're often called the Washington state highway patrol of the food box industry. Listen, I am team. That's right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So, um, prop. Yeah. Juvenile detention facilities spread across Texas throughout the first half of the 20th century. They came to be known as reform schools or training schools, even though neither of those things was ever much. Neither are happening. Yes. We will call it a school. School of hard knocks. This is school in the sense that we got some deaths. Yeah. Fucking dude walks in with a baseball bat, slams it on the table. Who's ready to learn calculus? Carry the one Martinez hit the kid with a bat. You get this one wrong and I'm going to bunt you. So, yeah, Gatesville remained the most brutal of the juvenile prisons in Texas. It was so bad

that it had to build a cemetery on its grounds because so many boys were dying in custody. Yeah. Yeah. When your child doesn't need to add a cemetery, maybe, maybe we got a problem. You're kidding me, guys. I'm guessing the kids who wind up there, like they don't have any parents left alive or something, right? Like maybe they're kids that are total wards of the state or whatever. And so it doesn't matter what happens to them in the eyes of the state. You can just throw them in an unmarked grave. No one cares. One of the worst cases of this occurred in 1921 when a guard strangled a 15 year old named Dell Timbs to death in front of two other boys. So, wow, not good places. 1921. Eventually, all the stories of abuse

led to enough outrage that in 1948, the state legislature appointed a special commission to study these schools. So the state of Texas, boy, kids are 20 years later, can get strangled to death, right? Like, yeah, it takes a while. Stuff builds. There's other deaths. There's a lot of, a lot of complaints. But eventually the state of Texas is like, well, it's our duty. We got to get in there and really look at these, these facilities. One guy dies, you know, two guys dies. Hey, maybe they were together. Ten guys die. Maybe we should call. We'll have a guy look into it. Like ten kids getting beaten to death is like, that's the equivalent of like when your washing machine floods the house for the third time and you're like, all right, I got to call a fucking

dude. I should probably call somebody right now. So the Washington Post reports, quote, when experts and reformers visited the facilities, they recommended placing them entirely within, with smaller facilities located near metropolitan areas. In addition to removing the stigma of prison, such facilities would place youths closer to their families and enable the state to bring in professionals from the fields of childcare, education, and mental health, a community-based vision similar to today's group homes and halfway houses. So that's not, that's pretty good advice. Given the state of things, that seems like an improvement. But the legislature rejected this advice. Absolutely not. What is the most sensible, humane, like. Kids should probably be near their

parents and experts and stuff who can help them. Maybe we should get somebody to understand kids around here. Oh, that pisses people off. Absolutely not. There was riots when they tried to stop the baseball bat beatings. Of course, they're not putting these kids in a different facility. Heating the demands of the politically well-connected leaders of the state's youth prisons who used the specter of black and Mexican American criminality to insist that young people required imprisonment. Texas instead expanded its construction of ever more sprawling prison-like facilities, sometimes strategically located in the electoral districts of keyed legislators. Abuse scandals continued to surface in television and newspaper reports. In 1952,

a Houston lawyer filed an appeal on behalf of a 16-year-old girl who had spent nearly 200 days in isolation in the Gainesville State School after being held down by mail guards and forcibly sedated with barbiturates. Another girl, who escaped the same facility, told a reporter for the Austin statesman, I'll kill myself before returning. They'll let you know how it's going in there. Yeah, so we've had two attempts to reform things. First in 1912, then in 1948, two big attempts. So far, they both met with massive protests from the people who lived in and around and also protests from lawmakers who know that if you put a child prison in a town where maybe you don't have a great electoral edge, suddenly all the people who get jobs there, that's your voting base. And you can

like lock that shit down. It's like, I can't believe I'm saying this, but like, yeah, in Texas defense, they tried at some point to do something reasonable. And it was like, well, Texas going Texas, never mind. It was Texas that stopped anything reasonable from happening. So I don't know about in their defense, in the defense of the individuals who tried to reform things. The 15 people that flew in. Yeah, those folks were at least on the right track. Because I will never mind. Yeah. By 1964, things were bad enough that a mix of parents and former Gatesville employees wrote a letter to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the governor of Texas. They described the kind of abuse we've discussed already in this episode at length and compared the training school to,

quote, a concentration camp. And man, statistically, at least one or two of those people had to know have known what a concentration camp looked like. Some of them were World War II vets or something. I don't know what we're talking about, Joe. Yeah. There was somebody in there who was like, I've seen a fucking concentration camp and this place doesn't look good. I was there, bro. I was there. So this leads to the biggest flurry of investigations yet. The FBI and the Texas Rangers both launch investigations into these facilities, Gatesville in particular, but also the juvenile criminal justice system in Texas, like the juvenile incarceration system in Texas. And also both houses of the Texas Legislature launch investigation. So you've got like four big investigations

going on, right? One of them federal. And when the FBI starts investigating stuff like this, for all of the intrigues we have them, they always find shit, right? Yeah, they're going to figure out. The most detailed documentation of a number of different law enforcement agencies' crimes comes from FBI investigations. Now, here's another fun question. Does it ever lead to anything? No, never. No, no. I was like, no, they find a guy. They find a guy. Nothing happens. Yeah. But they find him. Like in Oregon right now, the Portland police are currently in contempt of the Justice Department for repeatedly refusing to reform their use of force policies and being unconscionably so brutal that these federal criminal justice system says you guys can't do this. And currently,

they've just said, yes, we can. And we'll see if anything happens. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Absolutely fine. And of course, in this case, nothing happens. All of these investigations start. And there's like, there's again, sweeping reports of abuses, horrible details about all the bad shit that's happening. The FBI is like, yeah, bad shit's happening. Texas Rangers are like, yeah, bad shit's happening. Both houses of legislature in Texas are like, yeah, bad shit's happening. No very little reforms happen. Attempts to make serious reforms are shut down at every pass by again, local and state elected leaders who had training schools in their districts and didn't want to lose money. By 1974, the reform movement was desperate enough that a bunch of

former inmates, parents and activists launched a class action lawsuit in federal court. This case, Morales v. Terman, brought another wave of psychologists, social workers and prison consultants to not just Gatesville, but other juvenile detention facilities. Now, the guy who winds up in charge of this big investigation is a dude with the incredible name, Judge William Wayne Justice. That's that boy's name. Judge Justice. That's right. Yeah. Judge William Wayne Justice. He only had one credible Texas judge name. Yeah, he only had one choice for his career. That's that you will never convince me that's not the name of the judge in the best little whorehouse in Texas. There's no other. Yeah, that's what you call that guy. Like retroactively,

put a judge in there, make that his name. William Wayne Justice. What an incredible name for a judge. Wayne too. Yeah, it's everything. Everything is in that name. So he takes this very seriously. He tours the mountaineer school for boys and he finds, as he does a surprise inspection of this facility, that the children there were, like this judge is walking around and he sees children caked in old blood. Like oh my God. Like just left on their bodies, covered in bruises. And like whenever he tries to talk to them, they like skirt, they're terrified just of his presence. Like they've been trained to just react with like unthinking terror to the the presence of an adult. Yeah. Howard Omart was

also there. He was an expert. He was from the LBJ administration. He was an expert LBJ sent along to like look at things while Judge Justice was there. And Howard Omart later said, quote, we have never seen anything quite as depressing. So deliberately designed to humiliate, to degrade and to debase. It is surely oppression in its simplest and most direct form. That is the worst, man. Yeah. Yeah, designed to humiliate, degrade and debase. That's LBJ's man. And Judge Justice comes to the same conclusions. Yeah. And I mean, it's not like LBJ is like the greatest dude, but for him to be like, yo, this is wild. Yeah. I showed my dick to a secret service agent this morning, but even I think this is beyond the pale. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I made a guy take no

12 second shit. Do you have any idea how many people I've killed? Yeah. I ordered the firebombing of a country. Yeah. But this isn't right. But that's wild, dog. This place is fucked. Yeah. So the extensive investigation spurred by the Morales v. Terman case revealed regular use of isolation in Texas juvenile criminal justice facilities, forced psychotropic drugs on children, and also rare forms of torture. Among other things, investigators found that children were being punished physically for speaking Spanish. So called punk dorms had been created for juveniles. The guards decided were homosexual. By this point, the state had overcome its squeamishness at incarcerating women. And in one facility, guards were found to have forced abortions on pregnant

inmates. Yeah. Oh my God. A boy at Gatesville told a judge about a hazing ritual, told the judge, Judge Justice, about a hazing ritual he'd been forced to undergo, where a group of boys beat him unconscious while guards watched. To his credit, Judge Justice, I don't know about the rest of his career, Judge in Texas in the 70s, maybe he got up to some fucked up shit. But in this case, he is as good as his name. And he issues a sweeping ruling that outlaws all of the fucked up shit found at the facilities and requires medical, psychological, and educational services to be made available for any children in a Texas juvenile justice facility, or juvenile detention facility. The entire leadership of the state agency that oversaw these facilities was forced to resign.

Texas put money into probation and other preventative measures, and the juvenile inmate population declined rapidly. So this is, this is the first time to like, real shit does happen. Yeah, did the right thing. Yeah. This is a, this makes the situation better. Judge Justice gets credit in this. He's a big part of like, why less kids are in this system. However, as the Washington Post reports, quote, the impact of Morales and other important federal court rulings was blunted by the persistence of structural racial disparities and renewed fears of violent juvenile crime. And while the Federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974 provided even more funding for state and local reforms, these kind of like

prevention measures and whatnot, historian Elizabeth Hinton has noted that it also labeled, quote, economically vulnerable youths, most of whom are black or Latino, as potentially criminal. That's the term used, potentially criminal. Yeah. While removing white middle-class offenders from the formal justice system. And that's why the juvenile inmate system declines, right? It's because they put less white kids there. Like that's the big, the big, which is good, right? It's like, no kid deserves to be in a locker, less are in there, but it doesn't fix anything. You know? Nah, you don't want nobody in that system. Nobody should be in that system. Nobody should be in that system. You just played the numbers. And that is the main thing, is that the criminalization of white and mainly white middle-class,

because I think some white poor kids still wind up in these places. Yeah, yeah, they still wind up. But the criminalization of like white middle-class kids stops to a large degree. Which is good. They're mischievous. Yeah. Yeah. There's boys being boys, they're mischievous. It's like a racist firefighter who only rescues the white kids. And it's like, well, it's good that less kids died in the fire, but you shouldn't be a firefighter. Hey, bro. Like, you want me to pat you on the back for that? I mean, I guess. Yeah. That kid's happy. You'll say it. Yeah. Like, I still feel like you shouldn't be doing this job. I still feel like, I don't know, I don't know if you should get a plaque or anything like this.

Yeah. Yeah. So in the late 70s and early 80s, things were, though, trending in a better direction. And again, the decline in the prison, because it is, I should be fair, there is a reduction in the number of black Hispanic kids who are sent to these facilities. That does go down. Like, it's not complete, but it is largely the number of the kids who don't, who stop going to these facilities are largely white, right? It is largely based on race. Because again, I don't want to, I also don't want to be like completely shitting on the people who achieved this because it's good. Nah. Yeah. And the idea that like, you can't be me with a bad no more, like the fact that a judge was like, well, look, man, a judge didn't say that.

It does not stop. Oh, God. Well, just say like, let me at least give them that. That you would. Yeah. No, that they do not get. They gotta beat them, no. They put less kids in these facilities. No, they keep beating them. They keep right the hell on beating them. They was like, no, we worried about volume. Yeah. Like, yeah. Quality is different. We want like a more boutique experience where we really give each kid the beating they deserve. You know what? Our guards were just hitting too many kids. They were losing their passion for it. You know? Do you, do you, did you watch a, did you watch a Dave Chappelle show when it was on? Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. Do you remember the gay clansmen? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was just like, we're like the

clambers a little nicer. Yeah. So we'll just, we'll just ask you to leave, preferably back to Africa. Yeah. Like, got it. Yeah. That's kind of what we've done here. Now in the late, yeah. So again, things are getting a little bit better in the late 70s and early 1980s. Like there are improvements, but then like we talked about in our first episode, that's when crime really starts to rock it upwards, right? In all crime, but that it does include juvenile crime and the panic over super predators hits the media. Between 1990 and 1996, 40 states expanded the number of juvenile cases that could be tried in adult court and given adult punishments, and no state went harder than Texas. When he ran for governor in 1994, George W. Bush campaigned

with a promise to lock up more children. In 1995, after he won, the state legislature passed an omnibus juvenile justice reform bill, which brought even tougher sentencing for kids accused of crimes. The state budgeted another $200 million for facilities, which was enough to triple their capacity to incarcerate children. So like Texas is like, we got to have at least three times as many kids locked up in this fucking state. Yeah, that'll prove they're doing my job. It is worth noting we forget sometimes because the crimes against humanity he committed as president were so extreme. He did some of that while he was governor, too. His mixtapes were pretty crazy. Like y'all, y'all only looking at his major albums. I'm like, his mixtapes were pretty crazy.

It's also important to remember like how artists is tied to like crack. Oh, yes. I mean, that's too much to delve. Yes, that is a big part of the story. And I'm like, let's not let's not forget how we got crack. So let's just put that on the side. So like, yeah, it's funny how crime went up. Well, you know, I mean, well, there's, well, there's, yes, like with every evil thing in American history, the CIA is involved just not directly in this part of it. Yeah. And that that is a big part of like why there's all of this like terror over juvenile offenders and a big thing that like Bush and other Republicans campaign on. Absolutely. So we'll do we'll talk we'll do a crack episode at some point. We really got to do with me too. It's yeah, yeah, it's there's a whole thing.

Iran, Contra scandal, like crack in the streets, Nicaragua, everything anyway. That's all the other thing. I'm saying it right now. We'll get a couple of parts in there. Yes. So this period, the 90s, kind of the mid 90s when Bush gets elected and you've got like this omnibus juvenile justice reform bill, it's noteworthy in Texas because it's when they really everyone stops it kind of been trending this way, but this is when people really stop calling these places training schools and reform schools. Those terms die. The idea of like trying to hide what these places are dies because the people who want more of them just call them youth prisons and they're proud of that. Yeah. They love the idea that they're making youth prisons like they don't want to hide that

shit because like you get elected for being like, oh hell yeah, we're going to throw a bunch of fucking kids in lock them up. You think we got youth prisons now when I'm governor way more youth prisons. I'm gonna put all your kids. Wait a minute. I'm gonna put all their kids in prison. And while they tripled their capacity to lock kids up, Texas also doubled the number of kids they were executing. Now in the United States prop from 1985 to 2005, 23 children were executed. 13 of those were in Texas. Are you serious? Yeah. I didn't know this. Texas fucking loves executing children. Oh my God. I didn't know this. Oh yeah. We are, look, the United States has an executing children problem, but it's also largely a Texas problem. You know? That is, that's a lot.

There's a bunch of other states. I don't know if you're aware. There's like 49 of them. Yeah. I did not know that. I am in shock and awe. Oh yeah. We are huge fans of executing children. Yeah. Yeah. Can't get enough of it really. Now this all continued swimmingly until February 16, 2007, when the Texas Observer published an article about a horrific sex abuse scandal in a juvenile correction facility near Odessa in West Texas. And I'm going to quote again from Who Gets a Childhood. News reports revealed that the school's assistant superintendent Ray Brookens and its principal, John Paul Hernandez, had coerced sexual favors from several juvenile inmates over a period of at least two years. Compounding the alleged crime was an inexplicably

slow response from authorities. Between December 2003 and February 2005, staff complaints about Brookens' and Hernandez's suspicious behavior had fallen on deaf ears in the upper echelons of the Texas Youth Commission, TYC, the agency charged with administering the state's juvenile facilities. Finally, in February of 2005, Mark Slattery, a volunteer math tutor from nearby Midland, was approached by two students who wanted to confess something icky. As Slattery later told a reporter, I knew it must have been something bad if they had no word for it. Slattery soon discovered that boys were being led into the administration building each night for forced encounters with Brookens, who had used his power to unilaterally lengthen or shorten youth sentences

to exact sex from inmates. He can make you stay longer if you don't fuck him. Oh my god. And that's what he does. Oh, this just. Yeah. Oh my god. Yeah. Yeah, that's about as bad as it gets right there. Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out though to Mark Slattery. Yeah. It is important to note that like this guy clearly cares about these kids, is volunteering to teach, like not getting paid, volunteering to teach math to incarcerated kids, because it's important for them to learn. And they clearly, it says a lot about him that these kids know we can trust Mr. Slattery. We can trust you. We can tell him this and he'll do something about it by God he does. Yeah. So fucking give this guy something. Yeah. I don't know a house, whatever. Yeah, this is a mixed bag this episode

where there's like some dudes are dope, some dudes are like actual bastards. Yeah. You do have to, like this is an overwhelmingly bleak story, but whenever you get those those little heroes, you got to like, yeah, acknowledge that shit, because most people clearly didn't do what Mark did. Yeah. So it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And again, the Texas Rangers get involved. And this time they were a little more effective than they had been last time. Brookings and Hernandez are charged with a bunch of crimes. Both men are forced to resign, but the criminal cases against them grind to a halt in the local county prosecutor's office. And the US attorney's office in San Antonio refuses to get involved. What? It's like, again, why do you like this is, this is bad for

business. It's bad for everybody if this becomes a bigger thing that it needs to be. And this is thankfully where journalists come in. So obviously this gets out. This is a fuck as everyone's reactions. This is a fucked up story. Dallas Morning News is like, all right, well, let's do a journalism here. Because if this is happening, there's probably some other shit that's going on. If there's one, there's four. Yeah. Yeah. So they carry out a huge investigation, which concludes that the Texas Juvenile Justice System had created, quote, a culture in which prison officials were free to abuse their power and punish children who tried to complain about them. So this story goes viral. National news starts to get on the trail.

After the Dallas Morning News covers gets pretty big paper. The big guys, the really big guys start to get in there. Follow up investigations would eventually find more than 2000 confirmed allegations of staff on inmate violence between 2003 and 2006, including more than 60 cases of kids with suspicious broken bones. To try and quiet up outrage, Texas launched an abuse hotline for their child prisons, which racked up 1100 complaints in its first month. So, you know, it gets big. It reveals a bunch of the tip of the iceberg is revealed. Obviously, I'm going to guess more than 2000 times staff beat kids in a three year period in all the Texas prisons. Probably a couple of times, I'm going to guess more than 60 kids had broken bones. More than 60. Because,

you know, these are also kids. They're teens. There's a lot of oppositional defiance. I'm sure there's some kids who get bones broken and don't want to tell anyone because like, I don't want you to know you. I don't want you to know you hurt me, you know? Yeah. Or I don't want anyone like, you know, and obviously, shit gets covered up. It gets hidden. I'm sure it's a lot higher, the actual number. They started releasing child prisoners. Texas did. And in March of 2007, a Department of Justice investigation concluded and found that conditions in the Evans EVINS, Regional Juvenile Center in Edinburgh, Texas, were bad enough that they had violated the constitutional rights of imprisoned youth to be protected from harm while in state custody.

Evans had an assault rate five times the national average. Once this news broke, there were more stories about the horrific conditions in the facility. William Bush writes, one of the most watched cases was that of Shaquanda Cotton, a 15 year old African American girl from the East Texas town of Paris, who received an indeterminate sentence up to age 21 for shoving a hall monitor in school. Portrayed in the net. Yeah, she shoves a hall monitor and she gets an open-ended sentence. We can keep you up until you're 21 if we want to. What the fuck is an open-ended sentence? Yeah. I've never heard of that. So because of the way the Texas Juvenile Justice system gets, a lot of these are for up to five years. Again, that's why we talked about those

people, the superintendents of those facilities, of that facility being like, hey, if you don't fuck me, I'll keep you here longer. That's why they can keep them here longer. They get to decide how long the sentence is. It's an up to this long in prison. That's the difference. Okay, now I'm seeing difference between California because I'm like, at 18, it gets your record sealed. Like when you're a juvenile. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's fucked up. I mean, you could get transferred to the adult prison, but like, dang, for them to be like, I will keep you here until you're 21, because, dang, that's crazy. So Chaconda Cotton, this story goes really viral. People are horrified. The National Press covers it. It gets looked at as a victim, as like racially motivated.

And she gets her release in March 2007. She becomes kind of a cause celeb for how racist the Texas Juvenile Justice System is. She subsequently described conditions at the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correction Complex in Brownwood during an interview in Seventeen magazine, quote, seeing the barbed wire fences and guards terrified me. I was given an orange jumpsuit and socks and taken to my quarters, a tiny room that had only a bed, a bookshelf and a desk. Some of the other inmates had committed serious crimes like murder. This was, wait, you said Seventeen magazine? Yeah, she does an interview for Seventeen. For Seventeen? That's kind of, wow. Yeah, but yeah, good for Seventeen, yeah.

I didn't know Seventeen was doing like... That's some Teen Vogue shit right there. Yeah, I was like... Or I guess Teen Vogue is doing some Seventeen shit, I don't know. That's really, because I'm like, Seventeen predates them. I remember Seventeen magazine running around the hood and it was just the stuff that like, for the little girls and like, dang, I didn't know they was about it like that. What year was this? Um, God, this is like 2007, 2008. Okay, it's a little more recent than... Yeah, 2007. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like the internet's kind of running at this point.

I mean, it's still body shaming girls, but at least they're doing these articles about girls. Yeah, they did this. So people start to care again about abuses in Texas state facilities. Whistleblowers come forward. Randall Chance, a former inspector for the state's juvenile correction facilities, says in an interview that quote, and this is him, Randall Chance like, works for the state juvenile correction agency and he inspects facilities. He gives an interview where he says, staff are being paid your tax money to rape your children. Oh my God. Yeah. Oh my God.

That's not very sparing. Let me cut it, straight shot, no chaser homie. Let me cut it very clean for you. Yeah. This was happening. Dang. He describes TYC, the agency he works for as, a dynasty of corruption that condones the mistreatment of youth in its care. So again, reforms are demanded. The TYC governing board is overhauled. They throw out the old guys running it, bring in new ones. A state investigation is ordered.

And as you'd expect, it found a lot of evidence of individual wrongdoing. The blame was placed on the culture of the agency, which was described as having somehow become uniquely toxic. Little discussion focused around the fact that Texas had been this bad for two thirds of a century. So again, this is what happens every time. When something gets done, it's we're going to arrest and charge these individual guys who committed crimes. And there's a problem with the culture. We have to fire these dudes at the top and we have to reform the agency to fix the culture because it's a culture problem. And I think at this point in the story, it should be clear, it's not a culture problem. It's a child prison problem.

This is what happens when you have them. They keep trying to reform the culture and the exact same thing happens over and over again. Reforms are fought by the people who live there because there's money in there and by local politicians because that's where they get voters and fucking campaign donations from. And the abuse continues because the kind of people who are going to work, the kind of jobs that are available at these facilities in the middle of nowhere, which don't pay well, are people who are willing to take a pay cut to get to hit kids or molest them. Like, it's not a culture problem. It's a child prison problem. They're bad things to have. Yeah. Is that the culture of this toxic planet? Yeah. It's the fact that you're on a toxic planet.

Yeah. It's a culture in that, like, if you design a gun that can only shoot seven-year-olds and the people who buy them, yeah, there's a culture problem among the people who buy the guns that can only shoot seven-year-olds. Yeah. Like, but I guess, yeah, they're probably all very unpleasant people, but that's not really the problem, is it? It's that we built a gun to shoot seven-year-olds. Yes. Yeah. The issue is not the people buying these are bad. Like, they are, sure. But that's really not where the problem started, is it? They're both in situation here, guys. Do we need these things? It's not either or. I feel like it's a both-and. Yeah. But you know who doesn't shoot seven-year-olds,

prop, unless it's the Washington state Highway Patrol again, in which case they do. But probably not, unless it's also unless it's then potentially, yes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced,

cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck

in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So if you were an optimistic type, you could be forgiven for looking at the fallout from the 2007 revelations of horrific abuse in Texas facilities and thinking like,

shit, things are headed in the right direction again. We might fix a lot of stuff. And a lot of good stuff does happen. I should say that Texas closes more than half of their youth prisons. They gut the juvenile justice system. They dramatically reduced the number of incarcerated kids and resources are diverted from incarcerating kids to programs to try and prevent youth crime. This is great. Again, this is a big deal, but it's a big deal because it removes kids from the system. Journalists and politicians who demanded change and brought out this information improve material conditions for the kids who get released and the kids who don't go to juvenile prison because that becomes less common. That is undeniable, but it is not a reform of these facilities.

Because if it was a reform, it would mean that the facilities themselves are getting better. And that's not what happens. The facilities continue to be a fucking nightmare. There's less kids in them. Again, that's huge, really big deal. But for those inside, a lot of basically, I don't have a way of claiming this in any objective sense because again, our data is always imperfect here, but the same problems continue to persist. Yeah. So it's like the statistics go down because there's just less humans. Yeah. The reform is we've got to take kids out of this thing, which might suggest that if we really wanted to reform it, we would not let any kids be in these places.

You could close it. Yeah. We could close it forever. I mean, then there'd be no kids in it. That might work. That would be my argument. And again, obviously, the people who succeed in this, it's not abolition, but it's a lot less kids in prison. That's great. But again, the facilities stay exactly the same as they've been for a century. So fast forward 10 years, 2017. The Dallas Morning News publishes a blockbuster investigation into abuses at the Gainesville State School, which despite its name is a child prison, it just happens to have some desks. Here's how that article opened, prop. Yeah.

Youths at the Gainesville State School say staff paid them with drugs and cash to assault one another. A psychologist at the campus gave pornography to a boy there to encourage the young man to masturbate in front of him. A youth attacked a guard and stole his radio so he couldn't call for help. By the time the help arrived, the officer had a broken nose and needed four stitches over his eye. It's a wild west in there. Yeah. It's the wild west in there and the same abuses are happening. That staff paying kids with drugs and cash to assault each other, that's bounties. There's this whole system where the guards, when kids will fuck with them, sometimes it's cases like this where they beat up a guard, but oftentimes it's just a kid they

find annoying, they will pay other kids with drugs. They'll give kids cocaine and heroin to beat the shit out of kids who annoy them. That's an endemic problem in this facility. That's unfortunately. Well, yeah. Not normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's everywhere. But it's usually not kids. It's usually not children this is being done too. But again, Texas doesn't really see the need to treat them as children. Now, that article had a lot of really good stuff in it, very important piece of journalism, but it still contains some of the same problems we've seen over and over again. Here's one line I found particularly frustrating.

It's a bad culture, said Debbie Unruh, an independent watchdog charged with ensuring the safety of youths in the Texas Juvenile Justice Department's custody. It's a dangerous culture. And again, that's true. It's a bad culture. The culture of like guys who wear guards in child prisons is bad. But that's not the central problem. The claim that like it's a problem with the culture at this prison might hold water if we didn't have a century of documentation that this happens in every one of these facilities, the state of Texas operates. It's constant and it's for generations. The article quoted Juvenile Justice advocates who once again complained that part of the problem was locking kids in remote rural facilities far from home,

which is absolutely, absolutely true, right? If you are looking at ways to minimize harm, don't put them so far away where there's no services. Yeah. And like the frequency of your family visiting. Yeah, it's going to be good for you. The hotter it is. Yeah. Yeah. Now, that article also contains more detail about the staff psychologist who gave a child pornography so that he could watch that child masturbate. And I'm going to read a quote about that now. Vincent Rager, now 31, began working at Gainesville in 2015. His online resume indicates he provided individual psychotherapy to boys at the school. Rager resigned during the investigation, officials said. Records show he resigned in lieu of involuntary separation, so he resigns in order

to avoid being fired. Of course. Reached by phone earlier this week, Rager said he resigned because he wanted to move to California. Rager now works as a clinical psychologist treating male prisoners at Kern Valley State Prison in Bakersfield, California. Now, they're adults. Well, they're grownups. So that's better. Oh my. I might say you should never get to work as a clinical psychologist. That might disqualify you for doing that ever. You should not have a license to do any of this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, we should consider perhaps the possibility that this is not just a problem with like Texas. It is also an American problem, right? He goes right away and gets a job in fucking California. How do you like, are we that hard pressed for people to care about?

Like we're that hard pressed for like employment. Yeah. These facilities are in the middle of nowhere. They pay for shit. It's not enjoyable work. It's not very well respected work. So like, I'm there. I know there are good people doing that job in the system, but like a lot of bad people because it's like you're not getting the very best generally. Yeah. You have to be mission-driven. Yeah. If you're going to stay in that work because the work is trash. Yeah. It's like you obviously you get great teachers in these juvenile facilities sometimes like the guy we already talked, Mark Slattery, the guy we talked about. That's what I'm saying. Like that's where I started teaching. I started teaching in juvenile facilities. I was like,

but also you're going to get a bunch of basket cases who this is the gig they could get because they did something. Yeah. And it's not, if it's easy to not, like as this whole episode is, it's easy to not care and still get away with it because you're just, from a teacher perspective, it's just a couple packets. It's like continuation school. If anybody ever been to that, it's like, it's packets. You just fill out the packets and I just make sure you guys don't hurt each other. And the way that I'm sitting right now, y'all can't see this listeners, but like my feet are like leaned up against the wall. I'm leaning back with the mic and my, I don't have to care about, I can sit like this for the 30 minutes of class and just make sure you don't stab each other.

And if you do, all I got to do is call the PO and he comes in. Yeah. And then you'll have, then you'll go to a worse place potentially. Yeah. Basically. Like I don't have to, so you have to, you have to care if you're going to be in it. Yeah. And you get in these places, special ed isn't all that different. You get this mix of like the most dedicated, wonderful, caring people imaginable and like people who are either just waiting out a clock and then a tiny number of people who are fucking monsters and know that that's where the least lies are, eyes are on them, you know? Yes. And perhaps more could be done to make more caring and wonderful people able to do that job and fewer, at least fewer monsters.

I'm not going to say like, look, you're always going to have some people waiting out the clock, but you don't have to have the monsters. Exactly. We can avoid having, we can avoid, like let's set that as a goal. Higher fewer monsters. And as much as you can. Yeah. You know, because some people get through the cracks, like I ain't gonna lie, I know some personal information about that, but like some people get through the cracks, but you know, somebody's obviously a monster. Maybe like that's, maybe don't hire them. Yeah. Maybe, maybe you don't hire monsters. Speaking of monsters that somebody hired, Governor Greg Abbott in 2017, there's this all these, well, this is, I mean, he's not the bad guy or the good guy here. He does the thing that

everyone else does every time something like this happens. There's this big investigation and all of this press about how bad Texas's juvenile justice system is and he fires the person in charge, right? How many times has that happened this fucking story? Yeah. There's a bunch of talk of reform and yada, yada, yada. That nothing significant changes or at least the changes do not fix all the problems that we have been talking about all episode. Here's the New York Times reporting in 2019, quote, in October, 2019, a prison officer who worked at a juvenile detention facility in central Texas was charged with sexual assault and accused of forcing a boy in custody to perform oral sex on him in his cell. The incident came to light the day after the alleged

crime when the boy tried to kill himself. Two months before that, at another detention facility in Texas, a corrections officer was fired after a teenage girl said she was pregnant with his child. He was later charged in connection with that case. And in May of last year, another prison worker was arrested on charges that he had carried on a relationship with the teenager who was on parole. At five state juvenile detention centers, the day-to-day conditions are relentlessly violent and oppressive, with guards often resorting to force according to a complaint filed to the Justice Department. In 2019, prison staff used force on incarcerated children almost 7,000 times, equivalent to six times per child who was confined there.

Oh my god. Yeah. This, it just feels so personal. Like, oh my god, dude. Yeah, yeah. So these findings came courtesy of yet another Justice Department investigation. How many of those have we seen this episode, right? Yo. The DOJ investigated. Hooray! This is two, and like, like, I hope we hear in the date, like, this is 2019. Yeah, yeah. I know with COVID and make it, that feels like, you know, 1919 because of COVID, but that's three years ago, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, that Justice Department investigation had started in 2018 when two Texas advocacy groups begged the federal government

to intervene, arguing that Governor Abbott's promise to personally monitor the juvenile justice system would not be sufficient. It wasn't, which is why everything I read was found. And obviously, it's good that the Justice Department documented this, but at the same time, I think this is kind of a perfect example of the actual logic behind ACAB. I think that slogans are a lot less useful politically than it ever has been. But the sentiment behind it applies because these investigators, these Justice Department people documenting this, this is important work. It's important to document this. It's critical. And I think these, I'm sure these people care. I'm sure they see horrific abuse. They want to stop it. They document it. And I'm

sure they go to bed each night exhausted and sad, but certain that they're doing work that needs to be done. But as we've seen over and over again in this story, all of these investigations are part of how the system perpetuates itself. Guards rape and beat children. Whistleblowers and watchdogs complain. Government investigation leads to reform. And then guards keep raping and beating children. These investigations and the media cycle that follows them are a necessary part of the cathartic loop that Texas has been stuck in for more than 100 years. This is a part of the loop. This is how people, how it gets perpetuated again and again. Not that like they're bad people for investigating this shit, but it also is like that when I say like, you know, all whatever,

whatever our bastards or whatnot in the system, that's what we mean. The system, the system eliminates the possibility of being good because the system cannot be reformed. So even if you're working for something that looks like reform in the system, a lot of what you're going to be doing is keeping the loop going. And it's not that simple because obviously some of these investigations are part of why there's a massive reduction in the number of kids who are incarcerated and that's huge. So it's not, I don't want to be painting it as that simple, but like it does, it just doesn't get better. The actual prisons themselves don't get better. There are less kids in them and that's good, but the things keep happening because we just can't have these places and those things

not happen. Yeah, that's the like the argument about like abolition. It's just like, we just have to start over like because reforms, you're just, it's just duct tape and it's not, and it's not stopping, it's not fixing the problem. Y'all just keep adding duct tape. And sometimes the duct tape muffles the sound from inside. Yeah. Ooh, that's poetic, bro. Makes people think that we fixed it. Yes, that's pretty poetic there, Robert. Every now and then. Every now and then. Yeah. There's a part of me that questions the value of continuing to loop through all of these stories, all of these details of abuse, all of these statistics over and over again, every cycle that this happens. And because again, I think the only real thing to do is empty these facilities

out, burn them down and throw any person who suggests rebuilding them into the Gulf of Mexico. But that said, I also don't want to ignore the work that these journalists and these Department of Justice people do in documenting this because the stories of these victims are important. And so to close us out, I'm going to read one more quote from that article that I just cited from about Christie Dennis. Her son was 15 when he was sent to the McLennan County State Juvenile Correction Facility in Mart, Texas. Quote, Ms. Dennis was horrified when she called one day in 2019 and learned that her son had been beaten and taunted as guards apparently stood by. Her son was sent to the jail's doctors on one occasion, she said. And she was later told that

many guards did not intervene because they were afraid of the youth themselves. Ms. Dennis said her son ended up at the center after taking her car without permission several times and money from her purse. After talking to the authorities, she was advised that if she wanted to teach her son a lesson, he needed to go to a juvenile facility. A decision, Ms. Dennis said, a decision she ended up regretting. The attacks against her son escalated to the point where he begged guards to keep him in solitary confinement. Released in July, 2020, months before his 17th birthday, he now works at a fast food restaurant and is earning his GED with plans to pursue welding. But he is not the same as he was before his detention, she said. He has PTSD, he hears a noise and he panics.

And that's another important when we talk about the complicity in the system and the degree to which maybe some of these people documenting these abuses are even complicit. Another person or group of people who are complicit are parents in these communities. Parents who turn in their kids, parents who support these laws, parents who support funding these places. I think it's probably fair to say that 100% of the adults I knew as a child were to that degree complicit in this system because they supported, keep opening more places, the politicians who supported these places and they were convinced that it was the right thing to do. And the result of a lot of people being convinced that this is the right thing to do. It's not just the rapists and the

murderers and the pedophiles or the venal politicians who make this possible. It's the people who think they're doing the best thing for society. And the result of everything, of both the actions of these horrible rapists and whatnot and pedophiles and the actions of what I'm sure are loving parents and dedicated employees in the justice department, whatnot. The result of all of that is a system that rapes, beats and murders children on an industrial scale. That's why I opened this episode with, like, I am a parent and the part of me that understands at least can empathize what it feels like to have a child that you don't know what to do with. Like, I deeply understand that, you know, and the part of you that, like, the reality that

you're still unpacking your own trauma, like, just from just the time of age of civilization we're in, it was like, like you said, we were old enough to where we could get spanked at school. Like, that's, that's like, we're like, it's not that long ago that we actually realized that that was barbaric. You know what I'm saying? So, so you're, you're, you're processing your own upbringing, realizing, and then the parts of you that feels like, like even with me where I'm like, well, there's been times that I've been like, well, I kind of earned that spanking. You know what I'm saying? Like, I probably should have got spanked for that. You know what I'm saying? That now I can't, I look at both my children and I'm like, ain't no way in the damn world I will put my hands

on my kids. You know what I'm saying? Like, it just seems so, like, unthinkable. Like, that I don't, I just don't think I could, I could never do it. You know what I'm saying? But when I got married, again, I'm black, like black people spanked their kids. When I got married, Southern people, they spanked their kids. It's so normal. And I'm like, that no doubt in my mind, my parents love me. Like, I'm not, I would never take that from my parents loved me. I have a great relationship with my parents, with my mom, at least, you know what I'm saying? But like, you know, you know, and a better one with my father now, but like, that being said, I'm like, the part of me that understands that you're just like, I don't, and I'm from the city. So I'm just sometimes we be like,

nah, then homie need to go to jail. You know what I'm saying? And then, but then you get there, which is why I feel like sometimes for me and my wife, like us who've been advocates who have like, you know, been to the Congress, like stood to our front of our councilmen and been like, you know, our senators and been like, this shit got to stop. You know what I'm saying? Have like, done the work, done the therapy for ourselves, we've made enough money to be able to do therapy for ourselves to be able to be like, to come to the conclusions that we're at now, to be like, this shit isn't working. You know what I'm saying? And having the experience of like having friends that've been through the system, you know, ourselves somehow, you know, having our own

interactions with the system, to be able to look at our own children and everybody else's children, and be like, listen, this is not the answer. You know what I'm saying? And it's not, it's, it's not doing what you think it's doing. Sometimes I feel like that's a privilege of mine, even coming from poverty, coming from the hood is having a privilege of understanding that like, yo, the system you think is going to rehabilitate your children has no, that was never in their purview. Joe said that was never, that was never on the table was rehabilitating them. You know what I'm saying? So I raise my children in a different like, even just looking at like, my own like, like friends being like, yeah, we don't spank our kids and being like, friends being like, what? Like, you know,

I was like, no, like we've, you know what I'm saying? We, it's a, we're in a, it's all that says, I'm, I'm stuttering now because I feel so passionate about this to where it's like the complicit, because you talked about the complicity and that's the complicity that like sits as a parent to where you're like, but I'm also terrified for my child and I don't want them to make bad decisions. And and I feel like they not listening to me and I know what scared me straight was being scared. So I'm like, well, maybe that's gonna, but then you realize it's like, no, you're creating a criminal, you're traumatizing your child and not understanding how you're traumatizing your child because you think they know you love them, but like all of that put together and then, and then like you said,

like coming out of the other end and being like, I'm trying to do my best. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying a lot here because like, again, it's so important to me. I just like, I just went through a situation on a other, on a nonprofit, I'm on the board of that, like, you know, we had to go through a moment to where it was like, when you sit at the, I'd never been in a situation where I'm actually at the part of the table where I have the reins, like I can actually make change here. You know what I'm saying? Where I'm like, I'm actually the one in power now, like I'm usually the one outside of the door. Now I'm actually in it. But then once you're sitting at that and you're like, Oh man, there's like, there's really a lot at stake here when I, if I make this decision

that seems so easy when I was outside, you know what I'm saying? But now that I'm in and you're like, that's like you, like how you keep trying to like, balance your understanding of like, these journalists and these like, justice workers that were like, yo, like we're doing what is obviously the right thing. Just saying, but like, at the end of the day, you're still laying your head like, but well, shit, dude, like, I mean, I can't, I mean, what we really need to do, you know what I'm saying? Like you said, what you really do is close them all. Yeah. But you're like, but fuck, like I, I don't have the, I mean, this is the best I could do. You know what I'm saying? It's just like, I understand so much more now at this stage in my life and my career

and my parenting, like all of those nuances, you know, I just wish I could just rap about it. I wish I could just rap about it and do podcasts. You know what I'm saying? Well, yeah. I mean, you do, I, I, you do have a podcast. I do have a podcast and I do talk about the shit, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I wish I had some cathartic way to deal with it. Yeah. Rapping sounds actually extremely cathartic. It really is, bro. But I still think, I think I said that when first time I was on the show, like, yo, let me write a rap for you, man. Like, yeah, I hear your rhythm though. I don't know your rhythm. Like if I could write it, but if you ain't got rhythm, like, I don't know. Absolutely not. Yeah, that's that. That'll always just be something I have to

admire from afar. But I don't know. What do you, you got anything to plug prop? At the end, at the end of this very bleak day of talking about child prisms. I personally think that prop should write that for you and then we should perform it at the live show. Okay. I do have something to plug. Well, I'm happy with prop performing at the live show. No, I want you to perform it at the live show. That's not what they're paying for, Sophie. Bro, I bet you right now, if I were to throw on, because you mentioned it already on our shelf, if I were to throw on like a most death, like a black on both sides record, put it, you could probably rap along. There are songs out there, some desa, some of them like the doom tree stuff. I bet you have to throw on a full few of them

tracks, few of them atmosphere songs. You already know that you could probably rap along. Yeah, I may have listened to an ASAP rock or two in my time. Yes. And listen, that's some complex rap it. Like you know what I'm saying? That ain't some easy, that ain't some easy bars. Like that's some complex rap it. Well, anyway, yes, propfitpop.com. We'll see how drunk I get during the live stream, but that's one more reason to check out the live stream. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And hit me on Twitter. I'm trying to come up with a game for us to play during the live stream that might involve how drunk rapper gets. I feel like all the ones are like the boy howdy's and like the Hitler calls. I'd be like, man, luckily nobody calls me out on my like, you know what

I'm saying? Because I feel like wasted, wasted immediately. First 10 minutes. Yeah, bro. Anyways. Yeah, propfitpop.com. I got some new coffee content coming out. Like got some, uh, got some, uh, you know, music and politics pod, man. We're getting got renewed. Thank you. Cool. So there's more shows coming. You know what I'm saying? Hell yeah. Yeah. So we'll be up in there. Check it out. Check out prop. Check out props book. Check out our live stream on February 17th moment house.com slash bond the bastard. Yeah, check that out. And also, I have a fiction book that is on presale right now. If you order during the presale for the next couple of months, you will get a signed copy when it comes out in May. Google AK press after the revolution. And that's where my book

will be. AK press after the revolution by a copy of my novel. You can learn about a Skollfucker Mike. Skollfucker Mike. All right. Yo, that's a great book, man. You're like fiction's hard to write. It really is. Boy howdy it is. Boy howdy. One would think that you're like, well, I'm making up a story. Like we've been making up stories since we've been sneaking out in front of our parents. Like we've been making up stories, but like it's really hard. So like, yo, kudos way easier to just be a judge. Apparently. You can make money, send kids to jail. Great. Boy howdy. All right. Boy howdy indeed. I am Texan. All right. That's the episode. Bam. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands? Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you

get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.