TYC Discord

Hundreds of abuse reports at the state's troubled youth prisons were closed in the last year with no formal indication of whether or not they were ever investigated.

A review of the Texas Youth Commission's case tracking database shows no disposition for more than 560 incidents of alleged sexual and physical abuse, according to the agency's independent ombudsman.

TYC officials maintain all but one of the cases received proper attention and blamed the findings on a faulty database that is not set up to handle of the relevant information.

Still, TYC conservator Richard Nedelkoff described the lapse as "appalling," in light of repeated allegations of abuse and cover-up that brought the youth prison system to its knees last year.

"Uncertainty in the area of the treatment of youth simply cannot be tolerated," he said. "This agency must have a full accounting of each allegation from the time it is filed until its ultimate resolution."

In a report issued last month, ombudsman Will Harrell said his office could not determine what had happened to hundreds of the most serious allegations of abuse filed in the last 14 months- ranging from sexual and physical assault to medical neglect.

But his findings endured heavy criticism last week at a hearing in front of the state congressional committee charged with overseeing reform at the state's youth prisons.

Since the report's release, TYC officials have reviewed 300 of the 564 cases in doubt and found only one case that investigators appear to have handled improperly. Investigators had filed paper-based updates on most of the rest.

Some legislators accused Harrell of instigating panic by suggesting the abuse allegations had been ignored. Harrell, however, stood by his findings.

Given the TYC's past history of covering up and ignoring reports from youths, he said, he was not willing to take the agency at its word.

Last year, the commission nearly imploded under mounting reports of physical and sexual abuse and high-level cover-ups at its 21 prisons and halfway homes.

The Evins Regional Juvenile Facility in Edinburg came under particular scrutiny after inmate riots and reports that guards there routinely used excessive force drew U.S. Department of Justice investigators to the facility in 2006.

Youths reported incidents in which guards bound them, threw them face-down into flower gardens, used their bodies as battering rams to open doors and hit them against concrete poles.

The commission vowed to make youth safety a top priority as part of a legislative reform package passed last year and was later bound to many of those provisions by a federal court judgment issued in response to Justice Department's investigation of Evins.

Among the requirements was a stipulation that the TYC must develop an effective system to ensure all abuse reports were investigated by July 4, 2008.

So, regardless of whether the 564 cases mentioned in the ombudsman's report were investigated or not, the fact that the agency's official databases don't reflect that puts the TYC in violation of its settlement with the Justice Department, state legislators said.

"It seems to me that you should be able to track the danger to the employees and inmates," said state Rep. Aaron Peña, D-Edinburg, who sits on the committee charged with overseeing TYC reform.

"It's not moving fast enough for me, but it's a far cry from the outright deception we had with the previous administrations."

The lapse in properly documenting case resolutions could pose other problems as well, the ombudsman's report suggested.

Prison employees blamed for abuse are routinely shifted to alternate posts that remove them from daily contact with their accusers.

If their cases are never officially resolved, the accused guards could end up lingering in limbo for years.

Prison guards have previously accused inmates of gaming the system by filing false reports, knowing it could take years for a particular guard to be fully reinstated.

And in an agency that routinely has problems recruiting and keeping qualified employees, moving staff around based on false allegations could impact other areas of inmate care, said state Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen.

Hinojosa authored the 2007 TYC reform bill.

"They should be further along than this," he said. "They have made good progress but there are some areas that are falling behind like health care at the prisons and education."

TYC officials said all of the case tracking problems would be addressed in a new database system scheduled for implementation in December.

"I'm not going to say this isn't important," agency spokesman Jim Hurley said. "But it isn't a sky-is-falling situation, either."