Justice advocates rebuke county plan for $300 million juvenile jail expansion

At its June 27 meeting, the Travis County Commissioners Court considered spending $250 million to $300 million to expand the county’s juvenile detention complex in South Austin. A united front of more than 50 justice advocates voiced unanimous opposition to the plan, saying that the expansion would represent a doubling down on carceral tactics rather than diversion, which the county has recently made moves toward with its Diversion Center plan. For anyone who was present in 2021 for the community rebuke of the proposal for a new women’s jail, the discussion probably gave them déjà vu.

The Juvenile Probation Department presented this expansion as part of the county’s longstanding Comprehensive Facilities Plan, which was passed in 2017. In June, the Juvenile Board made public an updated proposal for the facilities plan to add three new buildings to the county’s current juvenile jail campus, Gardner Betts, and double its size. The first would add 32 beds of “nonsecure” dorm-style housing, meaning supervised but unlocked rooms; the second would add 16 beds of transitional housing for children being rehabilitated to reenter the community; and the third would house offices, meeting rooms, classrooms and spaces to provide treatment and counseling while on campus.

Juvenile Probation says the new facilities are needed because the old ones don’t include any nonsecure or transitional housing. Currently, if there is a lack of space, Juvenile Probation places children as far as 100 miles away, in facilities that may not meet Travis County’s standard of care, increasing costs for the county. They say the new space would also help bridge gaps in the continuum of services, enhance restorative justice programs and reduce recidivism to lessen the probability of children ending up in the adult criminal justice system. According to county data, 52 percent of children at Gardner Betts are at risk of reoffending. 

However, the county public defenders providing legal defense to these youths are questioning whether these changes would meet those needs. Ruben Castañeda, a 26-year Travis County juvenile public defender, asked commissioners if they had talked to community leaders during the planning process at all, since the Comprehensive Facilities Plan was made public only last month: “My office represents pretty much every kid in the system. I am all for investment in resources for these children and families, but we need to know and understand what they need. I don’t know that they need a centralized facility that would be difficult for them to get to,” since about 50 percent of incarcerated children in the county reside in precincts far from Gardner Betts, near South Congress Avenue and Oltorf Street. He suggested an exit survey for children and families who had been through the system, to better understand which of the current services offered are working and which aren’t.

Advocates also consistently pointed out how many services in the community could be funded by $300 million, such as family counseling and drug treatment programs to prevent kids from having to be incarcerated in the first place. Maggie Luna, executive director of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, said it took her five years to get her son out of the foster care system.

“He’s been home for two years now and because members of our community showed up. He’s a different child today. The system told me he was gonna end up in prison,” she said. “The children we’re sending there are salvageable but … there’s no such thing as trauma-informed incarceration, ever. You’re still incarcerating children.”

Bob Batlan from Advocates for Social Justice Reform said, “The thought process of designing buildings that could conceptually support needed services is putting the cart way before the horse. Commissioners need to better understand the services that might help our young people. Data suggests that detention – juvenile or adult – is rarely the road to good community outcomes.”

Advocates’ disagreement with Juvenile Probation boiled down to that point: Juvenile Probation wants to build capacity for future incarceration, and advocates want to avoid the need for future incarceration altogether. Though they postponed voting after hearing the testimony June 27, commissioners have already voted one way on this issue before.

“Travis County has already expressed these principles in prior votes on the women’s jail, saying that more buildings is not the way forward,” chief public defender Adeola Ogunkeyede said. “So I ask you to recommit to those same principles here today.”

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