Actions are being taken to clean up the Texas Youth Commission, but it is too little, too late in my book. And Governor Rick Perry still doesn't understand the magnitude of the problem -- or his culpability for it -- based upon his belief that he and his incompetent appointees, not the legislature, should take the lead in restructuring the troubled agency.

Under pressure from the Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry announced Wednesday that the Texas Youth Commission board will resign amid new criminal allegations involving TYC staff and revelations that the juvenile corrections health care system is in shambles.

Perry and the Legislature are battling over how to rebuild an agency with high staff turnover and accusations that corrections officers and administrators have physically and sexually abused youth in their custody.

On Wednesday, TYC officials were trying to figure out how a former adult-corrections-system guard managed to land a TYC corrections officer job while under investigation for sexually assaulting a male inmate on his former job.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice Inspector General John Moriarty told a special joint legislative committee that TYC would have found out about the investigation if the agency had contacted TDCJ on a background check.

So let's think about this -- TYC is hiring guards without conducting complete background checks. That means that sex offenders were put in positions of power over incarcerated kids, with the ability to prey upon them sexually. Not only that, but volunteers were let in with even less screening.

That Rick Perry, the failed governor of the state of Texas, thinks he has any role at all to play in the reorganization of the TYC is pretty disturbing -- but then again, he has been more interested in playing doctor with the sixth-grade girls of Texas than preventing the sexual abuse young people in state custody. When viewed in conjunction with the Gardasil Affair, I think we can say that Gov. Perry has rendered himself irrelevant for the remainder of his term -- and political poison for GOP candidates in 2008 and 2010.

Posted by: Greg at 03:28 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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