Nate Blakeslee
Will to Power
How is a ponytailed former ACLU executive reforming the troubled Texas Youth Commission? By helping one inmate at a time.
Hardie says: I worked as a teacher at Retrieve Prison, 1980-83. I loved working with those inmates, but had a hard time with one administrator. My first school administrator thought I had the right approach. All I wanted to do was help. That administrator was promoted and the next administrator and I had a hard time. That’s a long story. To make it short, I quit after being there three years. One incident: We had a riot in another section of the prison. My students were ready to take-up for me. I had some of the most intelligent students I’ve ever work with in 38 years of teaching. Never forget Mr. Jones, though. He had spent most of his 63 years in prison; nicest man; did all right with his numbers, but had a hard time with letters; could sign his name. I have a million stories. I learned a lot. (April 27th, 2009 at 9:58pm)
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The two first met in 2001, when Harrell was the executive director of the ACLU of Texas and Kimbrough became executive director of Perry’s criminal justice division. The ACLU had been pushing for reforms in the drug war, and seizing on a notorious police corruption scandal in the Panhandle town of Tulia, Harrell assembled a coalition to shut down the state’s scandal-plagued regional drug task forces. It was his first major organizing campaign as head of the ACLU of Texas, and though it took a few years to gain momentum, it became a stunning success. The governor eventually allowed the task forces to die on the vine, shifting funding and responsibility for statewide drug enforcement back to the more disciplined and better-managed narcotics division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Harrell followed this win with hard-fought victories on racial profiling and sentencing reform. He had a knack for attracting grant money from national foundations, some of which had previously written off organizing in Texas, and he accomplished all of this at a time when progressive wins were few and far between at the Capitol.
Harrell proved to be a quick study at politics, learning to work with people from the other side of the partisan divide. On juvenile justice issues, he found an unlikely ally in Marc Levin, who directs the Center for Effective Justice, an arm of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. “We’re spending sixty thousand dollars per year per child, and we have a fifty percent recidivism rate,” Levin said. “Whether you look at it as a human rights issue or a cost-to-taxpayer issue, what we were doing was not working.” When Levin and Harrell were honored last May by the Legislature for their work on TYC reform, the two were seated side by side in the House gallery, Levin in his three-piece suit and Harrell in his leather vest and bolo tie, grinning and whooping when his name was called.
It wasn’t long, however, before fault lines began to emerge between Harrell and the new leadership at the TYC. Three weeks after the Coke County facility was shut down, Harrell was back in front of a legislative committee, recommending the closing of a North Texas lockup called Victory Field Correctional Academy. The response from the TYC brass, including acting executive director Dimitria Pope, was decidedly cool. Pope, who had come to the agency in June after a career in the state’s adult prison system, suggested that conditions at the unit were not as bad as Harrell had described. After months of unflattering stories in the daily papers, there seemed to be a sense among some in the agency that it was time to stop the bleeding and get the TYC off the front pages, regardless of how much work still needed to be done. As one TYC administrator put it, “If you want good people to work at the TYC, you have to stop telling everybody that this is a terrible place where kids are abused.”
Harrell also butted heads with the new administration over the use of pepper spray. In an effort to cut down on injuries to inmates and staff, Billy Humphrey, the new deputy director of residential services at the TYC, who is also a transplant from the adult corrections system, had encouraged correctional officers to use pepper spray on unruly inmates rather than grab or tackle them. Harrell objected, noting that the trend in the industry had been away from the use of chemical weapons, the abuse of which had forced authorities in Virginia and California to settle recent lawsuits. Pope sided with Humphrey. But shortly thereafter, two advocacy groups sued, and Pope modified the policy. “If I’m successful, the agency won’t be sued,” Harrell said. “So that was an example of how the ombudsman process is not supposed to work.”
The blowup over pepper spray has some in the advocacy community worried that the window of opportunity for continued reform at the TYC is closing. In September a blue-ribbon task force of juvenile justice experts convened by the agency last spring released its final report. It recommended that the TYC consider shuttering many of its larger far-flung institutions in favor of smaller facilities closer to inmates’ families and encouraged other reforms associated with what has come to be called the Missouri model, a program that has drastically reduced juvenile recidivism rates and per-inmate costs in that state over the past twenty years. The report landed with a thud, and TYC officials refused to endorse it. “I’m concerned that there seems to be a focus on control and punishment over education and rehabilitation,” said David Springer, the associate dean of UT’s School of Social Work, who chaired the panel. The reaction suggests hard slogging ahead for Harrell. He cannot be fired by Pope, but nor does she have to follow his recommendations. Still, Harrell has a lot of people pulling for him. “We’re always going to have plenty of cops,” Kimbrough said. “What Will brings is some balance.”
Harrell’s last stop on his October tour of the Giddings State School was a visit to the isolation wing, where he wanted to check on a young man named Paul who had been threatening to kill himself the last time Harrell visited the unit. Harrell was distressed to hear that Paul was back on suicide alert, which meant he was in solitary confinement, behind a heavy steel door for most of the day. The use of isolation has been practically eliminated in more-progressive systems, like the one in Missouri, but most units in Texas still have dozens of solitary confinement cells, used mainly for punishment.
Harrell entered the narrow cell flanked by two correctional officers, all three of them saying, “Hi, Paul,” in the kind of calm, nonthreatening voice you might use to coax a spooked horse out of his stall. The boy, who was about seventeen, stood up and began shifting slowly from one foot to the other. He was wearing nothing but a sleeveless padded apron, and he had several days’ worth of stubble on his jaw and a mop of unruly black hair. He held his arms out so Harrell could see the long, self-inflicted scars on his forearms. Harrell threw his own arms out to the sides in a gesture of disbelief. “I don’t know, man,” the boy said apologetically. “I’m just really messed up.” For the first time that day, Harrell couldn’t think of anything to say.
On the way back to Austin, Harrell seemed to recover his verve, talking at length about what he had learned from national experts about nutrition, vocational education, programming for female inmates, and a host of other topics. He seemed undeterred by his recent conflict with administrators. “I’m learning to flow like water, through the path of least resistance,” he said, quoting from The Art of War, one of his favorite books. “This has been a Sun Tzu bonanza for me.”
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