"Their Last Good Chance to Get Better"
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A few minutes later we came across a group of boys also walking in single file. Boynton pointed at a grinning ten-year-old boy in the middle of the line. "They brought him in here after he burned down a church," he said. "Ten years old, looks like a choirboy, impulsively burns down a church—and his mind is so disturbed he doesn't even know why."
Every year, between 2,000 and 2,500 juveniles who either commit felonies or engage in a series of criminal activities are sentenced to the TYC by local juvenile-court judges. To successfully complete a sentence—the minimum is nine months, and the TYC has the right to keep especially incorrigible juvenile inmates until the age of 21—the offenders must prove that they can handle the regulated structure of prison life, successfully participate in a fully accredited prison school, and then complete a TYC "resocialization program," in which they are taught such skills as how to develop values, identify their "thinking errors," and prepare for the future. TYC officials have long realized, however, that the only way to get many of the young inmates through their program and ultimately prepared for the future is to deal with their mental illnesses. Of course, like every other financially strapped state agency that is supposed to help Texas children, the TYC cannot begin to treat adequately all of the mentally ill kids it receives. In fact, those children who do not display particularly acute symptoms of their illness are quickly sent off to the regular state facilities. Some of the more emotionally fragile boys are funneled to a TYC campus in Crockett, where there is a larger mental health staff. Corsicana is reserved for the worst cases. Here, one can find kids tormented by an almost endless variety of mood and personality disorders, plagued with delusions and paranoia, and stricken by textbook cases of acute depression or even the very rare cases of adolescent schizophrenia. Some of their minds have gone haywire because of the complications they experienced in the womb of their drug-addicted mothers. Others have drifted from reality because of physical and sexual abuse they endured in childhood. Still others, for reasons completely unknown, have never been able to express their emotions in a normal way.
The building that Grant Williams lives in at the back of the Corsicana campus is known as the CSU—Corsicana Stabilization Unit. It is for those kids who are either so disturbed that they cannot manage themselves in the standard TYC group environment or who have become so psychotic that they are considered a danger to themselves or others. The CSU kids have deteriorated to the point that they have been found cutting themselves repeatedly (as Grant has done) or banging their heads against a wall or succumbing to inexplicably violent outbursts, driven by an overwhelmingly paranoid desire to attack others before they are attacked themselves. At night, the CSU youths sleep in individual cells under rip-proof sheets, which are taken away in the morning. They either eat their meals with their fingers or a single implement, a nonbreakable spoon. Their clothes have no snaps or zippers. They are issued only ankle socks because they are hard to tie together to form a noose. Nor are they allowed to keep their prison-issued Bibles in their rooms at night, because they might tear out the pages and swallow them or fold the pages and try to scratch themselves until they bleed. Even with those precautions, guards peer through windows into their rooms every three minutes to make sure they are not trying to hurt themselves, and they also watch through peepholes when the kids are in the bathroom.
The CSU is where Boynton spends most of his time. Born and raised in Lufkin, he graduated from medical school in Galveston in 1962 and then worked mostly with children in private practice in Austin until 1999, when the TYC asked him to become a consultant. Although he was reaching retirement age, he took on the job because he was outraged at how the state treated its mentally ill kids. "My God, they don't deserve to be turned out on the streets, which is what is happening now in our half-assed mental health system," he told me. "Do we send kids with cancer out on the streets? Hell, no. We know that the sooner we start treating them, the better chance we have to fix them. And if we can get to the mentally ill when they are still young, then we've got a far better chance to make them better too, because we don't have to deal with all that pathology that accumulates over time."
I first started following Boynton after being told about him by two Austin film producers, Karen Bernstein and Ellen Spiro, who are making a documentary on the mental illness crisis among children in Texas. He was supervising the cases of nine teenage boys on one side of the CSU building and eight teenage girls on the other side. One boy was there for pointing a gun at a neighbor during a psychotic episode and then stealing his dog. Another boy had burglarized at least 25 houses. Still another was there for hitting his sister in the head with a baseball bat. A girl was there for taking a swing at a police officer when he tried to pick her up for running away from school. Another girl was there after she had been arrested for walking into a convenience store, pointing a gun at the clerk's face, and taking $200 from the cash register. Another was there for stealing a car while she was high from huffing gasoline fumes. "The question that always haunts you, the question that breaks your heart," said Boynton, "is whether these kids would have done any of these crimes if, years earlier, they had been given the proper treatment and medication."
There is perhaps no better example of what Boynton is talking about than Grant Williams, who allowed me to use his name and tell his story. Growing up in Wichita Falls and San Antonio, Grant began to display the classic symptoms of untreated mental illness by the age of fourteen. His mother, Sheila Howard, an accountant at a San Antonio military base, raised Grant and his sister as a single mother. "He became very introverted after the move to San Antonio," she said. "He seemed unhappy, and he stopped trying in high school." He began spending long periods alone in his bedroom, and he also began drinking and smoking marijuana. "He told me he needed the marijuana because it kept him from hearing voices," remembered his mother. "I said, 'Voices? Grant, what are you talking about?' But he wouldn't tell me anything else."
Like so many parents of mentally ill children, Grant's mother was either unaware or in denial of the depth of her son's plight. Grant's high school teachers saw only a poorly motivated student rather than a mentally disturbed child. Mental health advocates have long argued that MHMR caseworkers should be put in public schools, where it would be easier and less stigmatizing—compared with a trip to a crowded mental health clinic—for kids to receive help; MHMR officials say they would love to be in the schools, but they have barely enough state money to staff their own clinics. Their community health centers around the state are already overwhelmed. In some counties, children must wait about ninety days before they can get an appointment. When they do get seen, they often get no more than a thirty-minute counseling session once a month with a well-meaning but beleaguered mental health professional. And many don't get an appointment at all.
And so most parents of mentally ill children watch in bewilderment as their kids continue to decline and no one except police officers intervenes in their lives. That's exactly what happened to Sheila Howard. Grant dropped out of high school in the fall of 2000, just before his seventeenth birthday, and within weeks he was arrested by San Antonio police officers for having stolen a bicycle and other items. He was taken to a county juvenile detention center, where he suddenly turned on a guard and punched him. It was a peculiar thing for him to do: Grant had never before shown any violent tendencies. But assaulting a public servant is not a crime that is taken lightly, and a juvenile-court judge sentenced Grant to the TYC.
