For more than a decade, Texas has been trying to slim down its youth prison system, which has been plagued by years of abuse scandals. This Legislature is reversing that course.
The Texas Legislature convened this January facing a big task: fixing the increasingly unstable youth prison system.
Proposals on the table ranged from closing the state’s five remaining youth prisons and instead relying on local systems to rehabilitate children involved in criminal behavior to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build additional state lockups for juveniles.
Ultimately, lawmakers opted for the latter, passing a budget with $200 million set aside to build two or three additional state-run prisons to hold at least 200 more youth. Currently, fewer than 600 juveniles are imprisoned in the state’s prisons.
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