Wednesday, June 6, 2007

New TYC rules make more kids eligible for release

By Pegasus News wire

Several new rules just took effect at the Texas Youth Commission that have received little attention and surprisingly no public comment since they were proposed in April. According to the Texas Register, Governor Perry's now-departed conservator at TYC, Jay Kimbrough, received no public input regarding several significant changes to the Administrative Code governing the youth prison agency.

For starters, the changes make it easier to release TYC kids even when they haven't completed various programs to which they've been assigned. It:

The new rule also reduces "the amount of time a youth must remain free of serious rule violations in order to be eligible for release on parole from 90 days to 30 days." FWIW I can guarantee you that change alone will dramatically increase the number of TYC youth eligible for release.

Another amendment gives TYC carte blanche to release kids into virtually any setting, giving:

Finally, a new rule puts in place safeguards to ensure abuse investigations aren't prematurely closed or that supervisors don't ignore the results. The change:

Often changes to the Administrative Code have as great an impact on criminal justice programming as changes in actual statutes, and IMO these are as significant for reducing overincarceration at TYC as anything the Legislature passed on the subject.

A lot more rulemaking must occur at TYC once SB 103 and other pending legislation becomes law, though the commissioner is the sole "decider" under the current structure - there's no longer a TYC board to have a traditional rulemaking process. A handful of other agencies like the Department of Insurance have a single commissioner who makes agency rules by him or herself, but that still makes the process pretty insular. It's astonishing in this case that with all the hoo-ha surrounding TYC this spring the agency received no public comments on the changes. That must be at least partially because the board had been disbanded.

Pegasus News content partner - Grits For Breakfast

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