County Magazine

At times during the past two years, Bandera County Juvenile Probation Chief Matthew Haynie sent youths taken into local custody to the Victoria County juvenile detention center — more than a three-hour drive south — because he could not find a closer facility with space.

Other, nearby counties that Bandera County contracted with to house juveniles, such as Bexar or Atascosa counties, didn’t have enough staffers to take in more young people. And Bandera County doesn’t have its own facility for youths.

Since the onset of the pandemic, county juvenile justice departments have struggled more than ever to place children in detention centers, even if they have one located in their counties. The problem only grew worse in June, when Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) interim Executive Director Shandra Carter announced that the agency was temporarily suspending the intake of youths to state facilities due to a lack of staff.

TJJD coordinates with 165 county juvenile probation departments, which handle 98% of youth referrals at the local level, according to Carter’s testimony to the Texas House Appropriations Committee in September. Only 45 of those 165 counties have their own detention centers. 

But even in counties with detention centers, there are not enough staff members to manage the workload of housing hundreds of teens taken into custody. 

Bexar County Chief Juvenile Probation Officer Jill Mata said the staffing shortage is so severe that she has to turn away youths from neighboring counties that lack their own detention centers. 

"We're at a point right now where we cannot do that," she said. "We cannot help others because it's all we can do to manage our own situation. We have to take care of our county children first."

Before the pandemic, Bexar County frequently housed juveniles from Bandera and Comal counties, and its detention center could hold up to 200 youths when fully staffed, said Mata, who spent 25 years as a juvenile prosecutor and four years as general counsel for TJJD. 

Now, about 100 teens stay in the Bexar County center on any given day to match the current staffing ratio. 

The county tapped its probation officers to work shifts in the detention center during the week to help relieve the workload, even though that's not their job, Mata said. 

"Everybody's desperate to hire more staff, and everyone knows that the repercussions for not having enough staff are great," 

she said. "Children are not going to get the same level of supervision, so it's not good for kids. And it's not good for counties either, just in terms of a safety liability issue." 

It costs Bexar County $200-$400 a day to care for youths in its juvenile detention center, according to Mata’s testimony to the committee. Holding them in the local facility for sometimes months at a time — instead of days or weeks — has significantly cut into Bexar County’s budget, but the county certainly is not alone. 

TJJD and county juvenile probation departments have raised salaries to recruit and retain workers, but Haynie said that’s not enough. 

"It's going to take more than just that to fix the entirety of the system," he said. "I don't think anyone really has the magic button for staff. Everyone's having that problem across the board. It doesn't really matter what industry you're in." 

Caldwell County increased its annual juvenile probation budget by about $40,000, up to $160,000, said Jay Monkerud, Caldwell County chief juvenile probation officer and president of the Central Texas Juvenile Chiefs Association. The association covers 44 counties and 28 juvenile probation departments. 

Additionally, the cost for counties that lack a detention center to contract with another county’s center also has increased, placing another pinch on counties’ budgets. In some places, the daily rates have doubled, from $100 to $200 per day, Monkerud said. Caldwell County also lacks a juvenile detention center. 

Monkerud, who has served as a juvenile probation officer since 1994, said a "conglomeration of factors" led to this understaffing problem. Low pay, difficult and sometimes dangerous working conditions, and the pandemic all contributed to the staff shortage that has spilled over into a larger issue. 

"It creates a risk in your community," he said, adding that every juvenile probation department probably has released teens who should have remained in custody because they couldn’t find space for them. 

The risk ranges from a small county such as Bandera having to send one of its few deputies to Victoria to transport a teen, to a large county like Bexar not being able to house every youth taken into custody. The risk also rises inside the facilities. Mata said teens who don’t get their rehabilitative treatments try to break the monotony and gain attention by acting out, sometimes dangerously. That can lead to the juveniles being restrained. 

"When you have kids detained that long, they're hard to manage, and it's not a normal, healthy way to keep children," she said. "They exhibit a lot of difficult behaviors to manage, even more so than you would normally expect because it's not a normal situation, even in the correctional world." 

For Monkerud, the long-term solution would be to build more detention centers, but they would still need people willing to do the work. 

"The people that come to do this work are those who have a heart for it, and they really want to help kids," Mata said.