The Pursuit to Shutter Youth Jails

As the 89th Texas Legislative Session commenced on January 14th, instrumental advocates behind the scenes at the Texas Center for Justice & Equity are intent on ensuring the voices of those impacted by the criminal punishment system are amplified. Composed of resolute volunteers, TCJE staff, and those who have experienced the punitive measures of the carceral system first-hand, the organization envisages a future where Black and brown youths’ social welfare is invested in lieu of the draconian strategies that are at present. The largest focus is shuttering the last five youth jails in Texas, building upon their progress amassed during the previous year’s session with their ‘Finish the 5 Campaign’. Integral and at the helm of this harrowing endeavor is Sarah Reyes, Youth Justice Policy Director at TCJE.?

Texas’ five state-secured juvenile prisons are located in Edinburg, Gainesville, Giddings, Mart, and Brownwood and children as young as 10 years old can be detained. The sobering statistics reveal a reality many professionals who work in the legislative system confront daily where between 2010–and 2020, Black and Latino/boys and girls were far more likely to be admitted to detention during their first contact than comparable white youth in a study conducted by the Texas Policy Lab at Rice University in 2023 that uncovered glaring racial disparities. At a granular level, in 2022, Black youths accounted for 46% of admissions to detention, while white youths accounted for less than 9% in the Harris County Juvenile Justice System. As for taxpayer spending, Texans foot the bill for children in the states’ care with a whopping price tag of just over $175,000 per year, per child in 2020 according to the Justice Policy Institute, a national non-profit organization. Across the country, the costs of youth incarceration are staggering, displaying an increase of nearly double since 2014, 44% to be exact, ringing in at $214,620 per year. In 2022, around 600 youths in Texas resided in these jails and after roughly crunching the numbers, taxpayers’ shelled out an estimated 10.5 million from their pockets. The average cost of in-state college tuition in 2020 in Texas was just about $10,470 per year for reference according to the same study.?

Some would say it’s an understatement that the money could be better spent on beneficial investments in our communities such as affordable housing, rehabilitative services, and the aforementioned, education, that has been the focal point of conversations for years regarding the exorbitant higher education costs. Reyes is devoted to communicating to Texas’ legislatures that our youth deserve resources, not retribution. Reyes’ journey began long before she ended up at the University of Texas at Austin. A first-generation college graduate, she sought to serve as an example for her two sisters. “I kind of fell into this work, but it's similar to some of the things I experienced when I was growing up,” shared Reyes, who grew up in a low-income area of Texas witnessing the affliction of substance abuse issues and crime in her backyard and family. Initially, she started on a pre-med track hoping to secure financial stability for her family who struggled financially before calling home to her mom in tears just before her junior year facing societal and self-imposed pressure, nervous to break the news that she was straying away from her initial plan. By her senior year, she double-majored in both Human Development and Family Sciences and Social Work, cramming in more than a full-time course load to complete her education. It was a combination of her upbringing and stumbling into an elective course that led Reyes to land on Social Work as a career, reviving communities through policy and later going on to graduate with her Master’s of Social Work from UT at Austin the year after completing her Bachelor’s.

Reyes has found her niche in advocacy and policy work, landing a fellowship with the Annie E. Casey Foundation; a leadership development program for leaders ages 24 to 31 who are working to improve the life trajectory of children and their families most at risk for poor educational, economic, social and health outcomes. Throughout the 21-month ‘Rising Leaders for Results Fellowship’, grants are awarded to each of the fellows to direct to their respective organizations, launch a project or initiative that has a tangible impact on the communities they serve, or engage in professional development opportunities to enhance their skills. “Every single person in the fellowship, I think there's 14 of us, is a person of color. Working in policy, even though most policy or the bad policy impacts a lot of people of color, that's not who I work with most of the time at least in the legislature. In the capitol building when we're doing the policy work, the room doesn't look like me,” she shared. Connecting with like-minded folks across the country and traveling to various conferences and seminars has opened up Reyes’ outlook on how to advance the critical social justice work she is engaged in while approaching her work with a cultural and trauma-informed lens.?

She sees herself in the youth she centers in her policy which allows her to humanize the issues she hopes to remedy in the carceral system. “I think of why harm reduction is important to me and why I got into this youth justice work and I could have easily been one of these kids. I just wasn't because of certain people,” she shared. She credits the teachers, adults, and her parents who saw her potential and held her accountable to her goals. At TCJE, she aims for the legislature to be more proactive and find more preventative measures that intervene before the carceral system is considered any semblance of a viable option to support and rehabilitate youth. The ‘Finish the 5 Campaign’ has been one of Reyes’ largest tasks since she began as an intern at TCJE, working her way up to her position as director over the past several years. The campaigns’ youth-led coalition prioritizes incorporating the perspectives of young people, families of incarcerated kids, legal experts and advocates to reach their objective of redirecting existing funds pooled in youth jails into various avenues. “Having the lived experiences of people that have been impacted is important because a lot of organizations go to the policy experts and people with the education and all the qualifications and you forget that this issue is actually best communicated by people that have been a part of it,” shared Reyes.

Their docket contains their three target agenda items including the cardinal goal of facility closures, community reinvestment, and the decriminalization of youth. Dissecting these further, the north star of those funds would be diverted to causes such as establishing a new Office of Youth and Community Restoration at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, investments in existing school-based tools like restorative justice, and short-term funding to facilitate the transition of children by judges and juvenile probation departments to non-institutional, non-punitive services. The coalition at TCJE is a formidable one, still striving into the third legislative session staunchly bolstering the campaign since its formation in 2022, to bring their vision of ‘Finishing the 5’ by 2030.?

Reyes views TCJE as a prominent force in meeting their overall aim as an organization to end mass incarceration, uniquely positioning themselves as a space where all have a voice and a perceptible influence on the system. On the significance of the work, Reyes shared, “I want to be that person that encourages youth to know, you're more than your circumstance, you did this, and you deserve this and that. And so I think for me, I am very passionate, obviously, about the work that I do, because it is personal for sure.”?

You can learn more about TCJE at texascje.org and read about the ‘Finish the 5’ Campaign here.?

Support TCJE’s mission to end mass incarceration by donating here.?