Texas’ juvenile prison system is nearing total collapse.
Its five lockups are dangerously understaffed, an ongoing problem that worsened dramatically last year when its turnover rate hit more than 70%. The state has desperately tried to recruit employees, but most new hires are gone within six months.
Teachers and caseworkers routinely work in security roles so the prisons’ nearly 600 youth can get out of their cells to go to the bathroom or take showers. Still, children have reported being left to use water bottles as makeshift toilets.
On weekends, youth are often locked alone in cramped cells with only a mounted bookshelf and a thin mattress on a concrete block for up to 23 hours a day. The lucky ones have a small window to the outside.
The agency has largely stopped accepting newly sentenced teenagers from crowded county detention centers, fearing it can’t even protect the children already in its care.
And more and more, children are hurting themselves — sometimes severely — out of distress or as a way to get attention in their isolation. Nearly half of those locked in the state’s juvenile prisons this year have been on suicide watch.
The emergency is the predictable result of a state agency that has been entrenched in crisis for more than a decade. The Texas Juvenile Justice Department is under federal investigation for an alleged pattern of mistreatment and abuse, and it has gone through several iterations of major and moderate reform following scandals marked by sexual abuse and violence, including a full restructuring in 2011.
But the agency has never escaped its problem of chronic understaffing, exacerbating systemic failures and spurring a vicious cycle of worsening conditions for imprisoned children, as well as more difficult work and longer hours for the staff that remains. The agency consistently loses detention officers at a faster rate than any other position in Texas government, outpacing other hard-to-fill jobs like adult prison officers and caseworkers for Child Protective Services.
Look at the two pictures above: Both pictures depict the same thing; the burning of books. One was taken in Nazi Germany in 1933, the other was taken earlier this year in Tennessee, USA. Which one is which? Ok, the colour gives it away, but apart from that, these two images are eerily similar. Is history repeating itself?
In 1933, the books that were burned are now considered classics of German literature from famous authors such as Heinrich Mann and the children’s book author Erich Kästner. In addition to the obvious anti-Jewish sentiment, there was a fear among the far right that they were being attacked by the ideas of left-wing academics: “The state has been conquered! But not yet the universities! The intellectual paramilitaries are coming in. Raise your flags!”
In last week’s book burning, J. K. Rowling’s children’s book Harry Potter was given to the flames, along with Twilight and many other books. But it doesn’t stop there: A few weeks earlier, a Tennessee school board voted to remove Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel Maus from its district. The novel depicts Jews and mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs, and recounts the experience of Spiegelman’s parents in the Holocaust and it really makes one think. It’s an excellent book. The reason for its removal was that it was too disturbing – I wonder what’s wrong with a book about the Holocaust being disturbing? If a book about the Holocaust was not disturbing, I would find that problematic. As the book’s author Art Spiegelman says: “This is disturbing imagery. But you know what? It’s disturbing history.”
History should be disturbing, because it’s filled with horrors that we need to learn about. If history makes us all warm, fuzzy and proud inside, then we’re probably consuming propaganda, not history. By removing any potential for discomfort from our children’s history education, we are doing them a disservice. The way we build a better world is to critically and honestly examine the past to learn from it.
y’all better hype this up because this is BIG and is evidence that the berlin patient wasn’t a fluke, and this could revolutionize medicine (there’s already cases of cancers where methods similar to these have worked), and while you’re at it, please join a bone marrow registry!! (especially poc bc these therapies usually only have been done on white patients due to genetic similarities, and the more poc we get in registries the more access poc patients can have to this for cancers, SSS, etc)
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
