Sick Kids

A girl on Corsicana's main campus set a record for trying to kill herself this year by tying 100 things around her neck. Brantley didn't move her to the stabilization unit because, he says, her behavior was clearly manipulative. "She's choosing to do this, it's her way of having power or control," he says. "She'd find this so comfortable we wouldn't be able to get her back out."

Inside the stabilization unit girls wearing orange jumpsuits, white socks and flip-flops sit at individual desks glaring at one another. "These kids would be in a state hospital if they weren't in TYC," Brantley says. Mattresses and blankets are removed from the cells each morning, leaving solid blue blocks bolted to the floor. The window on the bathroom door has been covered, but a peephole was drilled because girls have a tendency to tie bras and panties around their necks, Brantley says.

"They can be really resourceful," adds the assistant superintendent, Lynda Smith.

Down the dusty road is the security unit where students with severe behavior problems, versus emotional issues, come to "cool off" anywhere from 24 hours to 90 days. "Some kids, you need to separate them out," Brantley says. "They just can't function."

The security unit is usually filled with mostly girls. "They tend to be more emotional and take a little longer to calm down," Brantley says. The observation rooms have larger windows than standard cells so guards can make sure kids don't try to drown themselves in the toilet or stuff clothes down the commode to flood the room.

Outside the administrative building, girls in blue shorts play softball, boys shoot hoops, and a gentle breeze blows through the gazebo.

"Frankly," Brantley says, "a lot of kids don't want to leave. They deliberately won't get better because they don't want to leave. They sabotage their chance for release."

"Jamal," a lanky boy from southeast Houston, has been at Crockett for 28 months. He lived in the Fifth Ward with his grandmother, a retired nurse, his mother, an elementary school cafeteria cook, and his uncles, police officers for HPD and Metro. "They were at work most of the time," he says.

When he was 12, Jamal started hanging out with the boys in the neighborhood playing football, basketball and smoking dope. Soon he was selling marijuana and crack.

He was first arrested for "testing" his .25 caliber gun by firing it out the window of a moving car. Buying another gun, he violated his probation and was sent to boot camp; he was rearrested for both dealing and making crack.

Jamal insists that he's not certified as emotional disturbed. "I'm stable," he says. "I'm just waiting to go home." He says it's "nerve-racking" to live in a dorm filled with crazy kids and he tries not to have "problem people" in his room. He talks about how he wants to go to Texas Southern University and someday own a McDonald's franchise.

The staff psychologist insists that Jamal is clinically depressed and has been for a long time. He's better than he used to be -- he doesn't need medication anymore -- but the therapist says Jamal is still classified as disturbed because he continues to make "thinking errors" and has difficulty with reality.

Past the Trinity River, Rattlesnake Ranch and acres of cows, corn and cotton sits the Crockett State School. Across the street is Crockett High School; the only obvious difference between the brick buildings is that the TYC institution is surrounded by a 12-foot chain-link fence.

The green-roofed buildings sit on a gentle hill covered in pine and pear trees; over-ripe fruit litters the dry, dead grass. Dorms are named "New Hope," "Courage," "Challenge," "Success," "Opportunity," "Discovery" and "Freedom." Coils of barbed wire top the schoolhouse, so boys won't have to be chased off the roof like Wiffle balls.

In the 1950s the school was an orphanage for unwanted African-American girls. "People could drop their kids off," says the chaplain, Bill Phillips. "Like abandoning a puppy." TYC started sending mentally ill kids here about five years ago because Corsicana was overflowing, says Brantley, who was then the director of clinical services at Crockett. Brantley says Crockett's single-bedroom dormitories with added privacy are conducive to treatment. "To function well in a setting like that, you have to have a certain amount of psychological stamina because you can't get away from people," Brantley says. "You have to have really good boundaries. Sometimes just walls and doors help."

Crockett houses 264 male juvenile delinquents, and more than half are from Houston. About 145 beds are reserved for kids classified as emotionally disturbed, which costs about $157 per day. "We run over always," says Blu Nicholson, the assistant superintendent and the former program administrator at Corsicana. There are also 24 beds for offenders with chemical dependencies, and the remaining 96 spots are reserved for the "general offender" population.