Politics

(AP) Three monitors whom the Texas Youth Commission fired after finding squalid living conditions at a West Texas juvenile prison had worked previously for the company that ran the prison, according to a published report.

The TYC closed the Coke County Juvenile Center in Bronte last week and moved its nearly 200 male inmates to other juvenile prisons in the state. The commission began a criminal investigation of the operations, and the state canceled its $8 million-a-year contract with The GEO Group Inc., which had operated the prison since 1994.

A TYC ombudsman's reported noted dirty bed sheets, feces-smeared cells, insects in the food and instances of inmates being placed in solitary confinement for five weeks.

Job applications by two quality-assurance monitors showed they were hired at the juvenile center directly from caseworker positions with GEO, The Dallas Morning News reported in its Friday editions. Records also showed the monitoring unit's supervisor had worked briefly for GEO at the Coke County facility four years before joining TYC, the newspaper reported. A clerk who was fired also had worked previously for GEO.

Executives were unaware of the workers' ties with the prison operator before the newspaper requested their records under state open records law, TYC spokesman Jim Hurley said. The employment history raises questions about whether the monitors had been objective in evaluating the prison, he said.

"How do you monitor the monitors?" Hurley said. "We need a very good answer to that."

TYC had named the Coke County facility its contract facility of the year twice.

State Sen. John Whitmire, whose Senate Criminal Justice Committee is scheduled to conduct a hearing Friday in Austin about GEO's Texas operations, was angered by news of the past employment.

"I think it's outrageous," the Houston Democrat said. "It just confirms what many of us suspected that there was too close a relationship between the TYC employees and GEO employees."

He said the committee also wanted answers from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and county jail and juvenile probation officials about their own monitoring of private corrections companies.

TYC officials fired seven workers last week after touring the Coke County facility. Four of the seven were monitors and two were contract care supervisors at the district office in Fort Worth. The TYC also ordered a systemwide inspection review of its contract-care operation.

The newspaper said its review of personnel records showed TYC employs more than 40 quality assurance specialists and supervisors. Some are based at the facilities they monitor.

Valerie Jones, the former supervisor of the monitoring unit, worked for GEO as a chemical dependency counselor from October 1995 to July 1996. She joined the TYC staff in 2000. She declined to comment to the newspaper.

Brian Lutz and David Robertson went directly from GEO to TYC, each making more money at TYC, the newspaper reported. Robertson declined to be interviewed. Lutz could not be located, the newspaper reported.

Patti Frazee, a clerk who worked for GEO before being hired by TYC, told the newspaper that officials never questioned her previous employment.

"There were not very many jobs out here," she said. "Any time you could take a state job, it was a better job for everybody because it paid more money. That's the only reason. It was like a step up from GEO. That's the way everybody viewed it."

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