Ector County is expected to go out to bid soon on its new $25 million youth center and Juvenile Probation Director Kevin Mann and his staff are thrilled about the opportunities the new facility will afford troubled youth.
When the existing detention center was built on East Yukon Road in 1974, it was built with runaways and curfew scofflaws in mind, not the children of today who are often dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues and accused of serious crimes, Mann said.
The new facility on U.S. 385 will not only address practical issues that arise every day in the current building, but it will give staff and stakeholders a better chance at rehabilitating the kids, too, Mann said.
Over the last five years, an average of roughly 260 kids per year have spent time in the youth center waiting for their cases to be resolved, county statistics show. From 2017 through 2020, another 35 kids per year spent time in the center as part of their sentence or after having violated their probation.
Court statistics show the kids usually spent anywhere from three weeks up to four months in the 48-bed facility.
Because of the way the facility is laid out and its size, staff often runs into problems keeping kids separated from each other, Mann and his staff said. Ideally, the kids should be separated not only in terms of gender, but by what type of crime they are accused of committing and by their age.
Kids accused of sex crimes or violent crimes should be kept away from other kids and children with mental health issues should also be held in a different area, they said.
Although the kids have separate cells, they are located along two hallways, each of which are attached to a day room. Also attached to the day rooms are classrooms where teachers from the Ector County Independent School District hold classes. As a result, kids who ought to be kept separate often end up encountering each other.
The layout also creates security and privacy issues at the current facility, they said. Their maximum security cells are located next to an exit and a dayroom. Children being booked into the facility can be seen by visiting parents and other kids.
In addition, the probation officers’ offices and the courtroom are within feet of the detention center.
“We’ve had kids in those rooms, banging, screaming while courts going on, and you have parents up front with attorneys,” Facility Administrator Albert Aguirre said. “Kevin can hear those kids all the way to his office. So just imagine the chaos that arises.”
Those same kids often make it difficult for church services and counseling sessions to be held or for a community stakeholder like the Rev. Dawn Weaks of Connection Christian Church to schedule a special activity or event, Mann said.
In terms of aesthetics, the facility looks like a jail with low ceilings, institutional colors and little natural light, Aguirre said. The kids have a large gymnasium, but they only have occasional access to a small, secure outdoor courtyard.
The new facility’s design will address all of these issues, but more importantly it will also give the department the ability to provide rehabilitative programs to the kids, Mann said.
The new facility will increase to 64 beds, have a multi-purpose room, gymnasium and a vocational building. It will also double the number of dayrooms, have a library and multiple courtyards with space for a garden.
The multipurpose room will allow community stakeholders to come into the facility and expose the kids to all sorts of things they’ve never seen before so they know “there’s more to life than running around on the streets,” Mann said.
Mann remembers years ago taking a probationer to a doctor and stopping at a restaurant on the way back. The teenager had never seen a menu before and had no idea how to order a meal. He wants to be able to teach kids in detention and on probation basic life skills and the multipurpose room will allow them to do that.
“Every kid thinks ‘Oh, when I get out I’m gonna go buy a house. I’m gonna go buy a car, but they don’t understand there’s this financial part of it,” Mann said. “There are a lot of opportunities. It’s just getting there. It’s been a long road but we’re getting closer so hopefully the building will start soon and we’ll go from there.”
Maria Sosa, assistant probation director, said she knows there are people in the community just waiting for the day they can help out at the new facility.
“We’ve had people come up here and offer their time, but the second they see the back, they’re like, ‘Whenever you get your new building, call us back and we’re more than happy to help you guys,’” she said. “Some people just don’t feel safe back there because of the way we have the layout.”
Sosa is just as excited about the vocational building as she is the multi-purpose room.
“We love the idea of being able to focus and try to help with services. You know, whether it’s plumbing or wood work or whatever is out there. We like the idea of being able to offer those services to our kids,” Sosa said. “School is not a strong suit for some of our juveniles. So, we want to be able to show them a trade and, you know, hopefully, they can practice that trade whenever they move into their adult lives.”
The building could also be used for both the kids who are in the detention facility and those who are on probation out in the community, Sosa said.
The county will also be able to once again house kids who are currently being shipped outside the county to serve their time, Mann said. In October 2020, the county began sending kids who were adjudicated delinquent or violated their probation to other counties to serve their time.
Right now it costs the county $197 per inmate per day to send those kids out of the county, he said.
Once the new facility is open, those kids will be able to stay in Ector County and their families will be able to visit them more readily, Sosa said. In addition, the county will also be able to bring back an aftercare program for those same kids to help them transition back into the community.
Mann said the county may also be able to offer open beds to other counties who are also having to ship their kids hundreds of miles away.
The whole purpose of a juvenile criminal justice system is rehabilitation, not punishment, Mann said.
“It’s keeping them in the shallow end. We say that all the time. You can’t put a kid in a room and lock them up and think that kid’s gonna get any better,” Mann said. “The kids that are detained here, we keep them out of their room and we try to provide as much programming as we can. If you put them in there and ignore them, you’re not doing anything, you’re keeping them off the street, but when they get out of here, I mean, what have they learned? They’re gonna go back to those same behaviors.”
Mann, whose department consists of eight probation officers and 17 supervision officers, said they work extraordinarily hard to help the county’s kids avoid the adult criminal justice system.
Over the last five years, the county has allowed roughly 120 kids a year avoid being entered into the system through a deferred prosecution program, statistics show. If first-time offenders and kids accused of minor crimes perform certain tasks and don’t re-offend within a specific time period, the charges against them are dropped.
Court stats show that over the last five years, the probation department supervises an average of 51 kids on regulation probation. In an average year, eight kids are on a more stringent form of probation.
The probation department cares about whole families, not just children, though, Mann said.
“It’s not just this umbrella approach, ‘Oh well, we’re just going to work on the kid.’ You have to involve the family in everything we do…We’re not only working with a kid, but we’ll take the parent for job interviews, or we’ll take them to counseling or we’ll provide stuff they need in the home.”
It’s not at all unusual for his officers to help out with shoes and blankets or to refer families to social services, he said.
“It’s not only ‘Hey, follow these rules,’ it’s ‘Hey, we want to give you all the skills to help your family out so you’ll be better citizens’ because these kids aren’t going anywhere,” Mann said. “They’re not moving off. These families have their roots here and they’re going to stay in this community and do we want to work with them now as they’re juveniles or let the adult system deal with them later?”
