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Sins of commission: we should absolutely find out who knew what when and why nothing was done sooner. But the real scandal at the state's juvenile lockups is how little we learned thirty years ago, the last time the system failed us.

Article Excerpt
IT BEGAN WITH A WORD ONLY a child would use--"icky"--uttered in a place where innocence was commonly assumed to be dead. A conversation between a tormented teenager and a volunteer math tutor about sexual abuse at a high-security lockup in Pyote, about fifty miles west of Odessa, set in motion a chain of events that has led to the downfall of the executive director of the Texas Youth Commission (the state agency responsible for juvenile corrections), the ousting of its board, the dispatching of police to every juvenile facility in the state, and an opening for the kind of corrections reform not seen since federal judge William Wayne Justice assumed control of the state prison system in the eighties. In the wake of the scandal, conventional wisdom about our obligation to delinquent youth has moved a long way in a very short period of time. "They are criminals," one agency supervisor told a reporter shortly after the story broke in February. "They are not children, as you keep calling them. They have survived in this world by learning how to manipulate and using it to their advantage." Two weeks later, after the real story of what had happened at Pyote had become impossible to deny, a rural East Texas legislator named Jim McReynolds was almost in tears. "They're God's children," he told a packed hearing room at the Capitol. "1 read last night till I wanted to vomit."

What McReynolds and other legislators had been reading was a confidential Texas Rangers report describing, in stomach-turning detail, a year's worth of alleged sexual abuse of multiple victims ranging in age from seventeen to twenty by two top officials at the West Texas State School, in Pyote. Ranger Brian Burzynski began his investigation in February 2005 after receiving a tip from the tutor, Marc Slattery. Burzynski completed his report a month later, but neither man was ever prosecuted. As a result, the details of the investigation were not made public until February 16 of this year, when I published a story on the long-hidden scandal on the Web site of the Texas Observer. Burzynski had discovered that the assistant superintendent at Pyote, Ray Brookins, was allegedly pulling inmates (or students, as they are called) out of the dorms at night and molesting them in his office. In his staff housing residence, adjacent to the facility, 41-year-old Brookins had an enormous cache of pornographic tapes and DVDs and sex toys, which he often brought to his office for his late-night activities. Investigators found semen stains all over his office: on the carpet, on the walls, on the furniture. Brookins's power over the young men he allegedly victimized stemmed from his control over their length of stay at the facility. "You...

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