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Will to power: how is a ponytailed former aclu executive reforming the troubled Texas youth commission? By helping one inmate at a time.

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Will Harrell entered the grounds of the Giddings State School, a high-security youth lockup in Central Texas, and immediately drove off-road, steering his shiny black Jeep along the facility's fenced perimeter. When he reached a spot behind the athletic fields with a panoramic view, he grabbed a pair of binoculars from the dash and began scanning the grounds, which at that hour--about one in the afternoon on a crisp, sunny October day--seemed mostly deserted. "Just trying to get a sense, brother," he told me. [paragraph] Harrell, a barrel-chested 41-year-old with a black ponytail, became the first-ever independent ombudsman for the Texas Youth Commission in the wake of last spring's sexual abuse scandal, which began when news reports revealed that two high-ranking officials at a facility in West Texas had been caught molesting students but had never been prosecuted. A cascade of allegations of assaults and neglect at other units followed, until Governor Rick Perry was forced to take drastic action, placing the agency in conservator-ship mid removing the entire board of directors. In the months that followed, nearly all the agency's top officials were forced out. [paragraph] The speed at which the TYC imploded was head-spinning. Yet Harrell's appointment as ombudsman has been perhaps the most unexpected result of the crisis. As the head of the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for the preceding seven years, Harrell had developed a reputation as the most effective voice for criminal justice reform in Texas. From the governor's perspective, that meant Harrell had more often than not been a source of criticism, on everything from Perry's prosecution of the drug war to his decisions on clemency applications from death-row inmates.

Harrell's impact at the TYG has been immediate and impressive. In his first three months on the job, he made unannounced visits to all thirteen lockups and nine half-way houses across the state and presented his findings to TYC administrators and a special legislative oversight committee. After his internal report about intolerable...

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