Where do you begin? Well, for starters, the agency expanded way too fast in the early 1990’s. Prisons were built in small towns, that didn’t have a large population base to draw from. We essentially flushed the toilet and sent all of our problem inmates to the new units, that had a lot of brand new officers and inexperienced supervisors. Word quickly spread among the townsfolk, that TDC was a cluster. In a small town, word travels. People know each other. They talk about how they were treated when they worked for TDC. Today you could open a unit in a major city and you couldn’t hire enough people to staff it. Everyone knows about our problems.
Another HUGE mistake was dissolving TDC and creating TDCJ. That was in 1989 or 1990, if my memory serves me correctly. There is too much under one roof. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. You have people in positions of authority that have NEVER worn a uniform, been a shift lieutenant, or anything else of that nature. That makes as much sense as going to your mechanic for a root canal.
Today, you have a lot of inmate rights activists, that are in administration. They are very weak, inept and incompetent The level they are willing to stoop to, in order to appease an inmate’s baby mama, is impossible to wrap your head around. The attitude is one of tolerance and permissiveness. That’s never a good thing, whether you are an executive director, a warden, a correctional officer, a parent or a high school principal.
From there things just spiraled out of control. This agency has so many problems that it would take Devine intervention to fix it. The ship has sailed. To be honest, I don’t know how to fix it. We hit the point of no return, at least 20 years ago. Probably longer than that.
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