Most of the news articles on TYC abuse have centered around the guards being the abusers, and the inmates being the victims.
Now this AP story suggests that there is a lot of the reverse. In fact, TYC detention center guards are four times more likely than their counterparts at Texas’s adult prisons to file work-injury claims.
As even “juvenile” inmates aren’t that less physically impressive or able than adult prisoners, and at that, juvenile lockups in Texas may and does hold persons between the ages of 17 and 21, if the person committed a crime as a under-17 juvenile, was tried and convicted as a juvenile, and the statutory sentence and/or juvenile court judge’s punishment ordains that the youth should be jailed at TYC lockup through his 21st year of life, my theory about why the juveniles’ guards are far more likely to get hurt than the adults’ guards is that the juveniles’ guards have more restrictive regulations and ROE on what level of force they are allowed to use on their inmates. This is in spite of the fact that, at least for those aged 17-21, they’re the same age and stature as many of Texas’s adult prisoners.
This means that the incarcerated “juveniles,” (some of them being legal adults), themselves over self-esteemed in both regular classrooms and prison classrooms, understand this, and attempt to get away with, and do get away with, far more assaults and abuse toward their guards than adult prisoners.
With this having been said, I can understand why the occasional hothead guard at a juvenile lockup will go “over the line.” Sometimes, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
