The Caretaker - one mother's crusade against the system that failed her son

The Caretaker

One mother's crusade to better the life of her mentally retarded son and the system that failed him

By Jesse Hyde

Published on July 31, 2008

Farhat Chishty pushes her son's wheelchair into the shade of an oak tree and sits down with a sigh. It's a calm spring morning at Denton State School, the largest institution for people with mental retardation in Texas, and she has come for her morning visit. She puts a knit cap on her son's head and adjusts a blanket over his bony knees. A gentle gust of wind blows across campus.

• Mark Graham

  

  Since her son Haseeb's attack six years ago, Farhat Chishty has visited him nearly every day at Denton State School.

• Mark Graham

  

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

Spread out over 200 acres of wooded, rolling hills, the school has the bucolic feel of a summer camp. It has been described as a place of systematic abuse and torture—an Abu Ghraib for the retarded—but it hardly seems that way this morning. Not far from the park bench where she sits, a man in a wheelchair is motoring around the leafy campus, headed perhaps to the chapel or the Wooden Nickel restaurant to get an ice cream cone. This is a school in name only. The median age of its 630 residents is 49. The only thing they have in common is the need for around-the-clock supervision. Some have Down syndrome, some are autistic, and some lack the ability to walk or talk. Chishty's son falls in the latter category.

Every day she comes here to be with him—to wash his wiry hair and clip his yellowed nails and rub his calloused feet. The boy has no control over his body. His head rolls from side to side, his eyes dart from one thing to the other, and drool pools out of his mouth. His name is Haseeb, and he is 34.

He wasn't always like this. For most of his life, he has been profoundly mentally retarded, but there was a time when he could sing and dance and communicate with his mother in broken English and Urdu. There was a time when he ate cheeseburgers with his family and bopped his head to his brother's hip-hop. And then something happened.

Six years ago, not far from where Chishty sits, a nurse's aide found Haseeb in bed, soaking in his own blood and urine. No one at the school could explain what happened. For six months he lay in intensive care, suffering from massive internal injuries that triggered toxic shock and then paralysis. His mother insisted someone at the school was to blame—she had seen a bruise in the shape of a footprint near his groin on the morning they found him. But no one had reported any abuse, so her claims went ignored.

For two-and-a-half years, she told this story to anyone who would listen, and then the unexpected happened. Kevin Miller, a former caregiver at the school, admitted he had abused Haseeb in a drug-induced rage, punching and kicking him more than a dozen times. He said his supervisors knew about the attack and helped him cover it up. Even more alarming, he said abuse at the school was rampant. He knew his confession, which he first offered at a drug rehab clinic in Houston, might send him to prison, but he felt it was worth the risk if it sparked reforms.

More than three years have passed since then, and none of the changes Miller envisioned have taken place. Yet largely thanks to Chishty's efforts, her son has become the face of a movement. For the first time in nearly a decade, advocacy groups for the mentally retarded are pushing for the closure of the 13 state schools in Texas. These facilities, which house nearly 5,000 people, represent the largest institutionalization of mentally retarded in the nation, at a cost to taxpayers of $465 million last year. The alternative—smaller, community-based group homes—are cheaper, safer and more humane, mental health rights advocates say. The trend across the country is toward this model of care, and other states, including California and New York, have either shuttered their institutions or are in the process of doing so.

Jeff Garrison-Tate, who heads Community Now, an Austin-based advocacy group, cites the Chishty tragedy as a defining example of why Texas should close all its state schools. "Haseeb is the tip of the iceberg," he says. "By their very nature, these are places where abuse is rife to occur."

While officials with the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Services—the state agency charged with overseeing state schools—says Haseeb's case represents an isolated incident, the agency's own records paint a different picture. In April, the Associated Press reported that in the last three years, more than 800 state school employees have been fired for causing serious injury to residents. That followed a July 2007 review of records by The Dallas Morning News and the Houston Chronicle that found disturbing cases of abuse and neglect statewide. Most devastating, however, was an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, which in 2006 documented neglect, cover-up and 17 deaths in 18 months at the Lubbock State School.

The Dallas Observer's own review of more than 800 pages of disciplinary records covering 11 state schools over the last five years reveals a widespread pattern of abuse and neglect throughout the system. These records are littered with incidents of staffers choking, punching and whipping clients. They also indicate that staffers often say injuries to residents, which they caused, were self-inflicted or the result of accidents; threats and intimidation of residents were tactics regularly employed by staff to ensure their abuse went unreported.

• 

  Haseeb was born in Saudi Arabia in 1973.

• 

  At 10 months he contracted pneumonia and the complications of the disease resulted in permanent brain damage.

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

The Observer also spoke with nearly a dozen former and current employees at the Denton State School. These workers—nurses, direct-care aides, investigators and others—have never before spoken to the press, worried that doing so would cost them their jobs. They are speaking now because they say they are overburdened and near the breaking point, often being asked to work back-to-back shifts. Turnover at Denton State School for starting positions, according to the Texas State Employees Union, is an astronomical 65 percent. The reasons are obvious: low pay, a largely unskilled staff and an increasingly dangerous patient population. Says one employee, "No one really trains you in how to deal with a person who comes up to you and says, 'The devil wants me to kill you.' "

None of this surprises Farhat Chishty. For the last six years she has been a constant presence at the Denton State School. She passes between the buildings, almost ghostlike, pushing her son's heavy wheelchair along the shaded walkways. Her eyes are black, ringed in shadows; her cheeks are sunken and hollow. She walks hunched over, as if she is carrying a thousand sorrows. There is something spectral about her presence, as if she has come to haunt the place.

While most staff steers clear of her, others feed her information. They slip notes into her car, or call after hours to report abuse they have seen. Thanks in part to her efforts—she is a fixture at public hearings regarding state schools—the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department is investigating the school.

What she has found, she says, is worse than anyone knows. "It's not one person. It's the system. They think I'm evil for being here, but the system is evil. They can't admit that because if they do, they admit that the system is wrong."

————

It's a warm Sunday afternoon in April, and Chishty is at her small Richardson home after a morning visit to Denton State School. She sits in the shadows of her front room with her shoes off, her bare feet curled up beneath her. Much of her youthful beauty—her high cheekbones, her striking dark eyes—is still present in her face, an indication of the resolve she has shown over the last six years in her battles with the state.

Two of her sons—handsome young men with college degrees—are also here, as is her daughter, who through this ordeal has become her closest confidant. They catch up on jobs and kids and Haseeb, and then Farhat disappears for a moment and comes back with a box full of pictures. Here is Haseeb as a boy in Iran, wearing a lavender vest of velvet. Here is Haseeb and his brother Saad, clowning for the camera. Here is Haseeb at Denton State School, a week before the attack. He is standing against a picnic bench, his face toward the sun. He looks unhappy, agitated.

The oldest of her four children, Haseeb was born in Saudi Arabia in 1973. At 10 months, on a trip to Pakistan, he contracted pneumonia, and the complications of the disease, which nearly killed him, caused permanent damage to his brain. After that, he never functioned like other children.

They had never wanted to put him in an institution, Farhat says. And in 1990, when his family moved to Norman, Oklahoma, Haseeb began taking special education classes. But at 21, state law said he could no longer go to school. The loss of structure and meaningful activities was difficult for him, and he often grew bored at home. "He would just get up and walk outside, go in the street," she says. "On more than one occasion I had to call the police. I didn't know where he was."

Because the family couldn't afford to keep him at home with a full-time caregiver, they placed Haseeb in a state-run facility five minutes from their Norman home. It seemed like a good fit. She visited him nightly, and on weekends he came home.

But in 1995, after the state of Oklahoma consolidated its mental health and mental retardation services, Haseeb was moved to a facility three hours away, and his mother began looking for a new place for him to live. She eventually settled on Denton State School, which at the time was the highest-rated public institution in Texas for people with mental retardation. After visiting the campus, she felt reassured. Haseeb's apartment would be as nice as anything she would find in the private sector. The apartment was his home, she was told; the school wasn't an institution, it was a community.

• Mark Graham

  

  Randy Spence is the new superintendent at Denton State School. He has previously held management positions at two other state schools, in Lufkin and Abilene.

• Mark Graham

  

  Denton State School

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

She saw residents freely roaming the sidewalks. Others were on their way to work in one of the school factories. Some were headed to the gym, which featured basketball courts and a swimming pool. The school's medical equipment appeared state-of-the-art; the school even had an on-site wheelchair factory. It reassured her that the school went to such lengths to ensure its residents were not only cared for, but comfortable.

Chishty, who at the time was pursuing a second bachelor's degree at the University of Central Oklahoma, took a three-month leave of absence from work and moved in with her daughter in McKinney to help Haseeb settle in. She visited him every day, staying until the staff asked her to leave at night, often bringing him his favorite Middle Eastern food.

There were some things about the school that worried her. Like the time she found a resident wandering along Interstate 35, not far from the campus. But she decided not to say anything. If she expected top-notch care—and she did—she needed to be on good terms with the staff.

On the morning of September 26, 2002, she says she phoned Haseeb's apartment to check on him and was told he had not eaten his breakfast. Haseeb could be a picky eater. She suggested the caregiver feed him a banana, but that hadn't worked, she was told. Then in a low voice, the staffer whispered, "Ms. Chishty, it's not good."

By the next morning, Haseeb's heart rate had risen to near critical levels, and his breathing was reduced to a labored pant. No one could explain what had happened.

Recalls Chishty, "When we got to the emergency room [at Denton Community Hospital] the doctor asked me, 'Can you ask him where he hurts, does he speak?' I said, 'Yes, he speaks.'" Haseeb told her his stomach hurt and when the doctor lifted Haseeb's shirt, she saw bruising from his stomach to his groin. "And then I sat down on the floor."

Doctors at the hospital said his injuries were consistent with someone who had suffered a traumatic car accident, but that didn't seem possible. He had only been at the school for four weeks, and during that time his family hadn't heard about any accidents.

For six months Haseeb lay in the ICU, during which time he had three major surgeries. The family pressed school officials for an explanation, but none came.

In January 2003, Chishty got a vaguely worded letter that raised her suspicions. She says the letter said a former employee had admitted to beating a resident. That could have been Haseeb.

She says she expected some kind of an investigation, but nothing happened. School officials would not give her any additional information. She called State Representative Myra Crownover more than a dozen times, asking for help, but was ignored. (Crownover, who represents the district where the school is located, is a staunch supporter of state schools. She told the Observer that she was traveling when Chishty called, but that her director of constituent services met with her. "I didn't want to get involved in a legal matter," Crownover says.)

Chishty says she also called staff at the governor's office and was told there was nothing they could do. Figuring she had no other recourse, she hired Dallas attorney Kelly Reddell, who on September 23, 2004, filed a federal civil rights suit against the school, seeking monetary damages that would cover Haseeb's in-home care for the rest of his life.

What followed could have come from the pages of a John Grisham novel. Reddell hired a private investigator, who tracked down Miller, finding him in California through his unemployment checks. When Miller was served with the suit, he called Reddell and told her he had found Jesus, and said he was ready to come clean. Six months later, he hitchhiked to Dallas and gave Reddell a two-and-a-half-hour videotaped deposition.

For the school, Miller's admissions were damning. He said he had come to the school looking for a purpose in life in August of 2001, but before long he was witnessing abuse. "There was the way we were trained to do things, and there was the way it worked in the real world," he said. "...There were techniques for everyone; different things worked for different people." To keep one resident under control, Miller said, he and other staff members used a large metal serving spoon. Sometimes they tapped it on the floor as a warning, and sometimes they beat the resident on the head with it. "It got to the point where it was fun beating them and hitting them and torturing them."

• Mark Graham

  

  Before being attacked, Haseeb, though profoundly retarded, could communicate in English and Urdu.

• 

  During his six-month stay in intensive care, Haseeb's family members were a near-constant presence at his bedside.

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

He also said he and other staffers regularly used drugs on the job, often slipping into the bathroom to snort cocaine or smoke methamphetamines. His supervisor was not only aware of drug use on the night shift, Miller said, he was also a user who bought painkillers from one of his employees. (The state has denied these charges, and the supervisor has said in a sworn affidavit that he never used drugs on the job or witnessed anyone else doing so. A nurse, who also worked during that time at the building where Haseeb lived, told the Observer none of Miller's claims are true.)

Miller said that once he had been fully "brought in to the fold" he began to see the sorts of abuse from which he had previously been shielded. Now, sitting on a couch stoned with other staffers, he watched as residents "ran into walls." Sometimes, he and his co-workers would throw balls at the residents as they passed by. "Basically what it came down to was systematic torture of residents to get them to change their behavior," Miller said.

Like other residents, Haseeb could be difficult, Miller said. Haseeb sometimes hit, scratched and pulled hair. He often refused to sit down for meals, to eat or to work in one of the school's workshops, according to court records. Occasionally, Haseeb grabbed him around the neck and dug his nails into Miller's skin.

On the evening of September 25, 2002, Haseeb did not want to go to bed. Miller was irritable and angry, coming down off a high. He told Haseeb to go to bed several times, and then, when Haseeb didn't listen, he punched him in the stomach. He had done this before to control Haseeb, and other staffers had done it as well, he said.

"He kept coming up to me, and he kept coming up to me, and I kept punching him, and I kept punching him, and he wouldn't stop," Miller said. "I can't recall how many times."

There was no way Haseeb could ward off the blows. He weighed just 116 pounds, and Miller stood 6-foot-1 and weighed 265 pounds. When he was done, Miller was sweating profusely. He said he shut the door and walked away.

Most damaging to the school was Miller's claim that his supervisors were aware of what he had done and had concocted a story of a seat belt injury, claiming Haseeb had struggled against being restrained during his transportation from his previous residence to Denton State School. "I'm not saying we all huddled up and said, 'This is going to be the story.' It was something management came up with."

With the tape rolling, Miller claimed he wasn't trying to get even with the school but rather hoped to right a wrong. "What happened there goes against every fiber of my being."

The next morning Miller turned himself in. Prosecutors at the Denton County District Attorney's Office charged him with injury to a disabled person, a first-degree felony. On August 11, 2006, Miller was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Despite the confession, the Texas Attorney General's Office, which represented the school in the Chishty suit, maintained that Haseeb's injuries—the perforations to his intestines—were caused by a seat belt injury on the trip from his previous residence to the school. True, Haseeb did not like being restrained, but his mother says she saw him immediately after the trip and didn't notice any injuries.

In April 2007, Reddell and Chishty took their findings to Austin, where each testified before the House Civil Practice Committee. They asked lawmakers to give the Chishty family a waiver from sovereign immunity, a legal defense which can protect the state from civil suits. Marianne Reat, an attorney with the Department of Aging and Disability Services, told the committee that an investigation into the matter had not found any evidence of abuse or neglect.

The House unanimously approved the request, but the Senate never acted on the bill. The lawsuit was dismissed last year after the state successfully defended on grounds of sovereign immunity.

Back in their home, the Chishty family says they still have a hard time believing what happened.

"We took all the avenues we could," says Haseeb's younger brother Saad. "Like any huge, overblown bureaucracy, they are designed to protect the institution instead of the people they serve."

His sister nods and talks about the toll this has taken on their mother. "Every day she is there, she's afraid to leave him alone for half an hour. It's taken over her life."

• 

  On August 11, 2006, former Denton State School employee Kevin Miller pleaded guilty to injuring Haseeb Chishty. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

• Mark Graham

  

  A poster at the Denton State School instructs staff to report incidents of abuse or neglect.

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

Their mother sits slumped on the sofa in their living room, listening. As her children talk, she thumbs through the pictures on her lap, and tears begin to stream down her face. She tells them how guilty she feels for the time she spends at the school. She has lost her job, her car and now her oldest son helps support her financially. She is separated from her husband, who lives in Houston. Still, her deepest regret is that in some way she failed to protect Haseeb.

"The hardest thing for me," she says, recalling the scene of the crime, "is to think of him lying there all night, soaking in his own blood."

————

When Chishty is not at the Denton State School tending to Haseeb, she is often on the road, tending to his cause. Two legislative study groups are investigating the issues surrounding the state schools, and in February she testified in Dallas before one of them. If either committee introduces legislation during the 2009 legislative session, she plans on lobbying lawmakers to ensure they understand her position: that the large, cumbersome state schools are fraught with the potential for abuse and should be shuttered in favor of smaller, community-based facilities.

Her fight is one with a long history, one that began more than 30 years ago when a man named John Lelsz filed a lawsuit on behalf of his son, alleging that Richmond State School near Houston used inhuman methods to control its charges, including the use of cattle prods to administer electric shock therapy. The suit languished in the Dallas federal courts for years until Judge Barefoot Sanders, now retired, forged a settlement in 1991. Two state schools—in Fort Worth and Travis—were shut down as a result. Then-Governor Ann Richards considered closing others, but intense opposition, fueled largely by the Texas State Employees Union, killed the effort.

"It's kind of like closing a military base," says mental health rights advocate Garrison-Tate. "A lot of these places are in more rural areas—Brenham, San Angelo, Abilene—and they are an economic boon of that town."

The Mexia State School, for example, employs one in four residents, adds Cecilia Fedorov, a spokesperson with the Department of Aging and Disability Services. "If you represent one of those districts, and you close down a place like that, you're committing political suicide," Garrison-Tate says.

Although advocacy groups continued their push to get people with cognitive disabilities into community-based facilities, nothing stoked the prospect of change more than the December 2006 report of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the Lubbock State School. "It was more horrific than we ever imagined," says Garrison-Tate.

The 43-page report revealed that the Lubbock school was severely understaffed and was providing its residents an alarmingly low level of care. The report noted that the school had almost no training for medical emergencies and had one full-time psychiatrist, who had a caseload of 180 residents. Some of the observations noted in the report seemed like something straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. On June 5, 2005, for example, a male resident was told he could take a shot from the nurse "the hard way or the easy way." Opting for the hard way, staffers grabbed, choked and threw him to the ground, slamming his face in the floor.

The report sent shockwaves through the Department of Aging and Disabilities. During tough questioning from a state Senate committee last year, DADS commissioner Addie Horn broke down in tears. This was her life's work, she said, and she took great pride in it. The agency did everything it could to identify, prevent and stop abuse, and would continue to do so.

Officials at DADS went on a public relations offensive, asserting that the problems in Lubbock were not occurring elsewhere and, that as the report pointed out, the main problem was funding. But subsequent media reports—in The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News—revealed that conditions were just as bad, and possibly worse, at other state schools.

Perhaps emboldened by these press reports, employees and family members of residents at the Corpus Christi State School visited the offices of state Representatives Solomon Ortiz Jr. and Abel Herrero last fall, telling them their own stories of abuse.

"People would bring pictures, 'Here is my loved one severely bruised. Here is my loved one with a broken arm,'" Ortiz recalls. "And there was no explanation from the school as to how these things had happened."

Then, in May 2007, a resident at Corpus Christi hung herself by her shoelaces, the first suicide at a state school in years. Ortiz says he was told the suicide was due at least in part to staffers who had not made their rounds.

"We started to talk to mid-management-type people, and they started telling us about how understaffed they were, the back-to-back shifts, about the drug use among employees, and that they were seeing a new [criminal] element being sent to state schools: people who were found not mentally competent to stand trial."

• Mark Graham

  

  "Every day she is there, she's afraid to leave him alone for half an hour. It's taken over her life."

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

The Observer's own review of disciplinary records for 11 state schools (Denton and Lubbock were not included because of pending litigation) also supports the view that what happened to Haseeb Chishty was not a unique event. While most of the disciplinary violations the Observer reviewed, for incidents reported from 2002-2007, were for minor rules violations and accidents, dozens more raise serious concerns.

There are also disturbing episodes of exploitation, sometimes sexual, and humiliation. Some mirror the environment Miller said existed at Denton State School. At Abilene State School in the spring and summer of 2006, for example, staffers regularly threw balls at residents as they passed by. The same group of employees also forced a resident to sit while one of their co-workers punched him in the arm, chest and stomach. These abuses went on for six months before any staffers were disciplined, even though their supervisor had been aware of the problems for months.

It is hard to reconcile these reports with what one sees touring Denton State School. During a recent visit, the facility appeared clean, the staff cheerful. "It really is a community here," says recently appointed Denton State School superintendent Randy Spence, who has held management positions at other state schools. "I never would have stayed for 29 years in a situation where what's been portrayed in the media is the truth. It's very hard to read things and know they just aren't true."

Still, employees say there are problems that must be addressed. Because starting pay for an entry-level job as a direct-care aide is a relatively low $1,522 a month, roughly $9 an hour, finding applicants with relevant work experience is difficult. The only requirement for the job is a high school diploma.

It's a stressful job, and over the years it has only become more difficult. Thanks to advances in medical science, residents in state care facilities are living longer, which brings a whole set of new problems. "It means more medications, more shots, more room for medical error," one nurse says. The population has also become more dangerous. As Texas has cut overall funding for mental health, state schools have been asked to pick up the slack and have seen a steady increase in the number of residents with the dual diagnosis of mental retardation and mental illness.

In places such as Corpus Christi and San Angelo, state schools also take court referrals, meaning part of their populations are now accused criminals.

Because of high turnover—2,138 state school employees quit last year—experienced staff are stretched thin while new workers must manage a situation that is often chaotic and frequently dangerous. As a result, staffers say that accidents happen and occasionally tempers flare. "Most of the people I work with are compassionate and really care about their jobs," another employee says. "But we do have people not cut out for the job, and sometimes bad things happen."

DADS spokesperson Fedorov argues that state schools are open to visitors 24 hours a day, making rampant and systematic abuse nearly impossible. She says that while abuse allegations are high—investigators have confirmed 1,266 instances of abuse system-wide in the last three years—that does not tell the full story. Ninety-one percent of all abuse allegations come back unconfirmed.

The future of state schools now lies in the hands of the state Legislature. Over the past year, a mostly Democratic legislative study group, led by Representatives Ortiz and Herrero of Corpus Christi and Garnet Coleman of Houston, has held hearings in Corpus Christi and Dallas, and plans to hold more. They expect to issue a report in November.

A second legislative committee appointed by House Speaker Tom Craddick has also hosted a hearing in Austin and plans to release a report before the start of the 2009 legislative session. The chairman of this committee, State Representative Larry Phillips of Sherman, believes that reports of abuse and neglect have been exaggerated in the press. What has been lost, he says, is the number of people who are pleased with the facilities.

"You hear from families who say, 'I don't think my loved one would be able to make it if it weren't for state schools,'" Phillips says. "And then you hear from those who say it should all be closed. It's very difficult when you have two sides who are very adamant about things."

As far as community-based facilities are concerned, Phillips says, "There will always be abuse in the alternative as well. You can't say that just doing away with this parameter, you're going to do away with abuse."

Fedorov maintains that when residents capable of existing outside state school facilities request to leave, they are allowed to do so, provided there is space for them in state-run group homes. Since 2005, there has been a steady increase in the number of state school residents transferred to these facilities, from 76 in 2005 to 97 in 2006 to 118 last year. Already this year, 144 state school residents have gone into the community.

• Mark Graham

  

  Since her son Haseeb's attack six years ago, Farhat Chishty has visited him nearly every day at Denton State School.

• Mark Graham

  

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

But Garrison-Tate says this is far from enough. He points to a July state audit report that said of the 644 residents at state schools who asked to leave in fiscal year 2007, 449—or 70 percent—were denied. Each state school has an interdisciplinary team—made up of a psychologist, a nurse, a guardian and others—that decides which residents are allowed to leave.

"There's an inherent conflict of interest when the people deciding whether you can leave are those whose livelihood depends on the continued existence of these facilities," Garrison-Tate says. "We would love to see the state close these facilities down, as other states have done, and move to community-based care. That's the trend across the country, but we know it can't happen today, or tomorrow. So what we want to see is a right-sizing. How many of these [schools] do we actually need to have? The people who want to get out should be able to leave, and we shouldn't put any more people in."

So far, the legislative response has been to increase funding for additional employees. In the 2007 session, the Legislature appropriated $49 million for state schools to hire an additional 1,700 employees. While DADS officials say the money has already had an impact, Denton State School employees say they aren't seeing much of a difference. The quality of training is going down, says one staffer, and new workers are often thrown into situations they aren't ready for.

Representative Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, says things must change. "For too long the answer has been to ignore these problems and to act like they don't exist, and we've done nothing," he says. "Well, doing nothing has got to stop. These are our most vulnerable citizens. It's a measure of our worth as a government, and as a society, how we take care of them."

Just how well the Denton State School takes care of its residents is somewhat obscured by DADS' refusal to provide relevant documents related to the facility, citing pending litigation.

But Chishty says what she has found suggests the school is just as bad, if not worse, than other facilities in the system. Over the last year, Chishty says she has uncovered several mysterious deaths at the school. One involved Manuel Lopez, a 17-year resident of the school who died in January. His family members told the Observer that they regularly saw bruises on his legs and face. Now they wonder if what they were told was an accident that caused permanent paralysis more than 13 years ago was actually the result of abuse. The family says the state has refused to release an autopsy report, and DADS declined the Observer's request for the same report, citing confidentiality concerns. The Texas State Attorney General is currently reviewing that decision.

While Chishty refuses to reveal what role she has played in the pending U.S. Justice Department investigation of the school, she had advance knowledge of the arrival of federal investigators at the school and the resignations within the last year of the superintendent of the school, its director of nursing and director of incident investigations. One Denton State School employee who spoke to the Observer on condition of anonymity blamed the federal investigation on Chishty. The employee also said abuse allegations at the school have dramatically spiked over the past two years.

For Chishty, this is good news. "It means somebody is getting the message. They know I am there and that I am watching."

————

She knows the answers now. For so long, they told her she was crazy, that what she said happened to her boy couldn't be true. And then they found the man who did it, and he confessed and is in prison. Everything that has come out since has only confirmed what she has always believed.

The prison is in the middle of nowhere, at a far west corner of the state in Fort Stockton. It is a bleak and foreboding place—a cluster of tan buildings surrounded by razor wire—and on hot days it bakes in the sun. It's the perfect spot to shelf a man the state would just as soon forget about.

In July, Kevin Miller agreed to a visit with the Observer, said he was ready to talk again. He knew the school, despite his confession, had never taken responsibility for its role in the matter.

He wanted to talk, he said in a letter, but wondered what difference it would make. After all he had said, so little had been done. He'd gained nothing by confessing, other than to give the Chishty family some semblance of justice, and they still wanted him dead. And so, not long ago, weighed down by what he had done, he tried to kill himself. It was his second attempt.

• Mark Graham

  

  Since her son Haseeb's attack six years ago, Farhat Chishty has visited him nearly every day at Denton State School.

• Mark Graham

  

Subject(s):

Denton State School, mental retardation, abuse coverup, group home

There was so much about him he wanted people to know—the abuse he suffered as a child, his habitual bouts with drug addiction, his bipolar disorder. Not that any of that was an excuse for what he had done.

"The above is not intended to put the blame on others and somehow reduce mine," he wrote. "I just feel now that it would have never happened if there weren't a hostile work environment, chronic drug abuse, and a system of abuse of residents already in place."

Chishty says she knows all this, has known it for years, but it's good to hear again, to re-validate what she's been fighting for. Because he is now a danger to himself, Miller has been transferred to a mental health unit. Both he and her son have become victims of the same act, and now both reside in institutions for the mentally challenged.

In October, the state agreed to let Haseeb come home and provide a nursing assistant to help Chishty with his care. She says she expects Haseeb to be home within a month or two, but considering the history of her battle with the state, she wouldn't be surprised if it takes longer.

Back on the grounds of Denton State School, she pushes her son in his heavy wheelchair, as she does most days. They cross the grass that leads to the edge of campus and stop under a grove of trees. Off in the distance, at the top of a small hill, is the cemetery, surrounded by a white picket fence. Every year, the residents of this school who have no family end up there. The school will not say how many they bury, but she knows that last winter 11 died in one month alone. She thinks of the many residents who have no family, and she says a silent prayer for them.

"Whatever happens, I will keep fighting," she says. "Not just for Haseeb, but for the other people here. I have to make sure what happens to him never happens again."

Patrolling South Texas for Illegal Immigrants

Patrolling South Texas for Illegal Immigrants
Border Patrolman Jorge Diaz left Mexico at 12. For 20 years, he's trolled the South Texas brush for illegal compatriots.
By Megan Feldman Published: January 24, 2008

Diaz checks immigrants' documents on Interstate 35 north of Laredo.

Jorge Diaz, a naturalized citizen from a family of migrant farm workers, checks trains north of Laredo for illegal immigrants. He was born in Mexico, but his loyalties to the United States are clear.

The recent crackdown at the border includes 6,000 new Border Patrol agents by the end of the year, as well as Operation Streamline, which in some areas sends immigrants to jail for entering the country illegally.

Diaz and his wife, Yolanda, live on a 200-acre ranch. They regularly apprehend immigrants trying to cross the property.

Subject(s): Border Patrol, drug smugglers, illegal immigrants, South Texas
Jorge Diaz spent years working the fields of South Texas, an earnest immigrant kid picking onions or melons alongside his family. Every month or so, the Border Patrol would descend on the fields. The workers without green cards would drop what they were doing and run. But Diaz didn't have to worry. His mother would wipe her brow, reach into her shirt and take out a small plastic bag. Inside were the pieces of paper that allowed her and her Mexican-born brood to live and work on the north side of the border and on the right side of the law.
As Diaz stood there, a determined kid covered in sweat and grime, he would look up at the agents as they reviewed these miraculous pieces of folded paper. The men wore clean, pressed green uniforms. They stood straight and proud and spoke with confidence. They were polite. And, it occurred to Diaz, they probably got to spend lots of time in air conditioning. He wanted to be like them. And so, strange as it might seem, becoming a Border Patrol agent became his dream.
He managed to graduate from high school—a leap up the social ladder, since his parents had only second-grade educations—and at 27 achieved his goal of donning the Border Patrol patch and uniform. Now 48, he has spent 21 years trolling the border for illegal immigrants and was recently promoted to head of the Cotulla Border Patrol Station, some 70 miles north of Laredo.
Diaz is responsible for 6,000 square miles of land. Six thousand square miles that at any given moment is host to untold numbers of immigrants. They drive, hitch, walk­—and in their most wretched moments, crawl­—toward a future they desperately hope will not resemble their past.
Many are headed to Houston and Dallas, drawn by the cities' booming construction and service industries and by the areas' burgeoning immigrant communities. It's Diaz's job to stop them. No matter how much their pasts mirror his own. He may have been born in Mexico, but his loyalties are clear.
Each month, he and his agents apprehend on average between 350 and 375 immigrants trying to scoot through their patch of borderland. The agents catch them along the most common migrant thoroughfares—the train tracks and the trail under the power lines, the highway and the ranch roads that demarcate the land like lines on a chessboard. It's big country. From any given point, the soft browns and greens of the South Texas brush extend on all sides to meet the dome of blue sky at the horizon.
On a recent afternoon, Diaz inches along the ranch road in his Border Patrol 4x4, craning his neck out the window. He peers down at the soft dirt below and searches the patchwork grids left by tractors and trucks for the telltale signs of human shoes.
He is a thick, hulking man with broad shoulders and a face rounded out by prominent cheekbones. Most of the time he's serious, jaw set in the image of a stern Latino RoboCop. When he smiles, his whole face changes and dimples mark his cheeks. Right now, though, his brows are drawn together in concentration.
"After an hour, the footprints are mostly gone," he says, eyes probing the ground. "So if you still have a fresh print in the sand, it's probably good traffic."
No tracks yet. Of course, there are 6,000 square miles to scan. So as always, he'll keep looking.
On a bright December morning, Diaz speeds in his 4x4 across Interstate 35 on his way to the train tracks. Minutes before, his agents spotted a group of men riding in one of the train's boxcars, a common way for people to cover the broad swaths of South Texas after crossing the border illegally. As he turns off the pavement and onto a rutted dirt road that runs along the tracks, Diaz launches into one of his cheery endorsements of the Border Patrol. "I love going to work every day," he says as he swerves to avoid a pothole. "I'm highly motivated, and I want to motivate my guys­—we're making a difference."
Seconds later, the train appears, chugging along the tracks toward him. As he picks up speed alongside thick mesquite, juniper and cactus, I notice two more Border Patrol 4x4s parked on the other side of the tracks. Diaz points to the oncoming train. "When they see the units, they jump off," he says. "You never know what you're going to find on these trains—could be a terrorist."
A terrorist? Has he ever apprehended one out here?
"No," he says. "But we're looking."
As the train pulls up, the car radio crackles. "I didn't get a look at that second car," says one agent. "There might be people on that one too. If they start dropping out one by one, I'll take the first one that drops."
"You guys got any bodies where you're at?" Diaz says into the handset.
"Affirmative, sir," comes the answer. "There's an open gondola—that's where the aliens are at."
We get out of the car as the train comes to a halt. Diaz's agents have asked the conductor to stop. It's a Union Pacific train with an American flag insignia and a slogan that reads, "Building America." Bright-colored graffiti covers the lower half, and looking at it, I'm reminded of where the train has come from. Several months before, while working on a story in Mexico, I went to the gritty Mexico City suburb where this particular line originates. In one afternoon, I watched about 50 young men leap onto the boxcars as a train pulled out of the station and chugged toward the United States.
This far north, few immigrants remain on the trains. By this point in the journey, many have already been deported, set out on foot or opted to negotiate the borderlands guided by smugglers with trucks or vans.
Four agents clamber onto the black boxcar, each positioning himself on a corner. They identify a lone immigrant inside and call out over the radio.
"There were supposed to be four," Diaz tells me, watching. "The rest probably bailed out."
Two of the agents haul the immigrant out of the boxcar and escort him to one of the 4x4s. A small, mustachioed man in a sweatshirt and jeans, he wears a defeated look as he is led to the car with his hands over his head.
He may not know it, but he's lucky. Had he been caught just miles away in another part of the Laredo sector, he would be going to jail instead of merely getting deported. Operation Streamline, a program that refers all illegal immigrants to the courts for prosecution, was recently expanded from the Yuma, Arizona, and Del Rio sectors and is soon expected to be implemented throughout the entire Laredo sector.
Recent news reports from the Texas border town describe local courts and jails filled to capacity with immigrants pleading guilty to illegal entry. For now, though, the new rules haven't affected Diaz's Cotulla station. It's the same rhythm as always—search, apprehend, process, then search some more.
On the way back to the station, we pass a man loading large rocks into a truck. Since Diaz has only been here since August, having spent 16 years stationed in nearby Hebbronville, several years in Freer and the past two in Puerto Rico, he's always on the lookout for an opportunity to meet locals. He pulls up alongside the man and calls out a warm greeting in Spanish.
The man looks about 70 and wears a baseball cap and work gloves. He introduces himself as Pablo Castillas. He recently returned to town after retiring from a job up north, he says, and he's collecting large rocks to landscape his new yard. They chat for a few minutes and then Diaz hands him his business card. "Call me if you see anything," he says.
Castillas gives him a vigorous nod. "There used to be a truck that would park here and pick up people on the tracks and take them to San Antonio," he says. "It was an old lady in her 80s and a young Mexican girl."
"So they never got caught, huh?" Diaz says.
"I guess not."
Diaz shakes his head. "Shame on us," he says. "They got away."
Back at the patrol station, Diaz gives me a tour of the area where detained immigrants are held. They call it "the bubble" because of the central command center separated from the holding cells by large glass windows. Two agents and one National Guardsman work radios and computers while on the other side of the glass two exhausted-looking men are being interviewed by agents. Behind them, several other immigrants gaze forlornly from their cells.
An agent points to the men being interviewed. "They were walking in the brush and an agent tracked them," he says. "They picked them up an hour ago."
One of the detainees agrees to talk to me. A smallish man with eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, he says he left Honduras 30 days ago. "I was going to Houston to make some money," he says in Spanish.
"Why? Why didn't you stay home?" Diaz asks, using the jocular tone he tends to take with immigrants, as if he's a soccer coach chiding them for a poorly executed play.
"My mother has AIDS, and she just had a stroke. Her medicines are expensive," the man says. He rode trains through most of Mexico and bused part of the way. At one point, he was robbed by Mexican police. They took 60 pesos—all the money he had. I ask how he got to this area from the border, some 70 miles. On foot, he replies.
"We were walking when we saw the agents," he says.
"Why didn't you run?" Diaz says.
The man shrugs. "Por miedo," he says. Fear.
I ask what he'll do now.
He's quiet for a moment, and I realize how stupid the question is, especially with the station chief standing by.
"I guess I'll go back," he finally says. "What else can I do?"
Jorge Diaz is no stranger to hardship. He, too, once longed for a future that lay out of reach, beyond a line drawn across the land. For years as a kid, he heard his parents talk about the United States. It sounded like a magical place, a place where problems disappeared and everyone was happy. Even in Mexico, their family was considered poor. The two parents and seven children lived in a two-room shack with a dirt floor in the village of Camargo, Tamaulipas, the state that borders Texas. Diaz's parents had second- and third-grade educations, and his mother picked crops while his father drove a tractor.
"We had a few cows, some chickens," Diaz remembers. "It was a hard life. You feel boxed in."
When he was 9, they moved to Monterrey because his father found work at a cookie factory there. As the oldest brother, Diaz helped out by shining shoes outside the factory after school. But there still wasn't enough money. They ate mostly tortillas with salt, and sometimes, when they could splurge, they added beans.
Diaz's mother finally decided to go to Texas, where her grandfather lived. A U.S. citizen born in Brownsville, he would petition for her green card, and she would work in the fields and save money until she could in turn petition to bring her family across the border. Around a year later, the paperwork was in order. Diaz walked with his father and siblings across the bridge to Roma, Texas. Eliseo Jr., one of Diaz's younger brothers, remembers their mother meeting them with a smile and buying them hot dogs. On that side of the bridge, everything seemed cleaner, bigger and brighter—full of promise.
Nothing came easy, but there was always work, and it paid better than in Mexico. Diaz's father found a job driving a tractor near Edinburg at a ranch owned by former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen. Diaz recalls sitting by the gate with his brothers and watching the senator and his friends pull up in a long white Cadillac. "They'd open the doors and hand us coins," he says.
The family had trouble making ends meet with their father's meager ranch salary, so they all became migrant workers. Before school let out in the spring, they would pack up, pile into their 1963 Chevy station wagon and drive to West Texas, the Panhandle or even Kansas. They would work in fields of cotton, cucumber and sugar beets, aiming to make as much money as they could before fall came around.
After graduating from high school, working some odd jobs, serving two years in the Army and becoming a U.S. citizen, Diaz applied to the Border Patrol. He did handstands and somersaults through the house when he received the letter of acceptance. "It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me," he says. At 27, he became an agent, and in the years afterward, two of his younger brothers would follow in his footsteps.
I ask Diaz how he feels about stopping immigrants from gaining access to the same opportunities he has enjoyed since he came here. "There are legal and illegal ways to do things," he says. I point out that most of the people deported now don't have relatives who can petition for them. And if they do, it could take up to a decade for the paperwork to go through. He nods and is silent for a long moment. "I guess it's just chance," he says. "It's a hard question."
Some 50 percent of Border Patrol agents are Hispanic, and many of them are from immigrant families. In 2006, some told The New York Times that their background added to the challenge of their jobs. Their families and communities considered them traitors to their heritage, they said, and immigrants often played on their ethnicity for mercy.
"Some of these people think that because you're Hispanic you're gonna let them go," Diaz tells me. "They say, 'Dejenos ir. Let us go. Don't be mean.' But it doesn't work like that. I respect this agency, and I wouldn't betray this badge. I dreamed of having it all my life."
His family, he and his brothers say, have always been proud of their government service. Yet later, as we're driving down I-35, he wonders. "I have cousins in Monterrey and Nuevo Leon," he says, eyes on the road. "Does it bother them that I'm a Border Patrol agent? I don't know. If it does, they never say anything."
Even without such questions, nabbing people desperate to reach their dreams can be difficult. He has investigated the deaths of immigrants who were killed leaping from freight trains or burned alive next to camp fires. He routinely comes across people who are weak or ill from hunger, thirst or heat exhaustion, and he once apprehended a family with small children clinging to teddy bears. "You feel for them," he says. "They go through a lot. I try to throw a little humor in there, 'cause we're the last people they want to see."
Diaz, his wife and three children live on a 200-acre ranch in a farm-style house they built themselves. At least once a month, immigrants pass through the property, walking by the family's cows and horses and prompting the dogs to bark. "At first, I felt really bad," Diaz's wife, Yolanda, says. "But my husband told me, 'You don't know what kind of people they are­—if they need water, point them to the water faucet outside.'" Since she spends long hours at the ranch alone, he also taught her to shoot a .22. She has called the Border Patrol station more than once to alert them to immigrants' presence on their property.
"Our house is like a trap," she says. "They don't know a border patrolman lives there. If they come, they're gonna get caught." Yolanda, whose parents were both born in the American Southwest, says Diaz rarely talks about the stresses or challenges of his work when he's home.
Manuel Sauceda, a Border Patrol intelligence agent and father of two who grew up in Laredo, says he learned to deal with emotionally charged experiences early on. "My supervisor told me to leave it at work—the arrests, the car rollovers, all that," he says. "It's not you putting people in those situations, it's them. They chose. You're here to take care of yourself and your family. Do your job, process it and leave it at work. That's how I've looked at it ever since."
While catching immigrants may at times be hard on the conscience, arresting coyotes and drug smugglers is not.
When Diaz leaves his large office and administrative duties for the field, he spends much of his time driving up and down I-35, eyes peeled for trucks packed with illegal immigrants or drug loads. "You can tell by how heavy the trucks are loaded, by how they bounce on the road," he says, scanning the highway before him while he drives. "The latest trend we're seeing is F450 and F550 Ford trucks. The smugglers want to blend in with the local population, and lots of the ranchers and hunters drive those." The trucks used to drive loads and smuggle immigrants are usually stolen, most often from Houston and Dallas.
The day before, Diaz's agents spotted a Ford truck that looked to be riding low. They followed it and ran the license plate, but before they could pull the truck over the driver accelerated, busted through the barbed-wire fence along the highway and careened into the brush. This is called a bailout, and it happens more often than you might think. Usually the drivers—migrants or drug smugglers or both—rumble through the tangled mesquite and cactus until the vehicle gets stuck and they can drive no farther. Then, they take off on foot. Other times, the driver leaps out of the speeding vehicle without even hitting the brakes, leaving the passengers to jump or else risk remaining in the unmanned car.
"I've seen a lot of fatalities," Diaz says. "They'd jump out and fall under the vehicle. Once, north of Highway 21, some people ran into the brush and others ran across the median. This 17-year-old girl got hit by an 18-wheeler." He shakes his head. "It was bad. The agent that took that one was new—he was pretty traumatized."
The truck Diaz's agents followed off the highway right before my visit didn't get far. The driver abandoned the vehicle and ran, but with help from Border Patrol helicopters, he and his co-pilot were soon spotted and arrested. It turned out six undocumented immigrants had been riding inside, sitting atop bundles of marijuana. The week before, agents in a neighboring county stopped an 18-wheeler loaded down with more than 5,000 pounds of pot. The street value was more than $4 million.
Diaz pulls up alongside an 18-wheeler stopped in the median. It's marked Dollar General. The man behind the wheel tells Diaz they're changing drivers.
"It's hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys," Diaz says as he drives away. "But when they're driving loads, sometimes they get facial twitches, or they hold the steering wheel like this." He grips the wheel hard. "You look at the jugular and it's just pumping."
Compared with the United States, his native country is a place he associates with crime and danger. "We have to enforce the laws, because that's what makes this country great," he says. "If you want to go to Mexico, good for you, but I don't go over there. You have kids that wear uniforms and carry guns and call themselves police officers, but they're not. It's chaotic down there—people are always getting killed."
Indeed, one of his brothers recently sent him photographs of a brutal crime scene published in a Mexican newspaper. The images, from early December, showed a half-dozen men sprawled on the sidewalk outside a cafeteria, shot to death and covered with blood. A former mayor known for standing up to the Gulf cartel in the Mexican border town of Rio Bravo, across from Mercedes, Texas, had been gunned down along with five other men, including his bodyguards. Nearby Nuevo Laredo is perhaps the most dangerous town along the border, enveloped by the violence that has erupted between the warring Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. Many of the dozens of people killed there in the past year were tortured and decapitated. Recently, the drug violence has begun to spill over the border.
There was the incident in Hudspeth County, when heavily armed men dressed in Mexican military uniforms crossed the border into U.S. territory to protect drug runners who were being chased by Border Patrol agents. The supposed Mexican officers warded off the agents with .50-caliber rifles, and later, the Mexican government denied association with the gunmen and said they were working for a cartel.
Working for the Border Patrol has never been so dangerous. Agents were attacked 987 times along the border during the 12-month period that ended September 30, according to the agency, a 31 percent increase from the 752 attacks recorded the year before and the highest number since the Border Patrol began recording assaults in the late '90s. None of Diaz's agents has been attacked, but it's something against which he is constantly vigilant.
Shortly after passing the Dollar General truck, Diaz picks up Agent Sauceda and heads out to Highway 57, a road smugglers often use to circumvent the patrols on I-35. After about an hour of scanning the road for smugglers but mostly seeing hunters towing dead bucks or locals on their way to visit family, they pull into a gas station and curio shop just off the highway. It's the only building visible amid vast stretches of cabbage fields and open sky.
They're greeted at the door by the owner, a tall Anglo man with a paunch and a thin brown mustache. He has ranches on both sides of the border, he says, and he leases his land to hunters. The drug violence has spooked his clients and affected business. "The more heat they put on the border up here, the more B.S. goes on down there," he says, speaking in a twangy drawl. "I was coming across near Acuña the other day, and I saw just three Border Patrol agents. Anyone could take a load through there." He shakes his head. "They shoulda put in a border security system 20 years ago. Now, it's saturated."
Diaz and Sauceda nod sympathetically, and the man continues. "A few years ago, we were down by Acuña, butted up against a fence line, rattling, trying to take down a big buck, and all the sudden here comes some people down the bank with automatic weapons. I said, 'Hell, it's time to crawl outta here.' A few days later, there was a cartel shootout." His ranch homes have been broken into, he says, and three years ago, whoever broke in did $30,000 worth of damage.
He turns and points to the shelves behind him. They're cluttered with Virgen de Guadalupe statuettes, silver jewelry and cow hides. He points out a large statuette in the back that resembles a skeleton. "That's Santa Muerte," he says, referring to La Santisima Muerte, the grim reaper figure that some people beseech for love, luck and protection. "The drug dealers build shrines—I saw one out by Amstel Lake­—and they put those up there to pray that they don't get caught."
On a recent afternoon, while searching for drug loads and unauthorized immigrants sneaking through the brush, Diaz stumbles across something else. He has pulled into the Exxon Mobil for tacos, and when he heads for the lunch counter, he notices a group of Mexican men sitting at a table. He strides over and addresses them in Spanish. "Who of you have immigration papers?"
The six men shake their heads.
"Nadie?" No one?
The heads shake again.
"We're on our way back from Tennessee," one man says. "We're going back home, to Oaxaca."
Diaz smiles and assumes his friendliest, most non-threatening demeanor. "So, you have trucks full of money, then?" he jokes.
The men smile and shake their heads no.
"So, how'd you cross?" Diaz asks.
One of the younger men, in his 20s, says they crossed near Laredo six months ago, went to Nashville to work construction and recently decided to go back to Mexico because there wasn't as much work as they expected.
"You crossed here and you didn't come say hi to me?" Diaz says. "Am I that scary? Am I that ugly?" This time, he gets a laugh from most of the guys. One, though, an older man with gray whiskers and a baseball cap emblazoned with an eagle and an American flag, doesn't look amused. He sits with his arms crossed tightly across his chest, eyeing Diaz suspiciously.
"We just need to take you to the station and process you," Diaz tells them. "We're not going to take money or property or anything like that. Then you can be on your way back home." The men will be fingerprinted and voluntarily deported, and if in the future they come back, they could be prosecuted.
Diaz takes out his handheld radio and calls for backup. He turns to me. "When I saw these guys—maybe it's training—but I knew they didn't have anything," he says. "I don't like these cases. We're supposed to be getting people who are coming in. But if they're illegal, they're illegal." Besides, like many of the people driving south this time of year before the holidays, they may be planning to come back to the United States in January. He addresses the group while he waits for his agents to arrive.
"Tell your friends and cousins that crossing is getting harder," he says. "You can go to jail now, and there are more agents all the time. Spread the word."
I ask if their friends and family in Mexico have heard about the recent crackdown.
The men nod. "They see it on cable," says one man in his 30s. "Some still cross out of necessity, but some say, no, it's not worth it."
In fact, it does appear that fewer immigrants are attempting to cross the border. A Mexican government survey shows that the number of people "looking for a job in another country or preparing to cross the border" dropped by nearly a third in the past two years, from 107,500 in the third quarter of 2005 to just 76,000 in the same period last year. The decrease is likely caused by the slowing U.S. economy and the nationwide crackdown by the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and various cities and towns, as well as the hiring and training of an additional 6,000 Border Patrol agents under a presidential initiative set to finish at the end of 2008.
Soon, more agents arrive at the Exxon to escort the Mexican men and their heavily loaded trucks to the Laredo Border Patrol station. "Then they'll follow them back to the border with Mexico," Diaz says. "Now, if one comes back with a warrant, it'll be a different story. Since 9/11 we have to make sure we document everyone. If they're not already in the system, they will be."
Once the agents have led the men out, we sit down to eat our tacos. As he takes a bite, Diaz gazes out the window to where the men are pulling out of the parking lot, followed by his agents. He looks pensive. "Those guys were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he says, then pauses. "If you were already here, would you leave, knowing how hard it is to come back? Some people stay and get their citizenship, go to college, become attorneys—there are a lot of success stories. It's a hard decision."
"Would you go back to Mexico?" I ask.
He thinks for a long moment. "No," he finally says. "I don't think I would." He polishes off his taco and balls up the wrapper. "I ain't lying to these guys," he says. "It's going to get harder. We're getting more agents, more technology. We're gonna be able to detect, able to deter."
The next afternoon, after a few slow hours, a call comes over the radio. "I got a bailout—an F250 truck went through the fence," the voice says. Diaz grabs his keys and turns to me. "Let's go. Air support will be there in 20 minutes."
We hop into the 4x4. Diaz flips on the flashing lights and does 100 mph toward Highway 44. With at least a half-dozen agents on the chase, the radio traffic is constant. "He turned back around, he's northbound," one voice says. "There are two young male suspects inside."
"I lost the dust trail," someone else says.
Diaz pulls onto Highway 44, and after a few minutes he spots the place where the truck busted through the ranch fence. There's a 6-foot gap in the wire. We pull up alongside the hole, near where a ruddy-faced Anglo man in a baseball cap and jeans is examining the damage. He introduces himself as Troy, one of the ranch workers. "I'm gonna call my hunters and tell them to get back to the house and stay there," he says.
"Yeah, 'cause they could be armed," Diaz tells him. A second ranch worker appears out of the brush, a middle-aged man with a long, gray beard. He says he was working near a dirt road when the Ford thundered past him, tearing through clumps of mesquite and cactus.
The ranch is a small one compared to the surrounding properties, but 4,800 acres of brush is easily enough to hide the truck and the men inside. And dark will fall in less than an hour. Diaz, looking up at the sky every few seconds in search of the plane, calls for more backup. Two more units soon arrive, and then we're off, roaring through the ranch in a caravan. The plane circles overhead, searching from above.
After a turn where the dirt road narrows, Diaz spots a cluster of flattened nopal cactus. "This is where he went through," he says. He turns the wheel, guns the engine and plows into the brush. We bounce along roughly for a moment and then lodge, stuck, in a thick tangle of mesquite that rises at least 2 feet over the grill of the 4x4. "Nope," he says. "Not gonna work." He throws the vehicle into reverse and soon we're back on the road and then easing into a clearing where several 4x4s and a canine unit gather.
The plane has spotted the truck in a nearby thicket. It appears to have been abandoned. Two agents start into the brush with M-4 rifles, followed by another agent leading a dog. The truck is in bad shape. The front left corner is caved in, the headlights cracked, and twigs and leaves protrude from every crevice. On the back cab window are Baylor and "Don't Mess With Texas" bumper stickers, and in the truck bed a black ski mask and a bottle of lotion.
The Ford turns out to be devoid of people and drugs. "They were probably aliens, then," says an agent named JJ. "Unless they took the bundles with them, and that's highly unlikely because it would weigh them down in the brush." Yet it's unusual for immigrants who have entered the country illegally to go to such lengths to avoid arrest. Most of the time, the guys who lead car chases through the brush are smugglers of some sort. Diaz guesses the men were scouts, paid to signal those transporting loads when the way is clear.
The chances of finding the men tonight look slim. Overhead, the sky is fading from glowing pink to dull, purplish blue. Diaz, somber and slightly frustrated, surveys two groups of agents that plan to comb the brush from opposite directions. "It's hard to follow sign here, with all the grass," he says. "But they'll meet in the middle. And if there's nothing, well, that's it."
Troy, the ranch hand, says he hasn't seen this type of thing before. Usually, immigrants walk through the ranch, sometimes asking for water or food. "I was at the gate one night and I heard, 'Amigo! Agua, por favor,'" he says. "It was two kids—couldn't have been more than 15. I gave them some water and chips." He looks out at the brush, the colors growing muted in the waning light.
"You gotta feel for them—it's 30 miles to the river," he says. "To walk 30 miles through this stuff for a better life? It's got to be bad."

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I am elated that Mr. Diaz was able to achieve his goal of becoming a Border Patrol Agent. However, the continual hiring of agents with a Hispanic background is highly suspicious. It seems that the plan for continuing the assimilation of anything remotely non-American into "Sir, yes sir" is working, as is the plan to continue hatred and racism within our own communities. Humans being referred to as "aliens" or even "terrorists" is a clear indication of the amount of fear that has been injected into the American pie. Do your jobs sirs, and beware of the alien. They just might be cutting your grass.
Comment by Xolótl Zarazúa — January 24, 2008 @ 02:26AM
I, too, share my happiness that Mr. Diaz achieved his goal; he is truly an example of a legal immigrant’s success story, something that occurs all too seldom. However, the previous commenter’s own words underscore his or her ignorance. Hiring agents with a Hispanic background makes great logistical sense. They require little or no training in Spanish or other facts pertinent to assignment along the Mexican border, saving taxpayers untold amounts of money. To the next point, assimilating “anything remotely non-American,” I should think, would be a worthy goal for anyone actually living in America. Fortunately, America allows its citizens and other legal (emphasis added) residents to retain parts of their culture that do not contradict the laws or beliefs of the majority of this country. Therefore, anything else that is un-American that does not fit the above criteria should, indeed, be changed, and as rapidly as possible, if you wish to continue living here. As far as the fact that humans are referred to as “aliens” is concerned, from a legal standpoint, what better word would describe border crossers? It’s my understanding that the word “alien” is, in one of its definitions, synonymous with “foreigner” (i.e. someone not from the country in which you live). This is an apt description in my opinion. That the word has a more pejorative connotation to it than originally intended is not relevant. I do, however, agree with the previous poster when he says that referring to humans as “terrorists” is an indicator of fear “that has been injected into the American pie.” It most certainly has been, and deservedly so. It is an undisputed fact that terrorists do cross at the U.S.-Mexican border quite regularly, so, again, this description is quite appropriate. And, if I may reiterate the previous poster, do beware of the alien. He may be mowing your lawn, and it is your duty as a law-abiding citizen to report him if he is illegal, so that others may have the chance to enter this country in a way that is respectful to the laws of this nation, as Mr. Diaz's family did.
Comment by David — January 25, 2008 @ 03:13PM
well said David.
Comment by Chris — January 30, 2008 @ 11:36AM
Well spoken David! The system and laws we have in place are a large part of why this country is great! If we start neglecting them, or bending them we will turn into Mexico. Where will we all flee then... to Canada? lol. It shocks me how many people speak so highly of Mexico and defend it so adimantly, yet live here! If it is so great why do you live in the U.S.? Go back! When my great grandfather came to the states from Germany (legally) it was simply a given that they would have to adopt to American culture... they were moving to AMERICA!!!! They didn't even leave Germany until they had learned English. My great grandfather was a blacksmith and when he opened shop in the states, no one could say our last name correctly... so he changed the spelling to be easier for Americans to pronounce! He didn't scream and cry and whine, he simply adhered to the American way... which was why he left Germany in the first place! I don't understand why these illegals come here and expect everything to be the same as it is in Mexico. It's like they think of coming here as a promotion instead of moving to a foreign country!
Comment by Ed — February 13, 2008 @ 11:22AM
Very well written. Truly a sad issue with many different views. If everyone read this article or another like it, they would not be so quick to express their opinions wither it is for deportation or citizenship. There really is no clear way to handle a citation like this. As Troy the handyman said to go through all that, the life they left behind must have been bad. I cannot imagine such a life a feel close to tears thinking that there are people with these situations and worse out there. Yet, I feel guilty because my tears mean nothing and it's just another circumstance of life. I just pray that in their next lives, the creator will be more favorable in their lives.
Comment by Loyola — April 9, 2008 @ 12:12AM

Jesus in the Jailhouse - Texas prisons

Jesus in the Jailhouse
Old-time religion confronts 21st-century Texas prisons: Does it work, and is it constitutional?
By Jesse Hyde Published: April 26, 2007
The prisoner, dressed in white cotton that's beginning to fray, ducks into the office and glances around nervously. The man behind the desk asks him to take a seat.
AP/Wide World Photo
The Carol S. Vance Unit near Houston, Texas, uses the InnerChange Freedom Initiative program in an attempt to reduce recidivism rates.

Chuck Colson, the Watergate felon turned born-again Christian, founded Prison Fellowship Ministries in 1976.

Afternoon worship services such as this one are a regular part of life at the Vance Unit. Attendance is encouraged but not mandatory.

Michael Jarmon, left, is an IFI re-entry specialist responsible for inmates in the Dallas area. His job is to make sure each one has a job, a mentor, a place to live and a church upon release.

Tommie Dorsett is the director of the IFI program at the Vance Unit. A former parole officer, he says there's no telling which program graduates will succeed once they re-enter the world.

Jerry Richards, 48, learned to read at Vance.

Anthony Johnson, who has the words "Brown Power" tattooed on his arms, is serving time on an aggravated assault charge.

Paul Johnson, 51, says he initially saw the program as a game.

A group of inmates pray before beginning a class.

At Vance, biblical principles are applied in all classes, including GED courses such as the one pictured.
Subject(s): recidivism, evangelical Christianity, Carol S. Vance Unit, InnerChange Freedom Initiative, Prison Fellowship Ministries
The prisoner sits on a metal chair, his knees together, his scuffed work boots placed squarely on the floor. He is a quiet, slender man, with a gap where his two front teeth should be. His hands, scarred here and there, rest in his lap, and below them, in a plastic sack, is the rest of his life—a thin sheaf of papers, full of hand-written instructions and Post-It notes, that details how much time he has left and where he will go when he gets out. His name is Jerry Richards, he is 48, and so far, his life has been a disappointment.
This is his third time in the pen. A three-time loser, in jailhouse parlance. In two months, he will leave this prison, just outside of Houston, and return to his sister's home in Oak Cliff. This is a sort of exit interview. It is taking place in one of the prison offices—a brightly lit room of white cinder block.
"What kind of work do you do?" the man across the table asks. He wears slacks and black cowboy boots.
"Well," Richards says, letting out a soft sigh, "I do plumbing work; I do roofing."
The man writes this down on a yellow legal pad.
"Do you have substance abuse in your background?"
"Yes, sir. Crack cocaine."
Well, they're probably going to have you take some classes for that, the man says. And you're probably going to have to wear an ankle monitor. Richards looks up from the floor and nods.
"What about church?" the man asks.
"I'll probably be going with my sister."
"And you'll be needing a mentor?" But this is more a declaration than a question. When Richards gets out, he will have a mentor; the man across the desk will make sure of that.
This time will be different, Richards says. Since the age of 21, he's been addicted to drugs. At 24, craving a fix, he mugged a woman at gunpoint. He did about four years on that charge, and he has been in and out of prison ever since.
But he is a changed man now, thanks to the things he has learned in this prison. He has taken public-speaking classes and learned how to format a résumé on a computer, and when he gets out there will be a job waiting for him.
But the biggest change, Richards says, has been internal. Thanks to the staff and the programs available here, he has come to know Jesus like never before.
"I want to live for the Lord," he says. "I want to do the right thing."
The man on the other side of the table nods his head emphatically. This is exactly what he wants to hear.
From the outside, the Carol S. Vance Unit looks like any other minimum-security prison in Texas—a cluster of brick buildings, a fence topped with razor wire, a group of inmates loitering in the yard.
But this prison is different. It is unlike any other in Texas. In fact, there are few like it in the world. Journalists from England and France have come to visit it. Corrections officials from as far away as Singapore have traveled here to study its unusual and controversial methods, which recently have been challenged in court.
Inside the prison, the cinder block walls are decorated with murals depicting biblical events such as the crucifixion of Christ and an apocalyptic vision from the book of Revelation. In one of the offices down the hall, a pencil drawing of Mother Teresa hangs above a desk.
The inmates are different too. They carry Bibles as if they were prison-issue. They talk incessantly of Jesus. Some even wake as early as 4:30 a.m. to study Scripture and pray. And it is not uncommon to see men of various races, marked with tattoos of rival prison gangs, circled together to pray.
On Sundays, there are revivals, led by either the prison staff or by evangelical churches from nearby Houston. These meetings sometimes end with inmates streaming to the front of the chapel to be baptized in a dunk tank. Visitors have remarked that the Vance Unit feels more like a Bible college than a prison.
The unit operates under an unusual agreement, the first of its kind in the United States. The state is responsible for the physical care and safety of the 281 inmates, but the programming—which defines the day-to-day life of the prison—is the responsibility of an evangelical Christian organization called Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Founded in 1976 by famed Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson, the Virginia-based ministry runs weekly Bible studies and seminars in more than 1,300 state and federal prisons. These programs focus on things such as "surviving life in prison" and "building a relationship with God." But the program Prison Fellowship runs at the Vance Unit is far more ambitious.
It is called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, or IFI, and in the last 10 years it has had a dramatic influence on prisons across the country. Its basic premise is that criminal behavior is the result of a sinful heart. "Acceptance of God and biblical principles results in cure through the power of the Holy Spirit," IFI material states. "Transformation happens through an instantaneous miracle."
Modeled after an all-Christian prison in Brazil, the program first took root in Texas in 1997, with the blessing of then-Governor George W. Bush, who at the time was promoting faith-based programs as an alternative to government social efforts. Based on his own religious experience overcoming alcoholism, Bush believed that programs like InnerChange could do a better job than secular ones at solving social problems such as homelessness or drug addiction. He pledged that, if elected, he would increase funding for these sorts of programs.
In the decade since, the InnerChange program has become a model for faith-based initiatives. It has also had a far-reaching influence within the corrections community. Both the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison contractor, and the federal Bureau of Prisons now have facilities that run nondenominational programs similar to InnerChange. Prisons in Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Arkansas and Missouri use the InnerChange program.
The program has caught on, supporters say, because when it comes to recidivism, nothing works better. Only 8 percent of the program's graduates are back in prison within three years, according to a 2003 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. On average, 50 percent of prisoners in the United States will be re-incarcerated.
"I think what you're seeing is a willingness to attack the problem in a different way," says Prison Fellowship president Mark Earley. "We've done a good job in getting criminals off the street and putting them behind bars, but we've done a miserable job in preparing them to re-enter society."
Yet in spite of the program's purported success, a court has already ordered it to shut down in one state, and critics hope that ruling will be the first step in abolishing "God pods" in American prisons. To these critics, InnerChange represents everything that's wrong with the faith-based programs that have flourished under Bush.
InnerChange, they say, is a clear violation of the separation of church and state. Last year, a federal judge in Iowa agreed, ruling that the IFI program in Iowa is "pervasively sectarian." If the ruling is upheld—a decision might come as early as May—it could open the door to lawsuits against other states that use the InnerChange program.
Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, has said one more courthouse defeat "could well be the death knell" for InnerChange and programs like it. But it could also have broader implications. It could mean the beginning of the end for Bush's faith-based initiatives movement.
Outside the office, the lunch hour is drawing to a close. A faint aroma of boiling cabbage hangs in the air.
The interview now over, the prisoner gathers his personal documents and stuffs them back in the plastic sack on his lap. The man behind the desk rises to shake his hand. "We'll talk soon," he says.
His name is Michael Jarmon. He is tall, bald and walks with a bit of a limp—the result of bad knees, he says. Once a month, maybe more, Jarmon, a full-time IFI employee, comes to the prison to meet with men from the Dallas area who are a few months shy of release. He finds an empty office at the prison, sets up his laptop and goes to work.
One by one, the prisoners Jarmon has selected for the day's interviews come to see him. One has a tattoo of his daughter's name inscribed on his neck. Another shows Jarmon pictures of his grandchildren. One he will meet today has 10 children from eight women. The men talk to Jarmon as if he is an old friend. He teases, he scolds and he encourages.
At one point, he tells a prisoner to drop and give him 25 push-ups. The prisoner stares back at him, unsure what to say or do. And then Jarmon cracks a smile, and the room erupts in laughter.
For Jarmon this is a job, but it's also personal. At 18, he was arrested on a felony robbery conviction. Thanks to help from friends, he never served jail time on that conviction, and he stayed away from trouble from that point on. "I had someone to step in and help me out, show me a better way," he says. Now he's trying to do the same.
Jarmon is a re-entry specialist, and his job is to make sure "his guys," as he calls them, have a job, a place to go, a mentor and a church upon release. No other prison in Texas has an equivalent program.
"I got a guy," Jarmon says, turning the page on his yellow legal pad. "He used to work as a butcher, so I'm trying to get him on at this sausage plant. If we can get that set up, he's on his way."
Jarmon has built a network in the Dallas area of employers, churches and community organizations willing to help IFI parolees. They range from Bishop T.D. Jakes' Potter's House to a small restaurant near the Dallas Police Department headquarters that has hired IFI participants.
"Say a guy gets out and he's going to Fort Worth. He needs a place to stay and some clothes. I take care of it. I know churches where he can go to get clothes, places he can get groceries.
"I go around to businesses, I say, 'This is my guy, he's a felon, but he's a good guy. He has a mentor, he has a parole officer, he has to be at work on time, he has to be drug-tested. Give him a chance.'"
Jarmon calls in the next inmate. His name is Paul Johnson, he is 51, and he is from South Dallas. He is a heavy-set man with thick arms and a double chin. His fingernails could use clipping. Like Richards, he is missing a few teeth.
His bio goes like this: Father was a truck driver, mother worked two jobs. Pretty much raised himself, he says. At the age of 18, he robbed a bank. He did six years on a 25-year sentence, went through "a good dry season" and then got caught up on parole violations. In total, he has been in prison five times.
"I chose a crooked path to follow: the life of drugs, the life of crime," he says in his deep baritone. "If I could do it all over again, there are things I would change."
The Vance Unit is a highly selective unit, and the truth is, Johnson is lucky to be here. It doesn't take sex offenders, and because it is a low-security unit, it won't accept prisoners who pose a safety risk.
To be in Vance, inmates must have a "minimum-out" status, meaning they can work outside the fence line with little supervision. Only inmates from the Houston or Dallas areas who are within two years of release are considered for the program, because it's easier to find mentors and volunteers from these areas who will regularly come into the prison.
Upon completing a 30-day trial period, IFI staff decide whether the inmate will be allowed in the program. Critics say this amounts to cherry-picking; IFI staff say their program works only in an environment where inmates feel safe.
"We get you over here and we isolate you from general population and we work on your core issues," Jarmon says. "You're not going to get guys to make transformational-type decisions in a hostile environment. If you've got to constantly be watching your back, you can't learn."
At first, Johnson says, he saw the program as a game. He believed in God, but he wasn't overly religious. If he could fake his way through the religious aspects of the program, he could take advantage of the prison's amenities. This is common, IFI staff say. Some come for the air-conditioned classrooms; others come for better access to treatment programs, which are necessary for parole; and others apply because they're allowed more visits. They don't come for the religion.
But the program isn't as easy as it's made out to be. Johnson is required to get up every morning at 5:30. Then throughout the day there are classes. Some deal with Bible instruction, others with job skills—like what to wear to an interview. Johnson spends time every day working toward his high school diploma. Richards, the last man Jarmon met with, has learned to read in the prison.
At night, until 10:30, the prisoners are involved in evening programming. This could mean meeting with mentors (each inmate is assigned a mentor after six months; they will stay in contact at least a year after release) or listening to crime victims tell their stories. On weekends, there is special programming, like the occasional "Date With Dad" event in which the children of prisoners are brought in for a day with their fathers.
In the beginning, says IFI Texas director Tommie Dorsett, the program was "pretty much Bible study 24/7." But it has evolved. "We recognized that there was an imbalance. Now we strive for a more holistic approach—education, getting your GED and the minimal vocational stuff we can offer in 18 months."
Over time, Johnson's perception of the program changed. He began to look at the world differently. Simply put, he felt hope for the first time in a long while.
"If you come here and you apply yourself to this curriculum and take on everything these people offer you, man, it can open up a lot of things," he says. "You give up your issues as well, your anger, your lust, all your issues that you had that always kept you in bondage to Satan. These people can help you break these bonds through this curriculum."
Jarmon says the true test for Johnson will begin when he gets out of prison. Will he keep in touch with his mentor? Will he keep going to church? And when he faces the first setback, where will he turn?
"I tell my guys, 'Give me a year, stop making decisions on your own. Your decisions lead to you going to jail. Don't make those decisions for yourself anymore, allow me to help you.'"
After 10 years of running the program, Dorsett says there's no telling who will make it and who won't.
"I've seen guys who can quote the Bible backward and forward, understand theology, and I think, 'This guy is going to do well.' And he crashes and burns. Then there's guys that just go through the motions, and they do very well. You just never know."
In 1974, a New York criminologist named Robert Martinson published a study on prisons in America titled "What Works, Questions and Answers About Prison Reform." For most of the 20th century, rehabilitation was viewed as a legitimate goal for prisons. But with rising crime rates and a burgeoning prison population, there was a growing disillusionment, both among the general public and within the corrections community, about the effectiveness of prisoner rehabilitation efforts.
Martinson studied 231 of these programs. He concluded that none of them worked. Not education, not psychotherapy, not anything else, could reverse "the powerful tendency for offenders to continue in criminal behavior." This became known as the "nothing works doctrine," and it became widely accepted. (Apparently, nothing worked for Martinson either: In 1980, he jumped from the ninth-floor window of his Manhattan apartment, killing himself as his son watched from across the room.)
By 1989, the United States had all but given up on rehabilitation in prisons. In January of that year, in a case called Mistretta v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld federal sentencing guidelines, which essentially ended the discussion on rehabilitation as a legitimate goal for the prison system. "Rehabilitation as a sound penological theory came to be questioned and, in any event, was regarded by some as an unattainable goal for most cases," the court wrote. It went on to cite a Senate report which "referred to the 'outmoded rehabilitation model' for federal criminal sentencing, and recognized that the efforts of the criminal justice system to achieve rehabilitation of offenders had failed." This came at a time when politicians everywhere were promising to get tough on crime.
(This mentality, according to a recent report in the Texas Law Journal by Marie Gottschalk, has had alarming results: "The U.S. incarceration rate has accelerated dramatically, increasing five-fold between 1971 and 2000," she writes. "Today a higher proportion of the adult population is behind bars in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world.")
Research over the past two decades has found that certain programs, in certain settings, do reduce recidivism. Viewed most optimistically, the typical prison rehabilitation program reduces recidivism by less than 10 percent, according to Byron Johnson, a researcher now at Baylor University.
In the mid-'90s, Johnson began studying two different prisons in Brazil that claimed exceptionally low recidivism rates. Both were in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous region. Then, as now, the Brazilian prison system was known as one of the most dangerous in the world. The national recidivism rate was somewhere between 50 to 70 percent, which is standard for most industrialized nations. Yet these two prisons claimed recidivism rates of less than 20 percent.
One of the prisons, called Braganca, was run by a nonprofit corporation. The prison essentially operated as a factory. Local companies contracted with the prison for labor, and the inmates were paid a small wage—the rest went back into the coffers of the nonprofit. The other prison, called Humaita, had completely turned over its operations to a group of religious volunteers, who worked as the prison's guards, cooks and even its warden. The prison was saturated with religious programming and instruction. The program had three main components: family visits, spiritual mentoring and work release.
Johnson and a team of researchers tracked 148 prisoners from Humaita and 247 from Braganca who were released between 1996 and 1999 to see how many would wind up back in prison. In general, the prisoners from Humaita were imprisoned for more violent crimes and had spent more time in prison than inmates at Braganca.
Johnson concluded that both prisons had successfully reduced recidivism, but that Humaita, which had a recidivism rate of just 16 percent, was far more successful: Prisoners at Braganca were three times more likely to wind up back in prison.
When the Texas Legislature approved the InnerChange program in 1997, it did so under one condition—the program had to work. It charged the state's Criminal Justice Policy Council with monitoring the program and determining if it effectively reduced recidivism.
With the support of CJPC and Prison Fellowship, Johnson began a study of the IFI program in 1997. At the time, Johnson was director of the Center for Research and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. The study would last for six years and include more than 125 interviews with inmates. The research team would make hundreds of visits to the Vance Unit over the years, at all hours of the day and night.
"Over the first year of its existence," researchers wrote, the prison "began to take on the identity of a 'church community.'" They described the environment as "extremely open, supportive, upbeat, friendly and nurturing."
Most prisons are infected with what is known as the "prison code," Johnson wrote. It teaches that prisoners can't trust anyone, especially authority figures. Showing any sort of emotion, or talking about feelings, is a sign of weakness. Violence, sexual aggression and allegiances based on racism and hatred are promoted. These antisocial attitudes probably contribute more than anything else to recidivism, Johnson noted. Some corrections officials think the code is so pervasive that most prisoners are beyond reclaiming.
Johnson found that the IFI program counteracted this mentality in a number of ways. First, it taught inmates that they were not on their own, that they were part of a community, and as such they were not only accountable for their own actions but were also responsible for those around them. They were encouraged to file "drop slips," or misconduct reports, when they saw inmates breaking rules. Some inmates refused to participate at first, insisting that they were above snitching. But over time, successful participants in the program began to understand the purpose of this exercise.
The program also helped inmates, according to the study, "realize that people on the outside do care about them, rather than believing that society as a whole has rejected them."
One inmate told researchers that he couldn't believe his mentor would regularly come to see him when he had a job, a family and kids already occupying his time.
"My mentor stopped by here last night on his way home from Virginia," another was quoted as saying. "His wife picked him up at the airport and brought him straight here on Tuesday night before going home. Can you believe that? And then his wife waited in the prison parking lot for two hours while he was in here mentoring me. I can't understand how someone could care that much."
Another said his mentor had helped him set goals, something he had never done before.
The focus of the study became a group of 177 inmates who were released before September 1, 2000. Johnson wanted to know where the inmates would be two years after release. The IFI program contained many of the characteristics criminologists considered essential to a successful prison rehabilitation effort, but did it work?
The group was compared with 1,754 inmates who met the IFI selection criteria but did not participate in the program. In 2003, Johnson and his team released their findings. Of the 177 selected for study, only 75 had completed all phases of the program, meaning more than half had dropped out.
Graduates of the program, however, had done quite well: During the two-year tracking period, only 8 percent were re-incarcerated, compared with 20 percent from the matched group, and only 17 percent of the program's graduates were re-arrested, compared with 35 percent of the comparison group.
But it wasn't all good news. When considering all participants, including those who dropped out or didn't complete the program, 36 percent of IFI participants were re-arrested, compared with 35 percent of the matched group. And 24 percent were re-incarcerated, compared with 20 percent from the control group. Had the IFI program made them worse? "Is it possible," the study asked, "that after a certain time period in such an intensive program there is a point of diminishing or even negative returns?"
While the study was widely trumpeted as proof that the IFI program was effective (The Wall Street Journal used it to bash those who opposed faith-based initiatives), others saw it as evidence that the program didn't work. In a 2003 story by the Houston Press, a UCLA professor of public policy named Mark Kleiman said the study didn't really prove anything. It "gives you this happy horseshit about the graduates, but [the program] is a loser," he said. He accused InnerChange of selecting inmates who already had the drive and discipline to succeed.
But Johnson has not backed off from his conclusions. Last year, an updated version of the study was republished by Baylor's Center for Religious Inquiry Across the Disciplines, of which Johnson is now the director. If inmates complete all phases of the program, his research suggests, they will in all likelihood never come back to prison.
Two weeks into his first term, surrounded by a group of black pastors and evangelical leaders, President Bush announced the formation of the first-ever White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. "The days of discrimination against religious institutions, just because they are religious, must come to an end," he declared.
In the run-up to the presidency, Bush had labeled himself a "compassionate conservative" and had promised that if elected he would increase funding to faith-based groups. "Whenever my administration sees a responsibility to help people, we will look first to faith-based organizations that have shown their ability to save and change lives," he said.
He often brought up two examples that he had supported as Texas governor: Teen Challenge, a Christian drug rehab program that claimed an astonishing 86 percent success rate, and the InnerChange program. InnerChange was especially close to his heart. He had often brought up InnerChange during his presidential campaign. At one press conference, held at the prison, he walked over to a row of inmates, put his arms around two convicted murderers, and joined them in the singing of "Amazing Grace." "There is a presence in this place," Bush said. A Washington Post reporter later asked him why he supported religious programs such as InnerChange, even though there was scant empirical evidence they worked.
"My answer to that is, 'Let's try,'" Bush said. "The old way in most cases, in a lot of cases, has not done a good job of meeting societal goals."
Several years later, in 2005, Bush stood before another group of religious leaders, this time in a ballroom at a Washington, D.C. hotel. "It is said that faith can move mountains," he said. "Here in Washington, D.C., those helping the poor and needy often run up against a big mountain called bureaucracy. And I'm here to talk about how to move that mountain so that we can partner with programs to reach out to people who hurt."
In the past year, Bush announced, his administration had awarded $2 billion in grants to faith-based programs, the most the federal government had given in one year to religious charities.
Not everyone was pleased. When Bush made the announcement, a number of lawsuits were in the works that challenged the constitutionality of his faith-based initiative. One of those lawsuits took direct aim at InnerChange.
The suit, filed by a group called Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, specifically targeted InnerChange in Iowa, the only state that had agreed to pay Prison Fellowship to run the program. In other states the program is funded by private donations. The suit had two main arguments: that the IFI program was discriminatory, and that in sponsoring it, the state of Iowa was promoting one form of religion over another, a violation of the First Amendment.
It argued that participants in the program were given special benefits not available to other inmates and that the real goal of the program was not to lower recidivism rates but to convert people to Christianity.
As evidence, it introduced a fund-raising letter from Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson that read: "We don't run IFI to reduce recidivism rates...We run this program so that through the Gospel, people's lives might be changed...so that the world around us will see the transforming power of Jesus Christ and be drawn to accept him as Lord."
According to the lawsuit, participants in the program were taught what is widely considered a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible—wives should be subservient to their husbands, homosexuality is a sin and non-Christian religions are "of Satan."
As evidence, Americans United entered the diary of a program participant. "Today we had some serious Catholic bashing in class," the diary read. "It hurt me very deeply. Never before had I heard serious criticism toward my faith."
The participant, Michael A. Bauer, would quit the program after a year because he felt IFI staff were hostile to his Roman Catholic beliefs. On one occasion, he said, they compared the Pope to Hitler and told him if he didn't leave the Catholic church he would burn in hell. Members of other minority faiths—including Jews, Mormons and Wiccans—had similar complaints. One Muslim inmate said if he were to participate in the program he would be committing blasphemy, according to the suit.
IFI classes, regardless of the subject matter, were buttressed by biblical principles, and religious references were constant, sometimes every few minutes, even in computer classes. "The application of biblical principles is not an agenda item," the IFI Web site stated. "It is the agenda."
Homework assignments dealt with Christian doctrine, and inmates were required to memorize Bible verses, attend morning devotionals, afternoon worship services and Friday night revivals. In a class called "Praise and Worship," inmates were taught the proper way to pray, the suit alleged.
Participants in the program also received special benefits not offered to other Iowa prisoners, the suit said. Their cells, for example, had wooden doors that could be locked. They had access to private bathrooms, while inmates in general population squatted in toilets side by side. They were also allowed more visitors, given prison jobs and had easier access to treatment programs that would put them on the fast track to parole.
In October 2005, the suit went to trial. During opening arguments, Americans United lawyer Alex Luchenitser told the court that the true nature of the InnerChange program was undeniable. "InnerChange has taken over an entire unit of a state prison and turned it into an evangelical church," he said.
Robert W. Pratt, chief judge of the federal courts in the Southern District of Iowa, agreed with the claims brought by Americans United. He noted that inmates of other religions were asked "to compromise, if not completely abandon, their faiths in order to participate." In giving participants of the program benefits not available to other Iowa inmates, the state had violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. He ordered Prison Fellowship to repay the state of Iowa the $1.5 million it had spent on the program.
Prison Fellowship appealed the ruling, and the case is now before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, a three-member panel that includes former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
"The whole lawsuit is full of allegations that we disagree with," Earley says. "Our big contention with the case in general was that the decision was not based upon what actually occurred in the program in Iowa, but what was really based on allegations of what occurred in Iowa, and really more based on the fact that the program had a Christian emphasis.
"There's a lot more flexibility in these programs than one reading the lawsuit might think."
In Texas, for example, inmates are not required to attend the prison's religious services. The Vance Unit also brings in a Catholic priest or deacon to hold Catholic services and keeps prayer blankets on hand for Muslim inmates. A Muslim recently graduated from the program in Texas, Earley says.
"If you came here with different beliefs you'd go through the classes like anyone else. You'd be exposed to biblical doctrines, biblical truths, but at the end of the day, the choice is yours," says Dorsett, director of the IFI program at the Vance Unit. "There's no pressure to convert. You practice what you came here with, and who you are is who you are."
Luchenitser says this is just rhetoric. "There's no way someone who's Jewish or Muslim or Roman Catholic can stay true to their faith and take part in this program," he says. "This program...teaches that its specific version of Christianity is the one true religion and in doing so it tells inmates that all other religions are wrong."
While only Iowa paid Prison Fellowship to run the program, all states that use the program provide indirect financial support in the form of facilities, guards, food and clothing for IFI participants, Luchenitser says. If the ruling in Iowa is upheld, his organization may file lawsuits against other states.
Critics of Bush's faith-based initiative say there has been little oversight of programs such as IFI. What's more, critics say, when it comes to doling out federal grant money, the Bush administration seems to favor religious applicants over secular ones. According to a recent lawsuit, the number of federal grants to religious groups increased 38 percent between 2003 and 2005.
"Before, what you had is money going to religious organizations, like Catholic Charities, who kept their secular services completely separate from their religious services," Luchenitser says. "Now you have these groups like InnerChange, which are essentially proselytizing groups. It's a clear example of government funding one religion over another."
InnerChange is just one of Bush's faith-based initiatives under attack. Since 2000, lawsuits have been filed in Arizona against a Christian mentoring program for the children of prisoners, in Alaska against a Christian college that provided a religious education program to teenage Native Americans living in isolated villages and in California against a Christian-based drug rehab program.
Participants in the program say they don't understand the controversy. Many of them are fervent—one could say evangelical—in the support of InnerChange and believe it's the best thing going in the entire American prison system, a truly revolutionary approach to rehabilitating prisoners.
"Why would anyone be bothered with it?" Dorsett says. "If we're successful, then people don't commit crimes, so we've got less victims and ultimately that's good for everyone.
"What people don't understand is, we have 155,000 people incarcerated in Texas, and of that number only 485 are on death row. Everyone else is eventually going to get out. So what do we want to accomplish while a person is incarcerated who is eventually going to be a citizen coming back to our communities? We can do absolutely nothing, or we can do some things to help."
It's nearly 3 p.m. at the Vance Unit. The afternoon worship service is about to begin. Jarmon rises from his desk and clicks off his computer. He is done with the day's interviews.
He crosses the commons room, where a group of inmates are watching The Andy Griffith Show. They sit on wooden benches, their legs stretched out, their feet resting on the concrete floor. At the end of one bench, an old man is fighting off sleep. The room erupts in laughter, and he jolts awake. He repositions the Bible on the bench beside him. Before long, he is nodding off again, snoring quietly.
Jarmon stops to admire the efforts of an inmate working on an oil painting of Jesus Christ. It will be entered in a contest with IFI participants in other prisons across the country. "Looks good," Jarmon says with a nod. Then he crosses the room, pausing again at the door to tease a pair of inmates playing chess.
He crosses the grass of the prison yard and enters the chapel, a brightly lit, warehouse-sized building. At the front, there is a wooden lectern.
The prison choir takes its place behind it. They are all dressed in white. They are thieves and drug addicts and dope dealers. One of them closes his eyes and begins to hum, finding the right note. The keyboardist joins in. The man on the drums, who has the words "Brown Power" tattooed on his forearms, finds the beat. A trumpet wails. And they begin to sing.
Holiness is what I need
Holiness, holiness is what I long for.
On the front row, a slender, quiet man sits alone. He wears white cotton that is beginning to fray. His hands, scarred here and there, rest on his lap. He taps his toe and nods with the beat.
His name is Jerry Richards, and so far, his life has been a disappointment.
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Write Your Comment hide comments (9)
Three time loser? I'm pretty sure Texas politicians tout us as a "three-strikes-and-your-out" state. You opening character along with that guy that shot the DPD officer a few weeks ago make me wonder what has happened to Texas' three-strike law.Maybe that would be a good topic for a future Observer feature.
Comment by Paul — April 25, 2007 @ 03:37PM
I believe all of these people who are incarcerated need to be made aware of the love of God that awaits them if they just accept it into their lives. It will change them for the better.Our Lady of America messages can be a specific guide for these programs. They are available at www.oltiv.org for free.
Comment by Olivia — April 26, 2007 @ 10:15AM
I watch this story with much interest in how the faiths of catholics are treated. I think this system work well if realized through one of the men of the church. How can tattoos be a good sign? I do not believe Jesus would feel comfortable watching Andy Griffith, maybe less convicts return if no persons watch Andy? Hay que hacer lo que prediqua.
Comment by Ignacio — April 26, 2007 @ 12:58PM
This is an awesome prison ministry program. Every life is worth saving in the eyes of God. Hopefully the government will not put an end to such programs because not only do these men benefit but also all of society. Good luck to all of you who leave these prisons and start a new life. May God be your strength. And to the US government, keep your nose out of it. The program is working.
Comment by Pam Pelletier — April 26, 2007 @ 07:06PM
After quickly reading this article, I failed to notice any mention of the leading expert on Antisocial Personality Disorder, Stanton E. Samenow, Ph.D. This esteemed psychologist was involved in a longitudinal study which focused on traditional psychotherapeutic intervention the population in question. Bottom line: none of these traditional approaches worked. Hence, the proposed treatment of choice was focusing on "criminal thinking errors." One of these thinking errors was that of religion. You can compare this to the Mafia going to communion after making a hit. I have been working in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice System for 20 years as a mental health professional. I strongly suggest that you go and purchase a copy of the following book: Inside the Criminal Mind, Revised Edition, by Dr. Stanton E. Samenow.
Comment by David — April 27, 2007 @ 07:59AM
I think this program is successful for three reasons:1. They have chosen inmates who are less likely to come back.2. They have a strong follow-up program that ensures the inmates are guided and employed. The involvement in a church helps feep the inmates from falling in with the same crowd they used to be involved with.3. They have changed the very nature of the prison. Most US prisons have an atmosphere that discourages behaviors that lead to rehabilitation. They have seen to it that these behaviors are encouraged.I would like to hear more on the similar non-denominational programs. It would be truly interesting to see how they work. In my opinion, it is not what your faith is that is important. It is the fact that you do have a spiritual path that you truly try to follow.
Comment by Tim Covington — April 27, 2007 @ 12:56PM
I agree with David on the work of Stanton Samenow. As we saw with the fellow who cried before the judge to be let out to donate a kidney to his son, criminals are consummate actors. A religious program like this provides a perfect script and, what is more important, a perfect audience of deluded Christian fandagelicals who are only too eager to persuade themselves that "Jesus" can do what nothing else has. When are the Muslims and the Catholics and the Jews and Scientologists and the Buddhists going to get a crack at this and a cut of the taxpayers' largesse?
Comment by TG — April 27, 2007 @ 05:09PM
It is pretty obvious that people in prison are not among the most intelligent examples of mankind. I believing in an invisible creature that will take care of them after they die brings them comfort and helps them live an honest life, where is the harm? Oh, I know. It's a government sponsored lie.
Comment by Johnny Ellis — April 30, 2007 @ 09:12PM
If the purpose of our prisons is to house horrible people, fine, a good job is being done in all the prisons throughout the world, but if the purpose of our prisons is to punish people for their offenses and then guide them through a life changing program that will cause 92 percent of them to never do anything that will get them into prison again, I think that is a better deal.
Comment by Mindy — May 29, 2007 @ 09:12PM