Keeping ’em Off the Streets

THE ROAD to the Dallas County Youth Village is also the road to the McCommas dump. Auto-crushing yards, scrap-metal
shops, vegetable stands and homes covered with aluminum siding are disarranged down the highway. A sour smell rising
from the Trinity River bottom wafts around the Simpson-Stuart exit off U.S. 75-South. It is through all this that
about 100 delinquent boys are transported every year by a Dallas County court referral. Many of these boys will
follow the same trail back on foot when they escape.

But the landscape within the Youth Village is considerably more cheerful. There are no fences or bars or alarms.
“That is the beauty of the place,” says Van Lasiter, one of three caseworkers. “The boys who stay are here by their
will. They know they can run away. And some of them choose not to.”

But many of them do. Currently, they’re running away at a rate of two a week out of a vacillating population between
50 and 64. Nevertheless, the Youth Village fills an important vacancy in what juvenile authorities call the “vast
middle ground” between extremes: informal adjustment and incarceration by the state. Many counties in Texas have no
such intermediate facility; if a child commits a fourth or fifth felony. he is ordered to an institution operated by
the Texas Youth Council (TYC). In Dallas, the Youth Village is equatable to a boy’s second strike in baseball. Next
time, he’s out. That’s why many of them stay.

The Youth Village is exemplary among non-privately operated institutions because it probably does more good than
harm. In the field of juvenile justice, that’s saying a lot. The Youth Village is more formal in its educational
program standards and more demanding of a child’s full attention than most court-ordered placement facilities. Its
systems are sometimes inefficient and too easily thrown off balance, but it’s safe to speculate that a respectable
number of boys -perhaps 40 percent – leave the Youth Village and never commit another crime. The others, says
Superintendent Robert Wadley, are “just being kept off the streets.”

The Dallas County Youth Village was founded 53 years ago when city and county officials agreed to jointly subsidize
a home for wayward boys. Charitable organizations such as Big Brothers, which had been pushing the project, promised
the support of their eager-beaver volunteers. An old house overlooking the Corinth Street viaduct in Oak Cliff was
refurbished to house 25 rambunctious youngsters. Newspaper editorials of the day were written in a heavy-handed kind
of hopefulness: “If the destructive spirit of boys who inflict such damage upon property was curbed in its
incipiency, the progress of youth toward delinquency or habitual criminality could be halted.”

Everyone wanted it to work. That was in 1929.

In 1936, a vacated transient camp for Depression-era hobos on 300 rural acres of south Dallas County was obtained to
extract the boys from the city environment that had, in large measure, been responsible for their delinquency. Here,
it was said, the boys would have access to a dairy barn, a chicken house and five hog houses; they would be given
the opportunity to learn a trade. The home remains at this location, and in the ensuing years it has been expanded
to include a Boy Scout headquarters, a horse stable, a swimming pool and a separate dormitory for black youths-kids
who apparently had shared no part of all this kindheartedness in the past. Much more recently, integrated dorms, a
chapel and a new school have been donated by members of the community or funded by the county (whose commissioners
now have full operational and funding control over the facility through the Department of Human Resources).

The Youth Village has had its share of scandals -photographs of bruises, tales of overly zealous paddlings, rumors
of inedible food and unsanitary kitchens -but nothing as reprehensible as the brutalities practiced through 1974 at
the state schools. The arrest of the Youth Village’s business manager in September on a charge of solicitation of
sodomy on Harry Hines Boulevard is about as embarrassing as the scandals get. But the facility falters onward, doing
its level best on an annual operating budget of $750,709 to change the lives of boys who aren’t getting the guidance
they need at home.

The Youth Village has had a string of superintendents over the years who came in on their own steam and frequently
lett on someone else’s. “We’ve had good superintendents, and some not-so-good ones,” says shop teacher Ray Young,
who has been there for more than 20 years. “And almost all of them have been fired.”

The man in the hot seat at this particular time is only 29. A graduate of Rice University with a stronger
specialization in business than in social work, Robert Wadley was previously in charge of a bigger and much tougher
facility in Harris County, where the average juvenile in residence had 13 or 14 felony offenses on his record
instead of the four or five infractions recorded on the average Youth Village kid. Contemporary juvenile delinquents
are far more difficult to work with than the neighborhood “bad boys” the home catered to during the late Thirties.
Today, 53 percent of the Youth Village residents were referred for burglary or theft; 14 percent were referred on an
unauthorized use of a motor vehicle charge. “I had one little guy in recently,” says Wadley, “who was mad about his
placement here because he’d only stolen four cars. He thought the judge would let him get away with five.”

Wadley and his wife moved from Houston into the $80,000 house located on the grounds soon after a thorough study of
the Youth Village had been completed by the county. Among the findings were that the Youth Village had “been
accepting children with lower testing scores, more underachievers, more with serious offenses, while paying less
attention to social and racial mix than other placement agencies.” But the Youth Village Study Board’s evaluation
had more good things than bad to say about the care those boys were receiving. Their recommendations included the
development of a program for girls (whose involvement in serious juvenile crime has risen statistically in recent
years). The study board also suggested that the Youth Village’s educational program be re-evaluated and enhanced.

Wadley has gone beyond the formal orders (the girls’ program will be in operation by 1982) and initiated some of his
own changes as well. He and Director of Juvenile Services/Chief Probation Officer Al Richard have placed two new
probation officers at the home. Visiting hours have been prolonged in an effort to encourage the parents of resident
boys to visit more often.

These changes haven’t gone unnoticed. “The Youth Village,” says Juvenile Judge Craig Penfold, “has in the past few
months made more changes than any other facility I’ve seen since I’ve been on the bench. In the past, the county
commissioners provided the funding without the management. Since the new Youth Village Board has picked this
director, the home has both.”

“Robert Wadley is quite simply the best director we could have found in the state,” says referee-master Dan
Street.

Still, the Youth Village has far to go before becoming a truly top-notch facility. If two of the school teachers are
out sick on the same day (as they were on a recent visit), for instance, the caseworkers are obligated to supervise
two periods of basketball in the gym instead of doing what they’re qualified to do: work on an individual basis with
the boys. Funding-related problems are commonplace. The Youth Village owns about $8,000 worth of sophisticated
camping equipment, but the salaries for instructors weren’t budgeted this year. The most serious flaw in the Youth
Village setup is its dearth of follow-up care; the caseworkers have no way of knowing how well their kids do after
release. “Sometimes we read about them in the newspaper. Sometimes they go to TYC. Very occasionally, a boy will
call in just to say hello,” says Lasiter. “One of my kids came out here to see me after his release, and when I saw
what he was driving, I said, ’Frank, what are you doing that allows you to drive that gold Cadillac?’ He just
laughed, but 1 knew he was into something and wasn’t too surprised when I read that he’d been shot and killed in
South Dallas. It was drug-related. He was doing something with drugs.”

Youth Village kids have gone on to commit some fairly notorious local crimes. One boy referred to the Youth Village
for making terroristic threats to strangers over the telephone escaped after living there only three months. He was
temporarily detained in Galveston, no-billed and released. The next time anybody heard of him was, unfortunately,
after he’d robbed his 73-year-old grandmother of $374 and strangled her to death with a black cloth belt. The
psychologist who had examined the boy before sending him to the Youth Village had written that he was “faced with
irresistible inner tensions that routinely motivated his behavior.” The boy was also said to have had a “problem
home.”

“We can’t work miracles at the Youth Village. We’re a short-term placement facility; we only have the kids for a
year,” Lasiter says. “Our conditioning lasts only 60 days after their release, and if changes haven’t been made in
the home, there are undoubtedly going to be some problems.”

The majority of boys who run away from the village do so during the first 60 days of the program. “We’re not turning
them loose as quickly now,” says Wadley. “If they run away once and are caught, we ask that they be sent back.”

“Sometimes,” Lasiter says, “all you have to do is go to a runaway’s home and knock on the door. He’ll be right
there. He just got homesick.”

Boys tend to run away in pairs. After a recent Wednesday-evening chapel service, two youngsters-neither taller than
five feet -ran across a fallow field toward the sunset. Runaway episodes seem to excite the remaining boys.

“Sir, did you see the runaways?” gasped one child to his caseworker in a breathless voice.

“No. Who was it this time?”

“Tidwell and that new boy.”

“Well, I’ll be. . .” The caseworker strode to the outside edge of the walkway and looked out.

“Why don’t you run after them, sir?”

“We’re not paid to run after them,” the caseworker said. “Besides, ya’ll can run like water bugs. I’ll just tell the
office like I always do.”

“I haven’t run away,” the boy said smugly as he mimicked the movements of a marathon star. “I can run fast, but I
haven’t run away.”

“Yes, I know, son,” the caseworker said. “You’re stronger than that.”

And that, in an episode, is the Youth Village’s style. As Judge Penfold said, “The Youth Village isn’t the stepchild
of Dallas County anymore.”

It’s more of a prodigal son. Maybe it’s stronger than that.