Why more Tarrant County kids are going to Texas youth prisons than any others

From The Texas Tribune:

Tarrant County recently sent more kids to state youth prisons than any other Texas county, contributing to a booming waitlist for beds in the Texas Juvenile Justice Department’s five secured facilities.

Tarrant transferred 103 kids to state custody in the 2025 fiscal year that ended in August, jumping 63% from the period prior, according to preliminary TJJD data obtained by the Texas Tribune. That’s also nearly twice the number of youth sent from Harris County, the state’s most populous county.

And while this is not the first time Tarrant has led Texas on this issue, the county is on track to send the highest number of kids to state youth prisons this calendar year since at least 2011.

State District Judge Alex Kim, a Republican who has led the county’s juvenile court since 2019, pinned the increase on a change aimed at shortening the time kids sit in the county’s juvenile jail awaiting their case’s outcome. He and other county leaders also said there have been more crimes.

But some juvenile justice advocates and former county officials fear that Kim’s tough-on-crime approach is helping to drive those numbers — a concern that has persisted for years. At the same time, Tarrant’s Black youth continue to be disproportionately represented in the number of kids sent to state custody.

TJJD data also show that kids who violated probation drove Tarrant’s spike, reigniting concerns about the county’s decision last year to fire a well-established group that supported youth on probation.

In Texas, only kids convicted of a felony or a probation violation for a felony could be sent to youth prisons, which are reserved for the most serious crimes. Critics and experts say Tarrant’s reliance on such placement, officially called a commitment, can harm youth. TJJD facilities have a history of youth being abused, and research shows that those kept closer to home are “far less likely” to commit new crimes.

“It’s pretty predictable that it’s going to have deleterious outcomes on a lot of the kids in our community,” said Brie Diamond, chair of Texas Christian University’s criminal justice department. “If we get them entrenched in the system … it becomes more likely that we’re creating a lifelong offender.”

TJJD officials said the rising number of kids that some counties — like Tarrant — are sending to its custody is one factor pushing its waitlist near an all-time high. The agency also blamed the queue on flat capacity and the declining number of youth exiting its secured facilities.

As of mid-October, there were 149 children who had been waiting for transfers to TJJD for an average of 90 days, the agency said. Twenty-two kids were from Tarrant, one of 38 departments on the list.

“System is sensitive — a single county can disrupt,” said a TJJD slide presented during its September board meeting.

Advocates and former county officials also raised alarms about who the county has been sending to state custody. Black children made up over 70% of the county’s commitments, while being about 20% of its youth population. In turn, around one in four Black children sent to TJJD custody in the 2025 fiscal year came from Tarrant.

“The racial disparities there are quite disturbing,” said Elizabeth Henneke, CEO of Lone Star Justice Alliance.

Now, some critics are calling for an independent audit of Tarrant’s juvenile justice system to get to the bottom of the spike.

“The third-party review may find that Tarrant County is on track and doing quite well,” Henneke said. “But without that analysis, I think we all should be concerned.”

Riley Shaw, an associate judge under Kim who became Tarrant’s juvenile services director last year, said his department is already directly reviewed by TJJD. He added that it doesn’t control youth commitments and that it would be improper to comment on judges’ decisions.

Kim rejected the idea of an audit.

The ‘ballooning’ waitlist

In Tarrant, the big concern over the past year has been TJJD’s “ballooning” waitlist.

Earlier this year, Kim grew frustrated with the agency’s pace of moving kids from the county lockup to state youth prisons. These children left waiting would often go for months without the rehabilitative services that the court had ordered for them to receive in TJJD’s facilities. Their extended stay would also add stress to the local juvenile jail, which was not set up to serve them, county officials said.

Then, Kim said he noticed that TJJD would often pick up youth from Tarrant after they’d been waiting for around 90 days. So in February, the judge said he began speeding up how quickly his court was resolving cases — a change confirmed by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office. The quicker the cases moved, the quicker the 90-day countdown for TJJD’s pickup could start for kids who are committed and the less time they would have to spend in the juvenile jail, he reasoned.

“If it looks like it’s going to be a commitment, we try and accelerate that as much as we can,” he said.

But TJJD Chief of Staff Nathan McDaniel said the agency operates on a one-in, one-out basis instead of a 90-day timeline, adding that its executives had communicated this with Kim over the summer.

Had Tarrant kept the average pace prior to Kim’s ramp-up, the county would have likely sent around 80 children instead of 103 to state custody, the Tribune found. The additional kids also lengthened the wait time for every youth on TJJD’s list by nearly two weeks, according to McDaniel.

“I think the unintended result there is certainly it does make it more challenging for everybody else across the state,” Manny Ramirez, a Republican Tarrant County commissioner and TJJD board chair, said when asked about the finding. “If there’s a direct correlation, perhaps that needs to be explored further.”

Kim said his change has recently helped to keep the juvenile jail’s population from hitting capacity, adding that there’s no simple remedy to the problem. Though the detention center was still pushed beyond its limits at times, forcing some kids to have to sleep in the intake rooms, according to minutes from the Tarrant County Juvenile Board’s meeting in August.

The board, which oversees the county’s juvenile department, has continued pushing TJJD to address the waitlist. Chaired by Kim, it’s made up of district judges and County Judge Tim O’Hare.

The group said in a Sept. 19 letter to TJJD that over six months, nearly one-third of the youth at its 128-bed detention center were those pending transfers to state lock-up. Then, it asked if the waitlisted kids could be placed in the state’s adult prison system, shocking advocates who said such a move would endanger children.

“To further delay providing services to these youth is to deny them their opportunity for rehabilitation,” the letter said, pinning the waitlist on TJJD’s prolonged staffing shortage.

But there are few ways youth can be legally sent to adult prisons and this is not one of them, TJJD Executive Director Shandra Carter responded. She added that the agency had recently taken in more Tarrant youth than any juveniles from any other county.

Instead, Carter offered ways the county could provide waitlisted youth some rehabilitative services. She also said TJJD is working to boost its capacity through recruitment efforts and the upcoming construction of two secured facilities near more populated regions.

No simple answer

Kim’s change alone doesn’t explain the entire spike.

The judge said the “vast majority” of youth went to TJJD’s custody due to plea agreements with prosecutors, instead of his orders. According to a snapshot from the district attorney’s office, there were 53 commitments between May 2 and Oct. 20. Just under 60% of them were through plea bargaining.

Kim and other county leaders also said kids are committing more crimes. In a statement, the district attorney’s office said the jump was “partly because of a rise in both probation violations and case filings, especially those involving violent gun crimes.”

TJJD data show that most Tarrant youth were sent to state lock-up for violating probation, more than doubling last year’s figure. Over 40% of these violations were technical — which could mean a range of issues such as missing school, not meeting with a probation officer or running away — instead of new offenses.

Kids shouldn’t be going to youth prisons over these infractions, advocates and experts said. They pointed to research showing that incarceration increases reoffense risk, on top of a 2024 report that found youth in TJJD facilities were “exposed to conditions that cause serious and lasting physical, mental and emotional harm.”

“Everybody knows the outcomes that you have with TJJD, they still are not good,” said Bennie Medlin, Tarrant’s former juvenile services director who retired last year. “I give TJJD a lot of credit for the improvements that they’ve made over the last few years. … But I think everybody wants to see the state used as a last resort.”

Kim, however, cautioned against analyzing the data without fully understanding each case. He said TJJD’s facilities are sometimes the best or the only option for certain youth — something that Frank Adler, a juvenile defense attorney who ran against the judge as a Democrat, said he has seen.

Adler and another defense attorney also said they have recently noticed more crimes, including those involving guns, in Tarrant.

County data provided to the Tribune up to August indicate that this year’s number of violent felony juvenile cases is on track to be similar to 2024’s figure and a slight increase from that of 2023. These datasets don’t break down the use of guns.

Advocates also raised alarms that Black youth made up over 70% of the kids Tarrant sent to TJJD — a disproportionate figure that has increased in the last few years. Statewide, Black children accounted for 47.5% of the total commitments, despite being 12% of Texas’ youth population.

Kim said Black youth in Tarrant are more likely than kids of other races and ethnicities to be referred for violent crimes, which more frequently lead to time in a state facility. He said that’s true nationally, too.

Black youth are disproportionately represented at the national level, but at lower rates than in Tarrant. Experts said Black juveniles are more likely to be punished than their peers because of several factors, including over-policing and over-enforcement.

Another reason Kim gave was his assertion that rap culture promotes guns. He has previously faced criticisms of racism for saying during a 2021 hearing that it was predictable that a teen who raps would be caught in a stolen car with a gun, though he ultimately decided to release the Black defendant in that case from detention.

Bob Ray Sanders, who co-chaired Fort Worth’s Race and Culture Task Force, called the remark “stereotyping” in a comment to FOX4. But at the time, Kim said he didn’t mention race when making the comment.

“I’ve been told many times that I’m racist because I made a comment about rap music and how it is criticizing Black culture, but rap music does glorify guns quite a bit,” Kim told the Tribune.

Medlin said there is no single reason why Tarrant’s Black youth are more likely to face time in a state facility. He said it’s not cultural, but the result of a criminal justice system that disadvantages Black youth at several steps. A study looking at the amount of contact Tarrant juveniles of color have with the criminal justice system reached that same conclusion. But Medlin said county leaders didn’t want to put resources into finding out why.

Looking for solutions

Tarrant’s spike has prompted a search for solutions.

For a decade, TJJD has sought to divert youth into local secured facilities to keep them closer to home. Tarrant is the largest county without such a center, despite it also being cheaper than putting kids in youth prisons, according to Ramirez.

Now, he is pushing for one.

“If Tarrant County is going to be the largest committer to the state system, then Tarrant County needs to be prepared in partnering with the state to make sure we’ve got places to put them,” Ramirez said.

Some advocates want more investment in community programs instead. They also worry that last year’s firing of Youth Advocate Programs — a national nonprofit that uses alternatives to detention, like substance abuse counseling and mentoring, to reduce reoffenses — might have fueled the probation violations that drove the county’s spike.

“I’ve seen a lot of those programs that were high quality gone away,” said Ben Travis, who leads Fort Worth nonprofit Community Frontline’s juvenile justice initiatives. “I would wonder if that has had an impact.”

YAP also supported close to 70% of kids under the supervision of Tarrant’s juvenile services, Medlin told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram last year.

But county leadership questioned the group’s diversity language and said it used Tarrant’s dollars to pay lobbyists, which YAP denied. After firing the nonprofit, the county contracted with My Health My Resources of Tarrant County.

Medlin said these groups are not the same.

“YAP’s focus was on community-based services and supervision and mentoring,” he said. “That is not MHMR’s strong suit and moreover, it’s just not their thing.”

O’Hare’s office didn’t respond to comment requests, while Kim said he has seen “no impact” from the change. MHMR Chief of Staff Catherine Carlton said the group is adding a therapy program as well as services for issues like gang and youth violence.

YAP CEO Gary Ivory said he can’t explain the county’s spike. But he said the nonprofit had long provided effective programs, and the group would “love to work with Tarrant County again.”

Disclosure: Texas Christian University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.