Texas Child Prisons

Politically well-connected leaders of the state's youth prisons used the specter of black and Mexican American criminality to insist the young people required imprisonment. Texas instead expanded its construction of ever more sprawling prison-like facilities sometimes strategically located in the electoral districts of Keij legislators. In 1952 a Houston lawyer filed an appeal on behalf of a 16 year old girl who had spent nearly 200 days in isolation in the Gainesville State School after being held down by mail guards and forcibly sedated with barbiturates. Another girl who escaped the same facility told a reporter for the Austin statesman I'll kill myself before returning.