Committee Looks At Youth Commission Merger
AUSTIN (CBSDFW.COM) -The Texas Youth Commission and Texas Juvenile Probation Commission will likely be one agency at the end of the legislative session.
The move will save the state money, but Richardson Republican Representative Jerry Madden thinks it will also mean a better system for juvenile offenders. "It would, I think, shift the emphasis so it's more community based and more oriented to our juvenile probation activities."
Re-doing the system and budget constraints could cause some rural TYC facilities to close, but Madden says they could be used for something else. "They could look at can they use those facilities locally in their probation activities in the other parts of that region to actually use those facilities."
Madden says the goal has always been to reserve TYC lock-ups for the worst offenders and keep everyone else in the community and close to home, but still hold those offenders accountable. "It would, in fact, emphasis the things that we did in the last legislative session where we sent incentives down to the local juvenile probation areas to reduce the population in TYC."
