State Rep. Jerry Madden (R-Plano), chairman of the Joint Committee on Management and Oversight of the Texas Youth Commission yesterday told the San Antonio Express-news that problems related to reporting abuse and neglect allegations within the troubled juvenile prison system don’t appear as bad as agency watchdogs have claimed.

At issue are the findings in a report issued by TYC youth advocate Will Harrell last week that indicated agency investigators had closed dozens of abuse and neglect cases without proper investigations.

Madden says that likely is not the case:

“What I think you’re going to see is that most of (the mistreatment allegations) were properly investigated at the time. Will I say every one was? No, but I’ll tell you that a huge majority went to the right people for investigation,” Madden said Tuesday.

And Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, a co-chairman with Madden of the committee on TYC, said he will have some tough questions for Harrell at a committee hearing scheduled for today.

A week ago, Harrell alerted the state’s top leadership of what he feared were “flagrant” abuses occurring inside the agency. In a letter to Gov. Rick Perry and others, Harrell said his office had “discovered hundreds of abuse or neglect allegations that were administratively closed without proper administrative and/or law enforcement investigation.”

Harrell defended his work Tuesday but acknowledged that the findings were only as good as the information he had at hand.

“If it turns out this is a high-tech typo, we’ll be the first to celebrate,” he said.

While I’m as skeptical as anyone concerning whether or not the Texas Youth Commission has really cleaned up its act, it is difficult to discount what Jerry Madden has to say on this particular issue. To date, he has done an admirable job with the commission and, Republican or not, seems to have no desire whatsoever to sweep anything under the rug.

More from Madden:

Madden said that over the past several weeks, the agency’s inspector general has reviewed hundreds of the cases cited in Harrell’s report and has assured him that the cases, by and large, were properly handled.

Madden said he asked Harrell over the weekend to provide him with specific cases that were not properly investigated.

Harrell submitted brief summaries of mistreatment allegations contained in a database but no hard evidence that cases were closed without review, Madden said. He surmised that if the database did not specify that the cases were properly investigated, then Harrell assumed they were not.

Harrell’s assumption may not necessarily be wrong. However, I do think the Committee will have some serious questions for TYC in this regard and, if something isn’t right, I feel sure that, under the leadership of Madden and Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston), the committee will raise some serious hell.

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