From the Houston Chronicle:

Nearly half of the youths locked up in the Harris County Juvenile Detention Center [have] mental health problems — far more than the estimated 20 percent with mental disorders in the general youth population — figures released Thursday show. [Harris County includes Houston.]

These youngsters, mostly teenagers, have been diagnosed with maladies including bipolar and attention deficit disorders, according to data compiled by a group of organizations studying the issue. Nearly 20 percent have severe emotional problems, the data show, and a quarter had never been diagnosed previously.

“For the first time ever we’ve collected amazing data that really give us the hard facts about what issues are there and what diagnosis we need to treat,” said Betsy Schwartz, president of Mental Health America of Greater Houston. The nonprofit agency and the county juvenile probation department are coordinating Operation Redirect, a collaboration of local groups trying to prevent mentally ill kids from ending up behind bars.

See related posts:

• Mentally ill strain Georgia prisons
• Editorial: Help — not jail — needed for people with mental illness

An analysis by the Dallas Morning News of state personnel records finds that 72 employees from Texas’ 10 state mental hospitals have been fired in the last three years over allegations of physical abuse, including brutal beatings and sexual abuse. Hundreds more were terminated for other violations, from sleeping on the job to over-medicating mentally ill patients.

State officials say there will always be some reports of abuse and neglect in an institutional setting. And they say they take any allegations of mistreatment seriously. But the records show that as in other state-run facilities, abuse and neglect are systemic.

The state’s juvenile prisons, group homes for the disabled, and state schools for people with mental disabilities all came under fire last year for reports of widespread physical and sexual abuse. The state psychiatric hospitals, like other systems for vulnerable Texans, are chronically starved for cash, advocates of more state funding say, and services at the local level can’t keep up.

“You get what you pay for,” said Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, who has bipolar disorder. “When you financially dumb something down, you make services cheap, something’s got to give. Unfortunately, it usually ends up being a mentally ill or disabled Texan.”

See earlier posts here and here.

From the Dallas Morning News:

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting the second federal investigation into a Texas facility for people with disabilities within two years’ time.

Word of the inquiry has given advocates for the mentally disabled new ground to call for the closure of Texas’ 13 institutions. And it raises serious questions about how well the state reacted to a scathing 2006 Justice Department report on the Lubbock State School, those advocates and some state officials say.

… Officials with Texas’ Department of Aging and Disability Services say they’ve gone to great lengths to improve conditions at all their institutions since the Lubbock review, which revealed shoddy health care, mistreatment, and more than 17 deaths in an 18-month period.

… A Dallas Morning News investigation last year found hundreds of cases of confirmed abuse and horrific conditions at some of the worst facilities.

Earlier stories here and here and here.

From the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, National Public Radio:

Investigative reporter Benjamin Skinner spent four years traveling the world as he researched modern-day slavery for his new book, “A Crime So Monstruous,” and says there are more slaves today than at any point in human history.

When he was in a seedy brothel in Bucharest, Romania, posing as a slave trader, he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car.

… I could have done one of a few things: I could’ve paid to redeem her. I was with a couple of guys and I could’ve fought physically with the traffickers to get her out. Or I could’ve gone to the police the next day to tell them, which is what I did.
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Men with disabilities forced to work as slaves at a building site

From the BBC, Reuters:

Chinese police have rescued 33 mentally disabled people forced to work at a building site by slave labor merchants after the apparent suicide of a detainee alerted authorities, a newspaper said on Thursday.

The case in Hulan, a city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, echoes a major scandal involving more than 1,000 people forced to work in brutal conditions at brick kilns in Shanxi province last year.

… At least three people were detained, suspected of keeping the slaves.

College students reportedly saw a man jump to his death from a seventh-floor window, and raised the alarm.

Why did prosecutor rely on discredited facilitated communication method?

Detroit Free Press columnist Brian Dickerson comments again on the sex abuse charges against an Oakland County couple that were recently dropped. The case relied on testimony obtained via facilitated communication from their daughter, who has autism.

… if police and prosecutors had Googled the phrase “facilitated communication” as my Free Press colleague L.L. Brasier did when she first heard about the case, they would have learned that most educators and autism experts had long ago lost faith in FC, and that researchers had repeatedly failed to establish its legitimacy in controlled experiments.

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From Washington Post Metro columnist Marc Fisher:

Officials at the Federal Aviation Administration used a crew of people with intellectual disabilities, working without protective gear, to demolish an outbuilding in Leesburg, Virginia, that was known to contain asbestos.

The FAA’s inspector general, federal prosecutors in Alexandria and a grand jury are now investigating whether the decision to give part of the job to people with severe disabilities was a purposeful attempt to circumvent procedures.

An agency spokeswoman said federal investigators are also assessing whether FAA managers knowingly assigned the crew to a job involving toxic materials, endangering the workers’ health.

Rich Santa, who represents the National Air Traffic Controllers Association union at the Leesburg facility, says FAA employees there determined that the mentally disabled workers were ordered to handle asbestos-laden material without any protective gear. He says an FAA worker who reported the incident to managers at the center was told to mind his own business.

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