Kevin Brady: “over the past year I served on the juvenile justice committee for the Texas Legislature. We rewrote our juvenile justice…”

“over the past year I served on the juvenile justice committee for the Texas Legislature. We rewrote our juvenile justice laws in trying to curb gang violence, and we found a number of things. One is that we met and saw a 12-year-old from Dallas who raped and bludgeoned a classmate and threw her body on the top of a local convenience store to hide her body. We learned that juveniles today are more violent and more mean and more mentally unstable than ever before in committing crimes. We find ourselves in a position of having to choose between building beds to house the most violent juveniles and choosing between a sanction process that we knew could make a difference. Had we had this bill, had we had this incentive, we would have been able to do both and put them in place immediately to make a difference. Finally, I would say the reason juvenile beds are so expensive is that we are trying to find out if there are kids who are rehabilitatable. For that reason we have to build additional classrooms, we have to build additional amenities. We are trying to allow, we want to give them a chance to come back to society if possible. We need these dollars, and I oppose this amendment.”