The Texas Model

A unified statewide juvenile justice system depends on a healthy agency culture and collaborative stakeholders. Our vehicle for building a healthy agency culture and partnering with stakeholders is the Texas Model.

The goals of the Texas Model are aligned with the Texas Legislature’s goal in the Juvenile Justice code — “to provide for the protection of the public and public safety, and to:

  • Promote the concept of punishment for criminal acts;
  • Remove, where appropriate, the taint of criminality from youth;
  • Provide treatment, training, and rehabilitation that emphasizes the accountability and responsibility of the youth;
  • To provide the care, protection, and holistic development of youth in the juvenile justice system; and
  • To protect the welfare of the community.”

The Model embodies the core values of the Agency: safety, accountability, and transparency.

Together, these values promote public safety by targeting:

  • staff safety and retention
  • effective youth supervision and accountability, and
  • youth safety, skill development, and rehabilitation 

What is the Texas Model?

The Texas Model principles and practices directs how the agency operates and is an evidence-based approach that TJJD employs to promote lasting behaviorial change and skill development in youth. 

The Model targets specific risk factors for recidivism and increases protective factors, and provides youth the structure, knowledge, and support they need to:

  • Connect positively with others
  • Engage effectively in treatment
  • Respond appropriately to environmental stressors
  • Reintegrate safely into the community

The goal of the Texas Model is to implement data-driven, research-based initiatives that help the agency achieve the following:

  • Physical and psychological safety for all youth and staff
  • A structured rehabilitative milieu in which staff have the tools they need to shape behavior, reinforce treatment goals, and maintain accountability
  • Observable behavior change showing youth know how to regulate themselves and respond appropriately to their environment
DEFINITION

milieu: the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops :  ENVIRONMENT

Achieving these goals requires a strategic, iterative approach so culture change can take hold throughout facilities, the agency, and the system at large. Ultimately, Texas communities can then reap the public safety benefits.  Programs that focus only on compliance, often through fear of punishment, have not been shown to be effective for achieving long-term public safety.

Texas Model Foundation: Building Safety and Trust

TJJD launched the Texas Model in 2019 with a basic premise in mind: For youth behavior to change, youth and staff at secure facilities must first be physically and psychologically safe. Therefore, our first task with any youth is to foster a sense of safety so they have the capacity to develop needed skills and transition home.

To promote facility safety, new integrated training initiatives focused on building appropriate adult/youth relationships that help build rapport and connection to then correct youth behavior. Training focused on expanding the toolbox for our staff to better meet the youth’s needs.

This required shifting the role of direct-care staff from an authoritarian staff to an authoritative one and moving from the sole focus on compliance in the facility to utilizing safety focused compliance as the foundation for treatment and rehabilitation. TJJD staff needed to shift away from practices that dysregulated the youth in our care, to practices that help youth identify ways to regulate their emotions and behavior while taking care of basic physical needs for the youth.

Recognizing the history and experience of the youth coming into our system is critical for us to be able to establish the relationship and safety needed for rehabilitation. It is imperative for us to understand our youth demographics .

Safety is based on trust. As a result, our Texas Model initiatives were grounded in Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI). TBRI is an evidence-based approach to help youth build positive connections and correct negative behaviors before they escalate.  TBRI is based on Bath’s Three Pillars of TraumaWise Care: Safety, Connection, and Coping.   

Early Texas Model Initiatives Established (2019-2023)

TBRI practitioner training: Ensures employees at all levels of the agency have the skills necessary to implement TBRI practices successfully.
Facility classification: Allows staff to place youth in TJJD facilities based on their assessed risks and needs to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Violence Intervention Continuum: Designed to target youths’ aggressive or violent behaviors so they may be held accountable and learn the skills necessary to safely return to other TJJD programming.
Nurture groups: Creates a routine opportunity for youth to set goals, discuss barriers to meeting those goals, and improve their communication and regulation skills.
Capital and Serious Violent Offender Group: Expanded to an additional campus so more youth can benefit from specialized programming designed to address offending cycles.
Caregiver training series: Launched to connect parents and guardians with the information and support they need to assist with their youths’ safe transition back into the community.
Crisis Stabilization Unit: Developed to stabilize, assess, and treat youth with the most intensive mental health needs in a highly structured, short-term environment.
Behavior Stabilization Unit: Developed to meet the needs of youth with co-occurring intensive mental health and aggressive behavior treatment needs within a highly structured environment. 

(For more on TBRI, see the Resources section at the bottom of the page.)

Texas Model: Developing Practical Life Skills

In 2023, TJJD began expanding upon the early development of the Texas Model by introducing a milieu-based implementation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). Research shows DBT can reduce self-harm and suicide behaviors in adults and adolescents, and pilot studies demonstrate that dorm-based DBT can reduce recidivism, self-harm, and aggression and increase employment in adolescents treated in juvenile justice settings.

A poster explaining DBT skills.
A poster explaining DBT skills.

(Click to enlarge.)

DBT directly targets skills that can help people in these specific areas, motivating them to build pro-social and successful lives. Five key skillsets include:

  • Mindfulness: Controlling your attention and cultivating the ability to focus on the present moment.
  • Emotion Regulation: Recognizing and accurately labeling your emotions so you can reduce vulnerability to negative emotions, increase experiences of positive emotions, and shift between emotions more easily.
  • Distress Tolerance: Accepting things you cannot change in the short term and avoiding impulsive decisions that may have detrimental impacts in the long term.
  • Interpersonal Effectiveness: Treating people with respect, communicating effectively with others, and accurately evaluating whether a relationship you’re engaged in is healthy.
  • Problem Solving: Using chain analysis to better understand behavior and solution analysis to support decision-making that favors more skillful behavior in the future.

DBT is a cognitive-behavior therapy developed for individuals who exhibit extreme emotion-driven behaviors (e.g., suicide, aggression). These individuals typically exhibit poor response to traditional treatments and have life-course outcomes among the worst in the public health arena, with unstable relationships, poor employment and marital outcomes, involvement with law enforcement, substance dependence, and often early death. DBT has been extensively researched in gold-standard studies, and pilot studies indicate effectiveness at working with incarcerated youth and adults. Its focus is on improved problem-solving based upon skills development in key areas of functioning: interpersonal, emotional, and long-range planning. 

(For more on DBT, see the Resources section at the bottom of the page.)

Texas Model: Roles and Responsibilities

The Texas Model is rooted in teamwork. Staff teams, not just individual practitioners, provide programming through structured daily activities, treatment groups, and DBT skills groups. Everyone at the agency plays a part, but those working most closely with youth have the biggest impact on their skill development. It is essential for these individual roles to work in concert for an effective rehabilitative program. Key roles include the following, which occur in individual and group settings:

JCO 3

Juvenile Correctional Officers are the safe, structured, stable adult with the youth throughout all programming. The JCOs primary role is to provide safety and security across programs, and to identify, coach, and reinforce youth skillful behavior. In many ways, JCOs act as our first-responders to youth in crisis and in ensuring basic safety.

A supporter of the TJJD team and our efforts.

Educators serve dual roles in providing educational instruction for our youth, and structuring the classroom to support learning and youth skill development. 

A Case Manager.

Case Managers teach the youth new skills, provide context for skill development, and help the youth practice using skills in our highly structured environment. They prepare youth to use those skills in their community.  

A Mental Health staffmember.

Mental Health Providers are the primary staff to assess and diagnose responsivity issues and develop the individual youth treatment plan. MHPs assess and gauge what tools the youth already have, and where there are deficiencies. MHPs identify the skills applicable to the youth and assist other staff to understand the youth-specific behavior plans.

Guardians/caregivers/mentors

Guardians/caregivers/mentors can have significant influence on a youth’s learning new skills while in our highly structured facilities. We also partner with them   to support the youth as they use newly learned skills in the less structured environment of the community.

Key Texas Model Tenets

The Texas Model is built on the agency’s purpose as established by the Texas Legislature.

  • “Create a unified state juvenile justice agency that works in partnership with local county governments, the courts, and communities to promote public safety by providing a full continuum of effective supports and services to youth from initial contact through termination of supervision
  • Produce positive outcomes for youth, families, and communities
  • Assure accountability, quality, consistency, and transparency through effective monitoring and use of systemwide performance measures
  • Promote the use of program and service designs and interventions proven to be most effective in rehabilitating youth
  • Prioritizing the use of community-based or family-based programs and services for youth
  • Effectively house and rehabilitate the youthful offenders who cannot be safely served in less-restrictive settings
  • Protect and enhance the cooperative agreements between state and local county governance.”

Texas Model and DBT Skills

TJJD Executive Director Shandra Carter and other agency executives explain the agency’s therapeutic approach with youth under the Texas Model. They also discuss the Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills that are being taught as part of the Texas Model. Watch this video >>

Resources

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