A juvenile correctional officer at the state youth prison in Gainesville was hospitalized after an assault by a youth in custody, and the Texas Juvenile Justice Department put all five of its secure facilities under dorm-by-dorm lockdown in response, Executive Director Shandra Carter told the agency's board on Aug. 21.
Carter identified the injured worker as JCO Hernandez and said she suffered physical and psychological injuries in what Carter called an exceptionally brutal assault by a youth serving an indeterminate sentence. The public board record shows Hernandez was hospitalized and later discharged. Carter said she reached the hospital about six hours after the attack and stayed in contact with Hernandez during her recovery.
The Gainesville State Juvenile Correctional Facility sits on 190 acres at 1379 FM 678 in Cooke County. TJJD counts it among five secure campuses that hold young people who committed felony-level offenses and ran out of options on local probation.
According to Carter, the youth had been at Gainesville two weeks, sent there on a probation violation for stealing his mother's gun, and nothing in his record marked him as high-risk or highly violent. She said he was moved to the department's Phoenix MAX unit in Mart and that the matter went to the Special Prosecution Unit.
After that assault and another recent attack on staff, TJJD applied lockdown, shutdown and slowdown protocols dorm by dorm at every secure facility, Carter said. No dorm came off lockdown because a clock ran out. Each one was evaluated several times a day, she said, and every phase change needed her approval.
Board Chair Manny Ramirez said three significant youth-on-staff assaults in the past month had caused serious injuries and created life-threatening challenges inside the secure facilities. About nine in 10 youth in TJJD custody are actively engaged, Ramirez said, while the remaining tenth accounts for a much higher rate of violence against staff. Carter said that in fiscal 2026, youth serving indeterminate sentences accounted for 76% of all staff assaults and 74% of assaults on staff that caused injury.
Indeterminate-sentence youth account for most staff assaults
Fiscal 2026 figures cited by Executive Director Shandra Carter.
Source: TJJD Board meeting, Aug. 21, 2026
Gainesville has been through long lockdowns before. The 2023 Sunset Advisory Commission review found some form of lockdown at four of the five secure facilities between December 2021 and April 2022, including 116 separate days at Gainesville. Sunset staff tied the practice to staffing shortages, described bathroom waits of three hours or more, and reported rising suicide assessments and aggressive behavior with lockdowns as a root cause. The Justice Department found in 2024 that conditions at Gainesville and four other TJJD facilities violated the Constitution and federal disability and education law.
The advocacy group Texas Appleseed, in a report published this year, said officer turnover at Gainesville reached 106% in fiscal 2025 and that the number of TJJD officers statewide with more than three years on the job fell from 535 in fiscal 2019 to 204 this year. Those figures come from the organization, not from the agency.
Gainesville had the steepest officer turnover of any secure campus
Juvenile correctional officer turnover in fiscal 2025, as reported by Texas Appleseed.
Source: Texas Appleseed, "Behind Concrete Walls" (2026)
The board voted unanimously the same day to ask lawmakers for about $347 million in exceptional items for 2028-29, including money for security and body-worn cameras and for two new secure facilities scheduled to open in January 2029.
_Editor's note: Everyone charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law._
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