By Dan Wallach
Beaumont Enterprise
BEAUMONT, Texas — Parkway Village Estates lies just a few hundred yards south of the Texas Youth Commission’s former Al Price Unit, with a few trees screening the vacant property from a 200-plus-space mobile home neighborhood.
Signs in the subdivision state “Slow Up, Let Our Kids Grow Up,” and steep speed bumps put an exclamation point on it.
Chalk art on short driveways lets visitors know that kids are nearby, as do bicycles leaning against the homes. A basketball goal stands on the side of the street.
It’s a little kid’s paradise - lots of friends and a community pool with summer coming.
Rumblings that the old youth commission unit could be used for sex offenders alarm nearby residents.
“I’m totally against it,” said Amanda Gilbert, a resident for two years, as she watched her 5-year-old daughter, Payton, play on a trampoline and bolt across the tidy streets with her friends.
“Too many kids, too many women, too many elderly. There’s no way they can move that into the middle of Mid County,” Gilbert said.
When the Texas Youth Commission consolidated its units because of budget cuts, the former Al price Unit closed in 2011. It had been built for about 350 youthful low-risk offenders.
The unit, surrounded by a high cyclone-style fence but lacking the iconic razor wire evident at other nearby prison units, was built in the mid-1990s during Jefferson County’s boom to accommodate the state’s penal needs.
The Office of Violent Sex Offender Management looks at it as a suitable place to bring in about 180 convicted sex offenders who have completed their prison sentences.
These are offenders whom the state has committed in a civil procedure to live in a controlled environment for further treatment. They aren’t yet eligible for release to the public.
The agency’s executive director, Marsha McLane, is expected to explain in detail her office’s plans for the unit at a Commissioners Court workshop session at 11 a.m. today.
“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said David Munselle, a retiree from Kansas City Southern Railway and eight-year resident of Parkway Village.
“I don’t want child molesters that close,” he said. “There are a lot of kids here.”
Heather Kirkpatrick, relaxing on her porch, said she isn’t as alarmed as others might be. She said her father once worked at the Mark Stiles Unit, one of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice penitentiaries, which is part of the cluster of penal units along with two state jails and the federal prison complex to the west.
“We live by prisons anyway,” she said. “There are some pretty bad people out there.”
At Triangle Baptist Church, on U.S. 69 almost immediately south of the Al Price Unit, church members Robert Haro and Kenneth Leavins, the interim pastor, were cleaning up the church and its grounds in preparation for Easter.
“If there are sex offenders there, we don’t want them to roam free,” Leavins said.
He said when the Al Price Unit was in operation, they had no trouble with the occupants.
“Our concern is our kids,” he said.
McLane has told The Enterprise that the former inmates also would be full-time residents and they would not have privileges like working away from the unit. If any did leave for any reason, it would be under tight control with case managers or transport officers and with their movements closely monitored.
Haro went through his list of concerns.
“Everybody needs a second chance, but are we at risk? Pretty much. Is it too close to us? Probably so. Anything can happen. You never know.”
Selina Burns, trimming her grass at her home in Parkway Village, said she’d rather see the state put sex offenders into “something better made than that,” referring to the former youth commission dorms.
“I hope they don’t put them in here, but they probably will, the way this world is,” she said.