Bringing Her Lone Star Power

Don’t be fooled by the fuzzy old mutt dozing peacefully on Donna Brorby’s lap. Tough and relentless, Brorby spent more than 20 years -- the bulk of her life as a lawyer -- forcing Texas to clean up its notorious prisons.

Death threats, stubborn wardens, hostile politicians, witnesses willing to lie for their beloved correctional system -- such were the obstacles Brorby faced as counsel for Texas inmates in the nation’s longest-running civil rights case.

Now, the Bay Area native has been asked to apply her talents in California.

Under a lawsuit settlement announced last month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brorby will oversee a top-to-bottom overhaul of the state’s juvenile prison system, rocked this year by graphic disclosures of violent conditions and substandard care.

Both sides in the lawsuit -- prison officials and attorneys who filed the case on behalf of taxpayers -- agree that Brorby, 53, has the insider know-how, credibility and temperament for the job. Less certain is whether the legal remedies she must enforce will turn around the California Youth Authority, home to 4,000 of the state’s toughest young lawbreakers.

“Given that every effort to fundamentally change the CYA has failed over the last two decades, it’s obvious that she faces a very tough task,” said David Steinhart, a veteran juvenile justice consultant. “It’s a mountain that nobody has been able to move so far.”

Those who knew Brorby in Texas say she has the impartial demeanor and stamina such a task will demand. Fixing the CYA will require her to cope with tricky politics, competing agendas and shrunken coffers, but few challenges could equal what she encountered in Texas in the 1970s, they say.

At the time, female lawyers were relatively few, and Brorby was in her late 20s, fresh out of UC Berkeley’s law school. Possessing little real-world legal experience, she was given a formidable task: Ferret out facts from inside a secretive, brutal penal system that evoked images of “Cool Hand Luke.”

To say she was viewed with disdain by most Texas prison officials would be an understatement. The system was a man’s world through and through, recalled Steve Martin, a onetime correctional officer who became chief counsel for the prisons. Many wardens took to calling Brorby “little lady” when she showed up at their gates.

“Donna is not a ‘hose and heels gal,’ ” added Scott McCown, the state’s lead lawyer on the prison case in the mid-1980s. “And she’d show up at these East Texas prisons in her bluejeans and tennis shoes looking like some liberal activist from San Francisco. By Texas standards, everything about her was weird and threatening.”

Brorby quickly proved that “she had no problem going toe to toe with the good ol’ boys” on behalf of her inmate clients, added McCown. But ultimately, he said, she won over most of the wardens because she was straightforward and fair.

“She always had a willingness to be moved by the facts, and everyone respected her for that.... Of course, that doesn’t mean they didn’t dread seeing her coming and weren’t glad to see her go.”

In the California Youth Authority, Brorby confronts a system that once was a national model of juvenile rehabilitation but now sees three out of four of its parolees arrested on new charges within three years of release.

Its problems don’t end there. As part of the lawsuit, a team of experts went inside the prisons and produced reports depicting a system plagued by shoddy medical care, inadequate psychological services, a pervasive gang culture and violence considered “off the charts” compared to that in other states.

Next month, CYA officials must detail their plans for reform. Brorby was picked by both sides as the “special master” for the case.

She will evaluate the plans, suggest changes, mediate disputes between the parties and prepare progress reports -- all toward the goal of ensuring the CYA fulfills the terms of the settlement. She has no direct power over state officials, but she can ask the supervising judge to intervene if she suspects foot-dragging.

The job is a delicate one, requiring a person who can remain scrupulously objective and gain the trust of warring parties. In that sense, Brorby’s selection stirred a few qualms among those inside the CYA, given her background as a lawyer for prisoners.

Carl Reynolds, general counsel for the Texas prison system, said skeptics needn’t worry: “Donna is very zealous on behalf of her clients, but she also understands corrections and knows how to figure out who’s telling the truth.”

CYA Director Walter Allen III said he views Brorby as a “very pragmatic person. What we didn’t need is another person hovering at 4,000 feet telling us what to do,” he said. “Because of her experience on the ground in Texas, Donna Brorby knows it’s not a simple thing to make the reforms we intend to make.”

Brorby’s attraction to prison litigation was not an instant one. Raised in the East Bay city of Richmond, she was among the first white kids to attend predominantly black schools. As such, she had a front-row view of racial inequities, and, she said, developed an early determination to “do something meaningful in the world.”

Initially, that meant law school and work as an attorney handling employment discrimination cases. But in 1978, a friend recommended her to William Bennett Turner, a respected civil rights lawyer looking for help with a case challenging Texas prison conditions as unconstitutional.

Brorby was hesitant. Though she admired public defenders and others who fought for the rights of criminal defendants and convicts, her preference was for helping those who “played by the rules.”

But then Turner explained to her the basic principle of prison law cases, that “no matter what they’d done, prisoners were people and they needed to be treated like human beings,” Brorby recalled. The argument made good sense, and she had no hesitation after that.

In fact, the Texas prison case -- which spanned 30 years before being settled in 2002 --became her life’s work. Looking back, the witty, unpretentious attorney -- who ran marathons to relieve the stress of the case -- said: “I could be wrong, but I think I’ve spent more time inside prisons than any attorney who hasn’t done time for a crime.”

The Texas case began with a handwritten lawsuit from David Ruiz, an armed robber from Austin. His complaint was joined with seven others into a class action that eventually shaped nearly every aspect of life inside the state’s lockups, including the size and design of the cells, what inmates eat and who takes X-rays when they break a bone.

Like many Southern states, Texas ran its prisons according to a plantation model, in which the warden was king and life for inmates was dangerous. Among the early victories was the dismantling of a corrupt internal hierarchy that made some prisoners bosses over others in exchange for privileges.

U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, who presided over the case, called the system “incapable of description -- the conditions so pernicious and the inmates’ pain and degradation so extensive.”

From outside the walls, however, the Texas prisons appeared clean, efficient and cost-effective. The atrocities were hidden beneath the veneer.

Brorby, who was paid $7.50 an hour at the start, said uncovering those atrocities initially left her depressed, because she’d had no idea how inhumane the conditions were. She recalled one visit to a prison that appeared, from all reports, to be one of the better ones.

Instead, interviews with a randomly selected group of inmates revealed that half of them had been raped in the last six months -- assaults that were corroborated by medical reports and other evidence.

“The impact of that sort of human pain was unbelievable,” she recalled. “And here we thought this was one of the good prisons.”

In 1980, Justice declared that confinement inside Texas prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. He followed that ruling with a set of sweeping orders mandating improvements that created a modern system bearing no resemblance to the old one.

Criminal justice experts say there is no doubt that the case transformed Texas prisons. For Brorby, evaluating the victory is more difficult, as problems linger.

“People report that, on balance, things are better,” she said. “It’s hard for me to say because I have so many years tied up in it. If we weren’t successful, then I should have spent my life teaching school or something.”

Brorby hopes her work on the CYA case “will be measured in years, not decades.” In her first month on the job, she visited several CYA prisons, read extensive reports and met key players. During that time, yet another scandal broke as a young inmate at the agency’s only facility for girls alleged that several staffers had forced her and other prisoners into providing sex repeatedly over the last two years. Four officers are on leave pending an investigation.

Skeptics say that despite the Schwarzenegger administration’s settlement of the lawsuit and apparent commitment to reform, true change at the Youth Authority will be elusive -- and expensive. They note that the legal settlement does not spell out what the CYA should look like, where to find money for fixes or how to instill a more therapeutic culture.

Brorby won’t share her thoughts on the system, saying that doing so might color perceptions of her as a neutral overseer. But she does not seem daunted by the path ahead.

“I think it’s right up my alley,” she said with a grin.