Earlier this year, a sex-abuse scandal hit the Texas Youth Commission. At the same time (for unrelated reasons), the whining mother of a whining delinquent got a crew of race-baiters to demand her release -- and sparked the early release of a large number of juveniles thugs and criminals.

Care to guess what happened? It shouldn't be too hard.

Thirteen days after Howard McJunkin was paroled from a Texas Youth Commission facility for beating and raping an elderly woman in this East Texas town, authorities say he committed the same crime again.

McJunkin is one of 2,200 offenders the TYC rushed to release this year as part of an effort to drastically reduce the population of the scandal-plagued juvenile corrections system. Nearly one in five of those parolees — 408 — have been rearrested for committing new offenses, including McJunkin and 42 others for violent crimes, documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle reveal.

While high recidivism rates have long been a fact of life for TYC — 50 percent of parolees offend again within three years — the rapid rearrests of offenders released in a hurry this year has residents in this town of 25,000 demanding to know: Exactly who's getting out, and how are decisions being made?

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While the Legislature this spring enacted a series of agency-wide reforms in an effort to address a sex abuse scandal, including closing TYC to offenders between the ages of 19 and 21 and those who committed misdemeanor offenses, they left untouched TYC's current criteria for paroling juveniles.

Staff who make parole decisions can consider neither the seriousness of an offender's original crime, nor his or her sentence, just the offender's behavior inside TYC.