Juvenile Injustice
Overcrowding, violence, and abuse--state juvenile justice systems are in a shockingly chaotic state. Now, finally, the feds are stepping in.
CHINO, CALIF. -At the Heman G. Stark Youth Correctional Facility here, the K&L disciplinary lockdown is known as "the Rock." Here dim corridors are lined with the steel doors of a dozen concrete cells. The air is dank, and the drip-drip of water echoes quietly, thanks to the perpetually leaking showers. On the mental health unit, shouts and curses bounce off the walls. In a cell, a young man with his head down paces silently, back and forth, back and forth.
Angry outbursts punctuate the din. One day, two youths--one black, the other Latino--passed each other and a racial slur was muttered. Both teens started swinging. A counselor screamed at them to stop, then blasted the pair with Mace. The smaller Latino boy knocked the black youth to the ground and kicked him. A guard ran up and slammed the Latino with his baton. Then, the black kid jumped up and pummeled the Latino. The guard flailed at the black youth with his baton and yelled: "Get off him! Get off him!" A second guard threw the black inmate to the ground. Finally, both kids were cuffed and sent off for a stretch in 23-hour lockdown.
It was just another day at Stark, the biggest, toughest prison in the California Youth Authority system. One expert has called the CYA system "a very dangerous place" with "an intense climate of fear." Last year, there were nearly 300 attacks at Stark--more than double the previous year's total. And that was just kids beating up other kids. There were also 52 assaults on staffers at Stark--also double the previous year's tally. "There's riots and fights all the time," says German Carranza, 23, a round-faced native of East Los Angeles who was sent to the Youth Authority at age 17 for a gang-related murder. "I don't feel safe here. But you get so used to it you don't feel fear. You're just alert all the time."
California is hardly unique. Juvenile justice facilities across the nation are in a dangerously advanced state of disarray, with violence an almost everyday occurrence and rehabilitation the exception rather than the rule. Abuse of juvenile inmates by staff is routine. At the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore, staffers used force on juveniles 550 times between July 2002 and December 2003. At the Nevada Youth Training Center, staffers repeatedly punched boys in the chest, kicked their legs, and shoved them against walls. In Florida, a 211-page report issued in March faulted employees at the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Detention Center for failing to act as a 17-year-old begged for help but slowly died of a ruptured appendix over two days in June 2003. In Mississippi, suicidal girls at the Columbia Training School were stripped naked and placed in the "dark room," a locked, windowless isolation cell with no light and only a drain in the floor for a toilet; other kids were hogtied and pole-shackled and put on public display for hours. Girls were forced to eat their own vomit. Some staffers at Arizona's Adobe Mountain School sexually abused teens. Several states have had a disturbing spate of suicides among incarcerated kids. "Almost every place is experiencing major problems," says criminologist Barry Krisberg, author of a recent scathing report on the California Youth Authority. "There are cycles of abuse, reform, and abuse, and we are in a cycle of abuse."
It wasn't supposed to be this way. The nation's first juvenile court convened in Chicago, on July 3, 1899. To social reformers who pushed for the court, the premise was that kids were different from adults; the juvenile court aimed to rehabilitate, not punish, and the facilities where juveniles served their time were supposed to help that process along. Juveniles were then to be set free when they were deemed rehabilitated or reached 21, whichever came first. Records, generally, were kept confidential.
"Full-court press." But that, as they say, was then. As violent crime among juveniles rose during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a frightened public lost patience with the old system, and many states moved away from rehabilitation. Today, almost every state has laws making it easier to try kids as adults. Today, juvenile facilities nationwide hold some 104,000 offenders--both kids going through the court system and those adjudicated "delinquent," meaning they have committed crimes ranging from vandalism to homicide. Most states have more juveniles held for property crimes, drug offenses, and public disorder than anything else, but about a quarter of the kids are in for violent crimes. Most are minorities.
The philosophy behind locking kids up may have changed, but that's hardly a reason to excuse the violence and abuse experienced at so many of these facilities. Juvenile lockups typically are the provinces of states, which either run them or pay millions to private contractors to do the job. But the U.S. Department of Justice has recently begun attacking abuses in juvenile facilities in an aggressive way. The feds have active investigations or are monitoring settled cases in juvenile justice systems in 13 states or separate territories, including California, Georgia, Michigan, Virginia, and New Jersey. Preliminary inquiries are underway in Connecticut, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. And more cases are on the horizon. "We have a full-court press on this," says R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights. Under a 1980 law, his attorneys have the power to investigate and sue to correct a pattern or practice of unlawful conditions at juvenile facilities. The 1994 federal crime act also allows the department to sue when administrators of juvenile justice systems violate kids' rights. The flurry of suits began during the Clinton administration, but John Ashcroft's Justice Department has more than kept up the pace, doubling the number of new investigations. "No one deserves to be treated this way," says Brad Schlozman, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights. "These aren't 17-year-old drug dealers. They are 14-year-olds who have run away or who've been truant."
At first glance, the depth of the current troubles seems almost counterintuitive. The arrest rate for juvenile violent crime in 2002 was down nearly 50 percent over the past decade. And with nearly every state making it easier to send older, more serious teen offenders off to adult prisons, juvenile facilities might have been expected to become less prone to violence and abuse, not more.
Obviously, that's not the case. Why? Lacking political clout, juvenile justice facilities are chronically short of money, which means fewer staff, more overcrowding--in short, more trouble. Then there's the problem of turnover. State juvenile corrections directors can be expected, on average, to stay in their jobs only about three years. The California Youth Authority, for instance, has had five directors since 1995. Similar problems affect the direct-care staff, whose annual salaries range from $20,000 to $32,000. About a quarter of Arizona's staff, for instance, has turned over annually in recent years.
Putting still more pressure on the facilities are the courts. Despite the fall in violent crime among minors, the juvenile-court caseload increased 43 percent between 1985 and 2000.
As if that weren't bad enough, the widespread closing of children's psychiatric hospitals has made things worse. In 1992, for instance, Massachusetts closed the Gaebler Children's Center in Waltham, which treated disturbed children mostly under age 14. As a result, says Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, juvenile lockups "are getting a tremendous number of kids with mental health problems."
Mismatch. The numbers are staggering. A congressional report released in July found that two thirds of juvenile detention facilities hold kids who are waiting for community mental health treatment. In 33 states, youths with mental illness are held in detention centers without any charges against them. From January 1 to June 30, 2003, nearly 15,000 incarcerated youths were waiting for community mental health services, the report said. In addition, two thirds of juvenile detention facilities that hold youth waiting for mental health services report that some of these youths have attempted suicide or attacked others. "Judges are throwing up their hands," Loughran said, "and these kids have been flooding the juvenile corrections system." Studies suggest that about 60 percent to 70 percent of kids in detention or juvenile facilities suffer from a psychiatric disorder. "We don't think the prevalence was that high 10 or 15 years ago," says Thomas Grisso, a University of Massachussetts clinical psychologist studying the mental health of juvenile offenders.
Advocates applaud the Justice Department's muscle because it pressures states to pony up more money for juvenile-justice budgets. "The Justice Department is discovering what happens when you don't fund these places properly--they go to hell in a handbasket," says James Austin, director of George Washington University's Institute on Crime, Justice, and Corrections. Austin has helped monitor settlements between the Justice Department and troubled juvenile facilities in Georgia and Louisiana. In both states, he notes, prosecutors and judges were sending kids to those facilities who didn't need to go there. "In Georgia," he says, "you would see 9-year-olds being sent for being disruptive in school." In both states, the first fixes, Austin explained, were to cut the number of kids in the system by half, add educational and mental health staff, and beef up internal avenues to investigate abuse allegations. In Louisiana, the state was spending about $50 million a year on juvenile justice before the legal settlement. After the settlement, in 2000, the state increased that to about $85 million annually. "The situation," Austin says, "has gotten a lot better in both Georgia and Louisiana."
But they are, it seems, the exception. Over the past few years, Maryland has provided a more depressingly familiar scenario: repeated scandals at violent, mismanaged detention facilities--followed by politicians' glib promises to clean things up. The state's "reform" legislation--passed in April--is considered weak by many, in part because it would take years to implement. That same month, the Justice Department found serious civil rights violations at two Maryland facilities after a 20-month investigation. At a recent gathering in Baltimore, mothers with sons in various Maryland juvenile lockups recited a litany of horrors. Erika recalls that the first time she visited her son at the Cheltenham Youth Facility, cited repeatedly by state monitors for "excessive violence," Jason cried and told her he could hear staffers punching and kicking another kid late at night. Jason, now 18, spent nearly a month at Cheltenham for marijuana possession and distribution. "There was one kid who was 12 or 13, and he was hyper and acting up, and one night, the staff went in and started choking him," Jason recalled "I heard him screaming in his cell."
The stories are equally disturbing at the Hickey School in Baltimore, which has housed about 250 delinquent boys. Nestled on several rolling acres in rural Baltimore County, it's both a detention center for kids awaiting trial and a "training school" for boys already found delinquent by the courts. Since 1991, the state has paid tens of millions to two private companies--first Rebound, a Colorado company, then Youth Services International, a subsidiary of Correctional Services Corp.--to run the place. But the problems persisted. Behind Hickey's razor-wire fences, there are nearly three assaults a day, according to a recent state report. Of the more than 70 child abuse/neglect investigations there since July 1, 2002, a quarter of the allegations have been substantiated; in an additional 30 percent, there was not enough evidence to rule out the case but not enough to prove neglect or abuse. The state took over operations at Hickey on April 1. At the same time, Maryland lawmakers approved a package of reforms that include smaller facilities with only 48 beds, year-round education, and programs to ease kids back into their communities, though it has a years-long timetable and funding is uncertain. The state also plans to hire a new private contractor to run the facility. On a visit by a reporter to Hickey, the place seemed clean and calm, if grim. Several teens said they had not witnessed any violence there. Ken Montague, who heads the Department of Juvenile Services, says his department has tried to train staff not to be violent. But he concedes that the challenges at a place like Hickey are immense, with 50 percent to 70 percent of the kids there suffering mental-health or substance-abuse problems. "We have to work on this," Montague says, "and make sure these kids get the help they need."
What many kids get instead of help, however, is experience--of the wrong kind. Ralph Thomas, who runs the governor's office that monitors Maryland's juvenile facilities, says the system is churning out even more troubled kids: "Many of these kids come out worse for their experience in these facilities. They're more likely to prey on society."
And not just in Maryland. Back in California, at the Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center and Clinic in Norwalk, Mark Alvarado, 19, is a depressing illustration of the state of juvenile justice. Alvarado says he set his grandmother's house on fire at age 5. At 9, he says he joined a gang; his older brother had "Natural Born Killer" tattooed on his collarbone. He was in and out of juvenile hall for years for what he calls "little stuff--burglaries and robberies and arson." He was thrown in the CYA at 16 for auto theft. There, he says, he learned new skills--how to hot-wire a car and how to break into houses. "I came out a better criminal," he says. "That's how it is for most people." Alvarado was paroled in June.
With Vince Beiser
This story appears in the August 9, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.