Lincoln Hills faces new issues Intern program at youth prison flawed, report says
MADISON - Inspectors reviewing a psychology internship program at Wisconsin’s troubled youth prison complex reported a host of problems in January — just four months after Gov. Scott Walker’s administration said the issues had been cleared up.
Interns had excessive caseloads, inconsistent supervision, few training opportunities and unethical behavior around them. Their supervisors also described feeling “a sense of overwhelm with the current demands.”
The disclosures mark the latest sign of ongoing tumult at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, about 30 miles north of Wausau, which has been under criminal investigation for more than two years.
Four directors have overseen the complex’s psychological internship program since August 2015. Each of the past three abruptly left amid misconduct allegations that included crude behavior with interns and producing erroneous intern evaluations. Two have surren-
dered their state licenses to practice. The third has been referred to licensing authorities for investigation.
The most recent departure occurred in November, when the head of the internship program was put on leave just weeks before inspectors from the American Psychological Association visited the prison complex as part of a review of the internship program. The inspectors left with renewed concerns, according to a Jan. 11 report to corrections officials that was obtained by the USA TODAY Network under open records laws.
“Interns at this site have had few stable and enduring role models, and by their reports, training has taken a second chair to other issues,” the inspectors wrote. “This internship advertises a set of rotation opportunities which, according to interns, have not fully materialized due to issues with population decline or institutional policy.”
APA representatives declined to comment for this story. In an email, corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said the internship program’s current director has the full support of department leadership and “many of the concerns raised (by APA inspectors) are historic in nature and have been addressed under new leadership.”
Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University who specializes in juvenile delinquency, said after reading the report he found it “irritating” that Lincoln Hills plans to bring another group of interns on board in the fall. The state should take a year off so that it can get its internship program in order — or drop it altogether, he said.
“This kind of place is like a dinosaur,” Boxer said, noting it isolates juvenile offenders in the rural north, hours away from their families.
“This kind of program might not be all that relevant anymore.”
Interns are one year away from securing their doctorates; using them saves taxpayers money. If the state lost its accreditation, it would have to hire professional psychologists, who make far more than the $30,000 a year interns receive.
Ongoing FBI and U.S. Department of Justice investigations examining inmate abuse allegations and possible civil rights violations at the complex trace back to 2015. A class-action lawsuit alleging unsafe conditions and civil rights violations at the facilities is also pending.
In February, responding to the APA inspectors, state corrections officials wrote that they were working to “repair and rebuild” the internship program. They said training continues to be a “significant priority” and reported several changes to the program since the inspectors’ visit. Interns now have more training options, stricter caseload limits, and more chances for providing therapy to inmates in solitary confinement, corrections officials wrote.
“Our program has remained candid with all intern applicants, as well as our current intern cohort,” corrections officials wrote in a Feb. 8 letter. “We have used this as a learning experience for our current intern cohort.”
Corrections officials said more than 16 hours of mental health training has been provided to new guards since November “in order to balance the correctional culture with a culture of treatment” and “the culture has begun to shift.”
The latest APA visit came after one in 2014 in which inspectors found interns weren’t given enough time to do their assessments, did not understand what was expected of them, were trained by staff who were not familiar with psychological tests, and sometimes were not evaluated by their bosses.
The internship program was re-accredited in April 2015 because corrections officials had addressed previous supervision and staffing concerns by, among other things, hiring two psychologists. Last September, corrections officials said they had worked hard to resolve those issues.
The accreditation the state received is good until 2019. Nonetheless, inspectors returned in December and it’s not clear why. In their January report about the visit, inspectors said they were reviewing the “stability of the broader institution and supervisory staff.”
Four directors in two years
The psychology interns at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake have faced abrupt and repeated leadership changes.
The facilities’ chief psychologist, Vincent Ramos, became the internship program’s director in August 2015. Three months later, he was fired for taking pictures of interns in a hotel room while wearing only his underwear and a Tshirt. He surrendered his state license to practice in March.
Wilson Fowle became the program’s interim director after Ramos but lasted just a month before a misconduct investigation prompted his departure, too. Internal investigators say he claimed to see inmates on days he didn’t work. He retired before the investigation was complete and agreed last year to surrender his psychology license.
A top aide to state Attorney General Brad Schimel last year said Fowle may be charged, but Schimel’s office has declined to say whether that will happen.
Derek Jeremy John followed Ramos and Fowle, and lasted less than a year in the director’s position. Corrections officials say he ignored dozens of requests from inmates for help and produced intern evaluations that said they had conducted group therapy work when they had not. The state referred him to state licensing officials for possible discipline.
John was fired in December but reached a deal with the state in April to characterize his departure as a resignation.
In fighting his termination, John wrote that he was given more work than one person could perform. He was put in charge of the internship program but received no training on how to do it — or even how to supervise interns, according to a letter he wrote in March.
Daniel Cohen was at Lincoln Hills from 2014 to 2016, first as an intern and then as a psychologist. In a statement he wrote to help John, Cohen described the facilities as short on resources. Cohen wrote that his experience “reflected an institution that was chronically and significantly understaffed, especially within the psychological service unit (PSU). The institutional needs/demands far exceeded the resources available within the PSU.”
Chief psychologist Melissa Parrent, who was hired a month before John’s departure, is now in charge of the internship program. Having one person with all those responsibilities worries staff members, who believe “history is going to repeat itself,” inspectors noted in their report. That appears to have been a reference to Rick Miller, who retired in March 2014 from Lincoln Hills because he said his bosses had given him more duties than one person could handle by making him both chief psychologist and intern director.
Cook, the department spokesman, said Parrent “has done well managing both positions.” To reduce caseloads, the department plans to hire another licensed psychologist soon and is seeking funds from next year’s state budget to boost mental health staffing.
Interns voice concerns
Past interns told inspectors they were pressured to deliver clinical services at the complex rather than attend training elsewhere, and a top administrator had to advocate for them to attend a training “their supervisors did not want them to attend.”
Supervision was so scant that interns “spoke of offering supervision to each other” based on past job experiences. Supervisors, citing higher than typical caseloads due to staffing shortages, said there is a “crunch of licensed people to provide supervision to interns and all unlicensed staff.”
APA inspectors cast the complex’s past and present interns as being forgotten while their directors were shuffled out the door. Last year’s interns described disarray during a period without both their director and the complex’s chief psychologist.
“The content of scheduled individual supervision from some of the remaining supervisors devolved most of the time onto off-topic conversations on personal issues. They saw supervisors modeling behavior that was neither professional nor ethical,” inspectors wrote.
The inspectors’ report doesn’t elaborate on the inappropriate behavior. Cook said the remarks refer to staff who are no longer employed.
Keegan Kyle is a reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. Patrick Marley is a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They can be reached at kkyle@gannett.com and patrick.marley@jrn.com.