Foster care shelter slow to improve conditions
Kids’ supervision lacking despite promise of reforms
Questionable arrests and poor supervision of traumatized children have continued at a foster care shelter in San Joaquin County, months after county leaders pledged new training and policies would fix conditions that led to hundreds of youth being booked at the local juvenile hall for minor misbehavior.
In June, state officials found mental health services lacking for a boy who attempted to hang himself twice in one week at the Mary Graham Children’s Shelter outside Stockton. The incident led to two state citations, including a rebuke reserved for only the most serious health and safety violations.
And while there have been far fewer arrests at Mary Graham in 2017 than in previous years,
abused and neglected children still have been locked up in the nearby detention center 11 times. As before, juvenile justice authorities tossed out most of those cases because they did not warrant incarceration or criminal charges.
The incidents include a 14year-old girl who was arrested for assault after tossing a cup of water on a counselor, and a boy who spent five days in jail before authorities dropped pending charges and returned him to the shelter.
“Kids are going in traumatized, and they’re coming out with an arrest record, with more barriers,” said Sammy Nuñez, executive director of the local advocacy group Fathers and Families of San Joaquin. “That’s a big problem.”
Michael Miller, director of the San Joaquin County Human Services Agency, which oversees Mary Graham, declined to discuss the recent arrests and citations. He has previously defended the shelter’s practices, and emphasized in an interview earlier this year: “We are not doing business the way we did in 2015 and
2016.”
In an email Thursday, Miller confirmed that the shelter had been cited for the June incidents for “not identifying service objectives or a plan to meet the child’s mental health needs,” but that the deficiencies had since been cleared.
A Chronicle investigation published in May revealed that hundreds of children in California’s county foster care shelters had been arrested and jailed in 2015 and 2016 after emotional outbursts that were predictable for victims of trauma placed in institutional settings.
Arrests were by far most frequent at the 60-bed Mary Graham Children’s Shelter, a collection of pastel-colored cottages located in French Camp, a rural area near Stockton. Children as young as 9 years old were booked at juvenile hall after shelter staff called the Sheriff ’s Office to assist with such childish outbursts as an upended Monopoly board game and a youngster hitting someone with a bag of hot dog buns.
The shelter’s high number of runaway calls — thousands during a two-year period — also raised concerns about the quality of programming and supervision.
Designed as a temporary and last-resort refuge for children awaiting placement in the foster care system, shelter care is widely considered outmoded and perceived as punitive by many youth who cycle in and out of the facilities. Three of the 10 shelters operating in California last year have closed or plan to close by December, bowing to a statewide shift away from such institutions.
Miller has maintained that the shelter is a necessary part of the local foster care system. He has resolved, however, to both reduce its population and house children there for shorter
periods of time.
In an opinion column published in The Chronicle in July, Miller said the county was “working aggressively to reshape” its approach under a state law designed to reduce reliance on shelters.
Miller’s column touted Mary Graham’s initiatives to improve employee training, staff-tochild ratios and the availability of mental health services. He also noted that the average daily population at Mary Graham had plummeted in 2017, as had total arrests.
Indeed, during the first seven months of 2016, there were roughly 1,960 calls for service and 80 juvenile hall bookings from Mary Graham, according to San Joaquin County sheriff ’s and probation data. During the same time period in 2017, shelter staff contacted the Sheriff ’s Office about 600 times, leading to 11 bookings. The majority of calls involved children who left Mary Graham without permission.
Despite the drop in numbers, arrests after minor scuffles have continued, alarming youth advocates who have been monitoring the shelter. As in past years, most of the 2017 arrests involved teenage girls, most of them African American, and most were quickly released from juvenile hall with no charges filed.
Advocates are growing increasingly frustrated with county leaders’ inaction, and say questions remain about whether the shelter is continuing to mishandle the children placed in its care.
Instead of attempting to calm the 14-year-old who threw the cup of water on a counselor, for instance, staff threatened her with punishment.
“I told her that was considered assault,” a shelter counselor wrote in an April 10 incident report.
The girl proceeded to throw milk and squirt ketchup on the floor before pulling a fire alarm. She was arrested within an hour for assaulting a staff member.
Days later, records show, Mary Graham staff again relied on law enforcement to handle separate tussles that also apparently did not result in injuries.
In the first, on April 16, a 14-year-old girl was arrested for assault after teasing a 10-yearold boy about his Superman shirt then pushing him to the ground. Days later, on April 20, the same girl was arrested for battery after trying to grab a 12-year-old boy’s blanket then hitting him in the back of the head with an open hand. Last month, a 16-year-old boy was held in juvenile hall for five days on assault charges before he was returned to the shelter.
All of those cases were dis-
missed or rejected by the San Joaquin County Probation Department or district attorney’s office.
Child welfare experts say that being arrested, handcuffed and jailed for any length of time can have lasting psychological impacts on children who have suffered trauma, increasing the likelihood of a criminal future.
To prevent that outcome, a network of advocacy groups called the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color — including the Youth Law Center, Fathers and Families of San Joaquin, National Center for Youth Law and PolicyLink — has been organizing a statewide campaign “to decrease law enforcement contact with youth in the child welfare system, particularly youth residing in emergency shelters.”
The groups are pushing for a variety of reforms, including a moratorium on calling law enforcement for disciplinary purposes until new policies are developed. Advocates also want counties to clear the records of youth believed to have been wrongfully accused of crimes at shelters and provide them the necessary legal services.
After pressure from community groups, the San Joaquin County Human Services Agency will begin reporting arrest and police call data from Mary Graham to the county’s board of supervisors, according to Nuñez of Fathers and Families.
“I can’t see a circumstance where law enforcement should be involved unless a child is causing a serious threat to themselves or the community,” Nuñez said.
But troubles at Mary Graham extend beyond the inappropriate use of law enforcement. In citations issued July 14 and 28, the California Department of Social Services’ licensing division found that Mary Graham failed to document a mental health plan for a suicidal child.
The age of the boy involved in the June incidents was not revealed by authorities. But according to staff-written internal reports, he became upset on June 23, after learning that because of his poor classroom attendance, he would not be allowed to go to the “school incentive dinner outing.”
Staff attempted to soothe him, but the boy managed to pull a long string from his swim shorts and wrap it around his neck three times, tightening the string by pulling it on both ends. Staff reported the boy had trouble breathing, with bubbles and saliva coming from his mouth, but then he panicked and loosened the string.
The boy was taken to the nearby hospital, where he met with a mental health clinician, before being returned to the shelter and placed on one-onone supervision. Four days later, however, his behavior began escalating again as he complained about being unfairly disciplined.
“I’m going to hang myself with the cord from this radio,” he said before running back to his room and slamming the door.
When a staff member entered the room, she found the boy standing on a desk wrapping a cord around his neck that was attached to a fire alarm on the ceiling. As the boy inched closer to the edge of the desk, staff were able to detach the cord from the ceiling and unwind it from his neck.
With the boy in tears, shelter staff then attempted to call a clinician, but there was no answer, according to the report.
These and other troubles at Mary Graham have led some youth advocates, including former San Joaquin County Public Defender Dennise Henderson, to question whether the shelter can continue to safely house children.
In 2006, Henderson’s office defended a 17-year-old with special needs who was arrested on charges of vandalism after taking a long shower that flooded a room at Mary Graham and caused carpet damage.
“It has been more than 10 years, and we were screaming as public defenders about Mary Graham back then,” Henderson said. “The shelter should be shut down.”