Teenager in lockup that agency avoids
Youth sent there by judge, it says
A teenager in state custody was locked up Tuesday at a north Arkansas juvenile detention center even though the state had stopped sending youths there because of concerns about how the lockup used restraints and solitary lockdown.
The 18-year-old was sent to the White River Juvenile Detention Center in Batesville late last week after a judge committed him to the custody of the state Youth Services Division.
But Amy Webb, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, said the youth’s presence at the lockup was not a sign that the Youth Services Division had reversed its decision to stop housing youths there.
“Judges have the authority, and do routinely place
youth at facilities with which DYS doesn’t have signed agreements. When that happens, we work as quickly as possible to find an alternative placement,” Webb said.
Webb said the agency is still waiting to see more progress at the White River lockup before it will resume sending its youths there.
“We want to take our time and make sure we’re making the most appropriate decision for the youth. We’ll work with the facility and get kids back there when we feel it’s time to do so,” Webb said.
County Judge Robert Griffin, whose office has authority over the White River Juvenile Detention Center in Independence County, said Tuesday that he believes most of the division’s concerns about treatment at the lockup have been addressed over the past month.
“All methods of discipline have been under review. We’re trying to make sure we’re complying with reasonable uses of any disciplinary action,” Griffin said. “Every staff member is undergoing retraining.”
The White River lockup continues to house youths who have not been officially committed to state custody.
Until about a month ago, the White River lockup was one of five that the Youth Services Division relied on to house youths awaiting placement in state residential treatment centers.
Over the past six years, the division has paid about $3.5 million to house an average of 38 youths per month at the 52bed lockup, payment invoices show.
But in late December, the White River lockup was one of two county-operated juvenile detention centers that the state cut off from housing state-custody youths.
On Dec. 23, the state announced that it would stop sending youths to the Yell County Juvenile Detention Center in response to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigation that found that staff members routinely punished youths, using a restraint chair, pepper spray or an immobilizing restraint device known as The Wrap.
About a week later, the division disclosed that its investigator found that staff members at the White River lockup were using disciplinary methods that violated state juvenile detention standards.
The investigator, April Hannah, reviewed two months of reports and found more than a dozen cases at the lockup in which staff members employed excessive measures in response to minor misbehavior.
According to parts of Hannah’s notes, obtained under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, she found problems with the use of solitary lockdown in 12 of 14 incidents she reviewed.
“I have concerns regarding what appears to be the arbitrary use of ‘ lockdown’ by the detention staff for violations of verbal misconduct,” Hannah wrote of one case she reviewed. In other reports she called the use of lockdown “alarming” and “excessive.”
In two incidents referred to in Hannah’s notes, she describes cases in which staff members punished youths by placing them in a restraint chair, a device that’s supposed to be used only when youths are out of control or posing a threat of harm to themselves or others.
“The question can be raised if the youth willingly walked to the [emergency restraint chair], was it necessary to place him in there?” Hannah wrote of one case. She raised a similar question in the second case.
Hannah also found that youths were threatened with Tasers for misbehavior that didn’t pose a threat to themselves or others.
Under a written agreement, the Youth Services Division allows the White River lockup to use Tasers even though it bars the use of the stun devices in state residential treatment centers and four other juvenile detention centers that house state-custody youths.
On Tuesday, Griffin said he and a former lockup administrator reviewed incident reports from the facility and found no reason to suspend or fire any employees.
“We have had nothing that was outside the norm that rose to that level,” Griffin said.
Griffin said the incidents involving employees threatening youths with Tasers were “unacceptable” and had been addressed by allowing only supervisors to carry the devices.
The lockup’s staff members are being retrained in response to Hannah’s findings about arbitrary use of lockdown or restraints. The lockup is also changing how it promotes good behavior, Griffin said.
Instead of threats of discipline, the facility has started using a rewards-based system at the urging of the Youth Services Division. Youths are rewarded with snacks or extra free time for good behavior. Those privileges are taken away if the youths act out, and so far, the switch has been working, Griffin said.
“We saw success. In one incident a child did not want to bathe, and the threat of losing the extra snacks persuaded him to go ahead and take his bath,” Griffin said.
Griffin said he’s invited juvenile-court judges, therapists and schoolteachers to visit the facility and give him their ideas on how to improve programs there.
The county judge also has worked with the Youth Services Division to clarify how youths were treated when they were placed on 23-hour lockdown, an additional concern that Hannah noted in her review of the facility.
“We were not putting them in a cell for 23 hours,” Griffin said. “They were still going to see their therapist. They were going to school in the classroom. They were just not allowed to interact in the general population by sitting around a table with other juveniles playing cards or watching TV.”
On Tuesday, Webb said the Youth Services Division was working to validate Griffin’s description of how the lockup used 23-hour lockdown.
Division officials are encouraged by changes being made at the White River lockup, Webb said, particularly its use of rewards or loss of privileges instead of “just doling out the most severe punishment for just a minor issue.”
“There are other ways to handle behavior problems. Even the best kids in the world are going to have some behavior issues, and there are simpler and easier ways to deal with that. And it sounds like that’s exactly what they’re looking at,” she said.
The division plans to send a training team to the lockup next week, she said, and it plans to move the teen now detained at the facility.
Webb acknowledged Tuesday that the youth was in the White River lockup. Her acknowledgment came in response to questions raised by the newspaper after it had obtained a daily census report under the state Freedom of Information Act that showed that one youth was being kept there.
Finding space for the youth at another facility was difficult because he is 18 and a sex offender, which only select juvenile treatment centers are equipped to handle, Webb said.
The youth will be moved soon because a bed opened up Tuesday at the Arkansas Juvenile Assessment and Treatment Center near Alexander, which is the state’s largest youth lockup and houses some of the state’s most behaviorally troubled youths.
The lockup near Alexander is currently being monitored by a federally funded disability rights group for several reasons, including allegations that guards rewarded youths for assaulting their peers.