By Juan Carlos Rodriguez
Albuquerque Journal
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — State officials say they are making some quick fixes to improve security at an Albuquerque juvenile jail after several violent incidents and escapes.
Children, Youth and Families Department Secretary Dorian Dodson said Tuesday in a Journal interview that inmates now attend school in shifts, rather than together as they had in the past.
They also wear uniforms to school rather than street clothes, which was permitted until recently.
Outside school, the youths wear color-coded shirts that identify the housing units they live in, an important distinction because the units separate inmates based on age, mental health needs and violent tendencies. Although they live separately, violent offenders can still interact with the general population at the Youth Diagnostic and Development Center school and during other functions.
About 130 inmates were gathered in the gym on April 16 for a bingo party when about 35 inmates began brawling. The party was supposed to reward inmates for good behavior. Some of the youths involved in the fight had either escaped or tried to escape only weeks earlier.
Dodson said having that many inmates together was a mistake in judgment by the center’s management.
“That should not have happened,” Dodson said.
Dodson, who has been working out of YDDC instead of her office in Santa Fe since the bingo brawl, said an event like that would not be allowed in the future.
She said more changes at YDDC are in store.
The department is preparing to reform the juvenile detention center using an approach it calls Cambiar New Mexico, which is based on a juvenile rehabilitation model that originated in Missouri.
Mark Steward, who helped bring about the Missouri reforms, now runs a nonprofit that has contracted with New Mexico to train workers on the changes. New Mexico has paid about $650,000 to the nonprofit since last year.
The Missouri model emphasizes intensive small-group therapy and peer mentoring. From the time a youth is admitted, he or she stays with the same group of peers and staff for the duration of the sentence.
The approach is used at the J. Paul Taylor juvenile detention center in Las Cruces. Although the changes haven’t been in place long enough to determine recidivism rates, Dodson said violent incidents and staff turnover have dropped.
Staff members at YDDC will be trained in areas including counseling with the goal of making them less like traditional jail guards and more like social workers, although both Dodson and Steward stressed that safety is the No. 1 concern.
Steward’s group, the Missouri Youth Services Institute, is in Albuquerque this week evaluating policies and procedures at YDDC. Cambiar New Mexico is scheduled to begin with guard training in July, Dodson said. The process could take as long as two years.
Critics say it ignores that more violent offenders will take advantage of the program to victimize other inmates.
Steward said the Missouri model has been used effectively in Washington, D.C., and Louisiana. He said the Missouri system does separate inmates according to security classification.
The issue of separating violent offenders from other youths has caused heated debate in recent weeks. The former head of YDDC, Bruce Langston, was booted from his job recently. He contends the department is endangering youths by failing to separate violent inmates, and says he was turned down in his request for programs to deal with them.
Langston says that he is being made a scapegoat, and that the union that represents officers at YDDC say top off icials are clueless about conditions and that it is becoming more dangerous all the time.
Copyright 2009 Albuquerque Journal