By Debbie Kelley
The Gazette
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — A request for a $1.2 million supplemental appropriation to add security staff at the state’s troubled youth corrections facilities was denied Wednesday by the Colorado General Assembly’s Joint Budget Committee.
The problem is, 53 people have been hired to do the job.
The reason for the denial, committee Chairman Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, said Friday is that Colorado Department of Human Services officials didn’t answer committee members’ questions.
“We disapproved it for a lack of data. We had a hard deadline to balance the budget, and DHS said they would have the data, and they didn’t,” Lambert said. “They still haven’t responded with the data.”
Lambert said the JBC members’ questions “weren’t unreasonable.” Committee members did not question the amount of money but rather “Where the department is in the hiring process, and if they had already hired people, where is the money coming from? Was it already appropriated?”
DHS spokesman Dan Drayer said Friday that, yes, Youth Corrections hired 53 additional staff members in December. The move came on the heels of increasing incidents of assaults and violence in the fall in 10 state-operated centers that house juvenile offenders.
The department used money from a pot that had been allocated to pay for placing juvenile offenders with contracted community service providers, moving it to the state-run commitment and detention facilities fund, he said.
“Caseload fluctuates based on the youth in care at any given time,” Drayer said in an email. “Therefore, the General Assembly has provided the Department of Human Services the flexibility and authority to move funding within its annual budget to meet the needs of kids in its care.”
Drayer did not say why DHS officials missed the JBC deadline but said DHS expects to work with committee members to come to a resolution.
“Because the JBC has asked that we get back to them with additional information, and they remain willing to reconsider, it is premature to talk about layoffs,” Drayer said.
Lambert said the JBC could reconsider the department’s supplemental budget request.
“It’s hard to make a decision over several million dollars when we don’t have the data we requested,” he said. “We need to rely on DHS to be candid with us and on time.”
Drayer said DHS is working to “ensure they have the most up-to-date and accurate information, in order to keep them informed of the ongoing safety enhancements through Youth Corrections.”
Troubles emerge
The missed funding approval is one in a string of concerns lawmakers and others have had with the Department of Human Services’ Division of Youth Corrections over the past eight months.
Officials have not been forthcoming in a timely manner with requests from other lawmakers, as well as The Gazette, for information on violence and operations within the facilities.
Much of the attention has been focused on Spring Creek Youth Services Center in Colorado Springs.
Lawmakers said that for years they had heard rumblings of problems inside Spring Creek, which has 80 beds for detained and committed youths ages 10 to 21. But it wasn’t until May, when Colorado Springs School District 11 announced it would not renew its annual contract with DYC to provide educational services at the center - partly due to concerns over the safety of its teachers - that the issues came under public scrutiny.
A lack of strong leadership, deteriorating communications and inadequate procedures were blamed for the chaotic environment that some workers described as unsafe and unbearable.
After making management changes, reducing the population of incarcerated youths, beefing up training and adding staff, assaults on students and staff continued at Spring Creek, including what police called a riot in August.
Later in August, an audit released by the state revealed that the department wasn’t properly overseeing the administration of powerful psychotropic medication to youths across its facilities.
The latest 53 staff additions are necessary to “improve safety and security” at facilities across the state, according to the appropriation request. Youth Corrections officials said that the division has experienced “steady increases of assaults and fights, including those on staff at the facilities.”
The number of assaults has risen every year, from 135 in 2011 to 176 in 2014, according to documents Youth Corrections provided to lawmakers in December. And staff-on-youth abuse allegations increased from 33 in 2011 to 81 in 2013.
On the day the JBC denied the DHS budget request this week, the American Civil Liberties Union and two other legal organizations sent a letter to JBC members, calling for them to support the supplementary budget request as well as funding additional security staff in the 2015-16 budget.
“The staff ratios are horrible, and the effects of low staffing are violence and an inability to rehabilitate kids - which is the purpose of DYC - to help children become fully functioning members of society, not to punish them,” ACLU staff attorney Rebecca Wallace said Friday.
Colorado’s centers for juvenile offenders have among the worst staffing ratios in the nation, according to statistics the JBC received Dec. 15. Colorado staffs its centers at one adult per every 14 youths during daytime hours and one adult per 20 youths at night.
Some states, such as Texas, have one adult per eight detained youths during awake and sleeping hours.
Youth Corrections is facing an October 2017 deadline to come into compliance with a new federal mandate to maintain staff ratios at a minimum of one staff person for eight youth inmates during waking hours and one worker for every 16 youths at night.
For fiscal year 2015-16, Youth Corrections preliminarily is proposing an increase of $3.8 million from the state’s general fund to add 83 employees to “begin implementing federally-mandated staff-to-youth ratios and to address on-going safety and security issues within the Division’s state-operated facilities.”
ACLU investigates
The ACLU contends that inadequate staffing at Spring Creek led staff to overuse isolation and physical actions - to the point of allegedly violating state laws - to try to control the youths.
“It’s easier to push them into solitary confinement, when best practices say de-escalating them one-on-one works best,” Wallace said. “It’s no wonder DYC staff has resorted to illegal and harsh control tactics.”
An investigation conducted last summer by the ACLU, the Colorado Juvenile Defender Center and the Legal Center for People with Disabilities concluded that putting youths in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day for days, weeks and even months, coupled with strikes to the femur and other harsh pain compliance techniques, contributed to the volatile and violent environment at Spring Creek, she said.
The harsh treatment, Wallace believes, has increased the number of altercations.
“When there’s a system in which you’re detrimentally understaffed and relying on painful and harsh techniques to control youth, the likelihood of staff violence is greater,” she said.
Multiple complaints the legal organizations received from youths and a teacher inside Spring Creek, alleging child abuse, prompted the investigation, Wallace said.
During a site visit by the Legal Center in June, Spring Creek’s six seclusion cells were occupied, according to documents the JBC received this week. The small, concrete cells have no mats or windows, Wallace said, nothing except a Bible.
“Solitary confinement is particularly painful for children, who often have a history of trauma, abuse, neglect and mental disorders,” she said.
Colorado law prohibits prolonged solitary confinement, she said, and stipulates it should be used only for emergency situations.
Drayer said DHS has ended the use of seclusion as an intervention for youths, unless there’s an emergency.
Then, “it must be ended as soon as the emergency has been resolved.”
Youth Corrections also has eliminated “some specific tough pressure techniques and modified other techniques to only be used when a youth becomes assaultive,” he said.
Drayer said the department worked with the ACLU and the attorney general to ensure the techniques are safe for youths and staff and comply with legal guidelines.
Issues linger
Wallace said Youth Corrections seems to be committed to using practices that have been proved to work in the industry but is concerned that without adequate staffing, the department won’t be able to implement those sufficiently.
A technique known as Positive Behavior Interventions and Support, which advocates talking kids down to de-escalate a situation instead of using punitive physical force, has gotten a bad rap, she said, and has shown success in other states. Colorado’s Division of Youth Corrections began using the method in 2012.
Some, including staff, have criticized the technique as being too soft an approach to control errant behavior.
Lambert said he toured Spring Creek in September and was told Youth Corrections had removed isolation and inflicting immediate physical pain on youths as a way to control behavior. But he said he now wonders whether it’s effective.
“The problem is, when you don’t isolate them, what’s the effect of that? Since they changed the plan, Lookout Mountain happened after that. Are we creating more of a violent and unsafe situation by changing that policy? It seems the numbers of those incidents of violence are going up in detention centers.”
In late August, four juveniles at Lookout Mountain Youth Services Center in Golden assaulted staff and escaped. They were later caught.
Lambert said he and other lawmakers who visited Spring Creek had a lot of questions.
“What they were telling us was a lot of theoretical management plans about how things were going to improve in the future,” he said.
“I don’t think the issues are going away. We have to readdress this as part of our normal budget cycle.”