By Cory Shaffer
Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The county’s juvenile detention center suffers from “significant flaws” in its daily operations that permeate all levels of the facility, according to a recent report compiled by a team of Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department employees.
The report highlights numerous problems at the facility run by the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court. The center does not have a master computer system that tracks inmate history. Staff keeps no database of inmates with suspected gang ties, nor does it try to separate members of rival gangs. It also lacks a special response team to respond to emergencies, according to the report.
The guards are under-trained and often do not enforce rules, and inmates in turn do not respect them and even find “humor in the situation,” according to the 14-page report, dated Nov. 29.
“At first this appeared to be an employee complacency issue,” the report says. “However, after conducting an in-depth analysis it appears the problem stems from all levels of the organization.”
Ken Mills, director of the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, led the committee that authored the report at the behest of the juvenile court’s Administrative Judge Kristin Sweeney.
Sweeney and Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish told cleveland.com Thursday that they are committed to addressing the issues raised in the report, including installing a new leadership team, hiring more detention officers and providing more training.
“There are issues in the detention center,” Sweeney said. “We did not have all these people coming in and making these reports and suggestions because people didn’t have enough to do.”
The report, which was finalized and given to county officials in early December, recommends nearly three dozen changes, including:
increasing the number of full-time jail guards from 117 to 135
equipping all guards with body cameras
strip searching teenagers at intake to cut down on contraband
allowing supervisors to carry pepper spray foam
buying a restraint chair and spit hoods
sending both guards and supervisors to specialized training courses
keeping an on-site special response team to respond to emergencies
The report, released to cleveland.com this week, was completed more than a month before a guard and two inmates were injured in a riot that saw more than a dozen inmates cause more than $200,000 worth of damage to a pod in the jail.
“It is clear to every team member that the center cannot keep doing what they have always done and expect a different result, and must acknowledge that things must change and expect nothing less,” the committee wrote.
Its release also comes after Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley and County Councilman Mike Gallagher have publicly questioned the jail’s management and suggested that Sheriff Cliff Pinkney, whose department provides security for the adult jail, take over control of the facility.
Mary Davidson, a spokeswoman for the juvenile court, provided a heavily redacted version of the report in response to a request on Tuesday. Cleveland.com obtained an unreacted copy of the report on Wednesday that showed the true extent of the issues the facility faced.
The report found that the metal detector leading into the jail was broken, giving inmates a chance to slip contraband into the jail.
Once the teens got into the jail, the committee found that the data management system does not allow guards to track separation orders. Staff also does not run each inmate’s names through a law enforcement database for outstanding warrants either when the inmate is booked into the facility or released.
The guards also blur the lines between mentor and guard, and the committee saw the guards playing sports with the teens.
“At times it was difficult to distinguish the residents from some of the employees,” the report says.
The report also found that there was no standard list of rule violations and disciplinary structure kept at the center, and suggested staff create one.
Erin Davies, executive director of the Columbus-based Juvenile Justice Coalition, said the lack of disciplinary standards, training and professionalism noted in the report was troubling.
“In any facility, rules must be clear so that staff and youth can communicate and boundaries can be drawn around what behavior is acceptable and what isn’t,” she said. “This is especially true for adolescents.”
But Davies said she found the idea that the jail could institute restraint chairs and pepper spray foam most troubling.
“These tools can be really harmful for youth, particularly when used in inappropriate ways, and I think making these tools available in this environment without training or professionalism is ripe for misuse or abuse, which will further increase tensions and possibly create harm,” she said.
Sweeney told cleveland.com that the court is conducting a national search for a new superintendent to head the detention center. Several other employees in leadership roles have been demoted in wake of the report.
The new superintendent will work with court and county leaders to decide how best to address the issues in the report, Sweeney said.
The court is also preparing to interview 84 applicants for detention officer positions. Sweeney said the court plans to hire between 15 and 20 new officers.
Officials have wrangled with violent outbursts at the detention facility for several years, and some of the issues the committee identified have lingered since shortly after the juvenile courts and detention center were moved into the $189 million facility on Quincy Avenue.
The court dealt with increased gang violence in 2014 in the jail, and sent officers to self-defense training and hired 12 more detention officers, Sweeney said. That led to a few years of calm in the jail, before the latest outburst of violence in 2017, Sweeney said.
The court is seeing more teenagers being housed in the juvenile jail than in previous years, Sweeney said. There were 155 teenagers locked up at the detention center on Thursday, but the jail is only staffed to accommodate about 120 inmates, she said.
Of the 155 inmates, nearly half of them are being held on either aggravated murder, murder, aggravated robbery, aggravated burglary, rape and kidnapping charges, Sweeney said.
At the same time, children as young as 13 years old are being held on misdemeanor domestic violence charges.
While O’Malley’s and Gallagher’s have called for Pinkney’s office to take over operations of the jail, those calls may be hindered by state law that dictates how juvenile detention centers are managed.
Detention centers are not meant to resemble jails. The centers are focused on rehabilitating children out of a life of a crime, rather than punishing them as though they are adults. Incarcerating teenagers, as their brains are still developing, can have long-lasting implications, Sweeney said.
State lawmakers mandated that all detention centers in Ohio be managed by a single administrative officer and the court of jurisdiction or board of trustees, and not a law enforcement agency like adult jails.
Budish said having sheriff’s department takeover the juvenile jail would not be a “magic fix” the overall problem, which he and all officials agreed was a lack of leadership inside the jail.
©2018 Advance Ohio Media, Cleveland