By Amy Upshaw
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
JEFFERSON COUNTY, Ark. — Delinquent youths are spending more time in county detention centers because budget concerns forced the closure of 40 beds at the largest staterun juvenile lockup over the past few months.
The number of children sentenced to state lockups also has gone up.
In the past six months, the number of youths in county facilities has more than tripled at times. Nearly a third of the inmates every month are at the Jack Jones Juvenile Center in Jefferson County, where a guard was beaten, eventually dying, as three teens escaped Jan. 30.
The Jefferson County facility is just one of several county facilities housing the increased number of delinquent youths in state custody.
It costs the Department of Human Services’ Youth Services Division more than $140 a day to care for youths in state-run lockups such as the Arkansas Juvenile Treatment and Assessment Center, said Ron Angel, Youth Services’ director. That’s where the 40 beds were closed.
In contrast, counties charge the state about $80 a day to care for youths in their own facilities.
But county juvenile-detention centers have fewer officers watching inmates and fewer mental health services that advocates say are vital to helping children stay out of trouble upon their release.
“So in other words, we’re just going to close the beds rather than provide them services?” asked Dana Mc-Clain, an advocate and senior attorney with the Disability Rights Center in Little Rock. “There are kids who are going to languish in that system.” Angel said closing staterun beds will save his agency about $728,000 a year, and that he and others are trying to find ways for county facilities - often called JDCs - to offer more services such as therapy, anger-management classes and sex-offender treatment.
“What I’d like to do - and what I’ve always said I’d like to do - is get out of the JDC business,” Angel said. “When I say get out of the business, I mean I’d like to move kids immediately into a [program].” But that’s just not possible right now, he said.
County facilities are supposed to serve as stopover points for youths who have been placed in Youth Services’ custody by a judge. The agency has 10 days to assess a youth’s mental, physical and emotional condition to determine which program best meets the child’s needs.
Since the juvenile-justice system is about treatment and rehabilitation as opposed to punishment, Youth Services uses the assessment to determine which state youth lockup, if any, the youth needs to be in. A youth is sent to a facility as soon as a bed is available.
The three teens who escaped from the Jefferson County facility had been there a couple of weeks, Jefferson County Sheriff Gerald Robinson said.
Sixteen-year-old Christopher Beverage and 15-year-old Nicolas Dismuke are accused of beating officer Leonard Wall while he conducted bed checks the night they escaped. Wall died the next day.
Authorities have said after the beating, the two youths waited until a second jailer, Gloria Willburn, checked on Wall. Investigators say they attacked her and then escaped with Brandon Henderson, 18, who has not been charged in Wall’s death. Willburn was not seriously injured.
Robinson said he’s still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong that night in the 87-bed facility. An internal investigation is ongoing, and Robinson said that will include a review of the number of guards on duty that night.
“This was something that was planned and was going to happen regardless if we had 10, 15 [guards] on the shift,” he said. “They had made their minds up about what they were going to do.” Though Robinson declined to release the number of guards on duty the night of the attack and escape, he said state law requires one guard on the night shift for every 16 inmates and one guard for every 12 inmates on the day shift.
“The only thing I can tell you is we’re evaluating the incident as it happened to see if adequate staffing was in place,” the sheriff said. “If there was some mistakes made on our part, we’re going to do everything we can to correct it.” Angel, with Youth Services, said his office will review Jefferson County’s internal investigation but that he doesn’t plan to stop sending youths to that facility.
“For a JDC, they really do a good job,” Angel said. “It was an unusual incident that occurred - very unfortunate.” Neither Angel nor Human Services’ spokesman Julie Munsell can remember another incident in which a guard at a juvenile facility - county or state-run - was killed.
As a result of what happened, Youth Services sent a team of counselors to the facility to meet with the remaining youths in custody, as well as the staff.
The number of youths in state custody at that facility has steadily climbed over the last year.
From July 2008 through January 2009, for example, there were no Youth Services inmates staying at the Jefferson County center. By September, however, there were 31 youths in state custody at that center.
Last week, Robinson said he was holding 26 Youth Services’ inmates. The steady increase in youths at that facility echoes an increase statewide from six youths in November 2008 with an average length of stay of 10 days to 97 youths in November 2009 with an average stay of 44 days.
Scott Tanner, the ombudsman for the state’s Public Defender Commission who serves as an independent monitor of conditions at Youth Services, said any stay longer than two weeks is too long.
Late last year, some youths in state custody stayed in county facilities for more than 90 days, which is the maximum amount of time a judge can sentence a youth to a county facility, Tanner said.
He said youths call the time they spend in a county facility “dead time” because they may not have to participate in treatment programs, just regular school classes.
Angel said a spike in the number of youths in state custody, high medical costs for some of those youths and the reduced number of beds all contributed to the delay in moving youths out of county facilities.
McClain, with the Disability Rights Center, said she’s concerned that those numbers mean the state has gone back on efforts a few years ago to reduce the number of youths in county facilities because they lacked some mental health services.
“To be so far back up, we’re almost back to where we were started,” said Mc-Clain, who has been critical of Youth Services in the past for what she believed was inadequate services at the Arkansas Juvenile Assessment and Treatment Center in Saline County.
The center is most widely known by its old name, Alexander Youth Services Center, or simply “Alexander.” Mc-Clain said that facility has drastically improved its mental health services.
“Right now if you’re talking about kids who are languishing at JDCs and not going to Alexander - and I can’t believe this is coming out of my mouth - I’d rather have them at Alexander,” Mc-Clain said.
Copyright 2010 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette