rampage, attacking each other with chairs and mop handles. A guard fuels the
chaos by opening a locked door to let one side attack the other. Another guard
kicks through two doors in pursuit of an inmate, who repels him with a fire
extinguisher.
Substitute the word students for inmates and you’ve got reality, as
depicted in a report on Incident 11473 at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School for
juveniles, in Baltimore County. The fight was Aug. 3, and one youth suffered a
broken jaw, one had a skull fracture, and one incurred serious eye and facial
injuries. Two staff members were fired.
Two months later, the security chief who reported the incident was fired
after wrecking a van loaded with Hickey residents on their way to court, some
of whom were sitting on milk crates.
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Violence and foul-ups are nothing new at Hickey. Housing about 260 youths,
the state’s largest juvenile detention center has long been a symbol of what
ails Maryland’s juvenile justice system.
This week, Hickey reaches a crossroads. Tomorrow is the last day it will be
run by Youth Services International, a subsidiary of Correctional Services
Corp. which has managed the place for nearly 11 years. State officials will
keep operations going while choosing a new contractor to take over in July.
The hope is that a newcomer will solve Hickey’s problems, though this may
be the last chance for the private sector to get it right. Proposed
legislation would require the state to take over Hickey for good in July 2007,
when the population would be cut to about one-fifth of its current size.
But state and corporate officials have claimed before to have discovered
the formula to fix Hickey, only to founder time and again.
House of Refuge
As juvenile facilities go, the sprawling campus of Hickey is something of a
hybrid – a detention center for youths awaiting trial, a holding area for
those awaiting placement in various treatment programs, and a training school,
classrooms and all, for young offenders serving sentences that can last more
than a year.
The population includes some of the toughest young offenders in the system,
charged or convicted of crimes that include assault and armed robbery.
It began in Baltimore in 1850 as the groundbreaking House of Refuge, an
early attempt to keep juveniles out of adult jails, and moved to its present
site near Glen Arm in 1910.
Its surroundings are bucolic – rolling, wooded hills and horse pastures –
but its high chain-link fences crowned by razor wire and the bleak, lock-up
dormitory rooms give the place its penitentiary feel.
The state decided to try privatization at Hickey in 1991 for the same
reasons that it may end up ditching the concept: The place was getting
horrible reviews, and many juveniles were coming out more hardened than when
they entered.
Rebound, a for-profit firm from Brush, Colo., won the first contract with
promises of great achievements, only to be fired less than two years later
after a rash of escapes.
Youth Services International (YSI), a local company at the time, was then
touted as the solution in 1993. Founder W. James Hindman was better known as
the man who created Jiffy Lube.
“We plan to turn these kids into tax-paying winners,” Hindman boasted to
legislators in his initial pitch for the job. “The kids are going to love it,
you are going love it, and the state of Maryland will be proud of the
initiatives you have taken to set this program on a high and lofty road.”
The company’s tenure instead became another cautionary tale. A year into
the deal, critics were grumbling about unfulfilled promises, and within a few
years more Hindman’s company was in financial difficulty.
‘A significant change’
Correctional Services Corp. seemed to be the perfect rescuer, buying the
struggling YSI in early 1999, just as the company was winning a new five-year
contract at Hickey, the same one that expires this week.
It didn’t take long for problems to surface. Workers complained of short
staffing. A $7-an-hour dishwasher was serving as a guard when one of the
juveniles he was supervising was involved in a sexual assault. There were
escapes and beatings. Meanwhile, Correctional Services was being sued in other
states for violent incidents at its facilities.
“All of us would agree that there was a significant change when YSI was
taken over by CSC,” said Maryland Juvenile Services Secretary Kenneth C.
Montague Jr., who used to track Hickey’s woes as a reform-minded state
delegate. His department is now seeking a refund of about $1.5 million for
poor performance.
By last May, a state report found that instances of child abuse or neglect
were taking place about once a week. In addition, 2.5 assaults were occurring
daily, not counting the possibility of “many other cases that go unreported by
staff and youth for fear of retaliation.”
The report heightened state attention but didn’t end the problems.
The riot last August erupted from a simmering dispute between youths in
rival residence halls, according to an internal incident report obtained by
The Sun.
On Feb. 6, according to state police, a staff member was charged with
assault after allegedly striking a youth who had dropped his food tray.
And on Feb. 23, also according to police, staff member William Devon Johns
was charged with assault after allegedly punching the face of a student who
had been involved in a fight.
Witnesses said Johns struck the student after the disturbance had begun to
ease. A state employee later overheard Johns in the parking lot yelling, “I
will kick their ass. I will blow their brains out, and they don’t know who
they are messing with.”
Catherine C. Douglas, whose 16-year-old grandson left Hickey on March 18
after a six-week stay, said: “He never felt safe for one minute. He was
terrified. He sat with his back to the wall in the day room. The place was
rundown, the staff was short, and there were fights all the time.”
In recent weeks, YSI’s problems at Hickey have included at least one
bounced paycheck and the recent cancellation of cell phone service for staff
members who depend on the phones in case of emergencies.
“Those kinds of glitches happen from time to time in any operation,” Jesse
Williams, executive vice president for YSI, said in a telephone interview from
Florida. “But for the most part, the transition has been going pretty well.”
He said that some of the terminated cell phone accounts were being restored.
‘Corporate mentality’
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Critics say the Hickey experience shows that the profit motive is
incompatible with the business of treating and counseling troubled youths.
“Kids can be rehabilitated, but it’s expensive,” says Judith Greene, a
criminal justice policy analyst who researches private prisons. “Companies are
going to cut corners in order to make a profit. It doesn’t take long for the
corporate mentality to push aside the concern for kids.”
Consider, for example, the perspective from which YSI’s parent company,
Correctional Services, views the problem of violence in its facilities. Its
most recent 10-K report to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission
states: “An escape, riot or other disturbance at one of our facilities could
have a material adverse effect on our financial condition, results of
operations and liquidity.”
For the next three years, at least, the state will keep trying to run
Hickey largely as it has for the previous 13 – by hiring a private contractor
to treat and detain hundreds of juveniles. Nationally, states such as Missouri
have enjoyed recent success by doing away with such large centers and running
the smaller facilities themselves. Colorado, by contrast, is building a
juvenile detention center with 500 beds.
Montague, who prefers the Missouri model but doesn’t have the budget to
emulate it, sounds almost resigned to a certain level of impersonal service at
a place as large as Hickey. He nonetheless says that some companies, if held
to high enough standards, might be up to the job of running the place.
“If you have a program of any magnitude, and you have an adequate staffing
level, there are for-profit companies that seem to be able to meet contract
requirements,” he said.
Few bidders
And the next contractor will have to live up to tougher standards. The
state has told potential bidders that staffing will have to increase by about
9 percent. But the tougher requirements, plus Hickey’s aging buildings, have
apparently scared away some of the competition.
“The physical plant was in really rough shape and would mean more work than
we could really put into it,” said Ellen Donnarumma of Community Solutions
Inc., which decided not to bid.
Of about seven large contractors that initially showed interest, officials
at two say their companies submitted bids. One is Securicor New Century, a
U.S. subsidiary of a large British corporation that runs some juvenile
facilities in Florida, and North American Family Institute (NAFI), a nonprofit
company that runs the Thomas O’Farrell Youth Center in Marriottsville, which
houses about 40 juveniles. NAFI is proposing to run Hickey in conjunction with
smaller vendors.
Ken Kopczyynski, a critic of for-profit correctional ventures who runs a
Web site documenting their troubles, laughed when asked about Securicor,
contending that none of the companies in the field stands out as exemplary,
due to the nature of the business.
“It’s hard enough doing this kind of thing right under any circumstances,”
he said. “Then you put the profit motive into it, and, oh … Lord have
mercy.”
Correction: Because of inaccurate information from state officials, an article in Tuesday’s editions of The Sun incorrectly reported that the chief of security at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School was fired last fall after wrecking a van carrying students. In fact, he was placed on administrative leave with pay by the company running Hickey, Youth Services International, and did not lose his job until YSI’s contract expired this week.
The Sun regrets the error.