Jun
22
Probe pushes prison’s hires into spotlight
Filed Under juvenile justice, privatization | Comments Off
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
When the state’s only maximum-security prison for girls hired Jason Crawford in August 2001, he had a high school diploma and some experience with juvenile offenders.
He was 23, only a few years older than the troubled girls he was paid $8.50 an hour to supervise and mentor.
Bosses at the Florida Institute for Girls in suburban West Palm Beach did not know the state Inspector General had faulted Crawford for using excessive force with male offenders in his past job.
Instead of checking references where Crawford worked at Sago Palm Academy, managers at the prison called two employees in an office where he was a summer volunteer, according to court records.
Crawford was arrested less than a month after he was hired by FIG, accused of fondling a 15-year-old girl. He denied molesting the girl, but is serving 18 months’ probation for a lesser charge.
Since Florida’s pioneer maximum-security program for juvenile female offenders opened in April 2000 under contract to Ramsay Youth Services Inc., at least seven staff members have been fired for sexual misconduct with the girls they were supposed to protect. Two of those workers were arrested.
That troubling pattern prompted Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer to announce a grand jury investigation last week. He hopes an in-depth review will help find the underlying reasons FIG has employed some dangerous and unqualified staffers. Juvenile justice officials agreed last week that neither Crawford nor William Likely, a second guard with a history of improper use of force, should have been hired.
FIG’s executive director, Jacqueline Layne, said she ran criminal background checks but did not know about civil complaints against Crawford and Likely before she hired them. FIG does not hire any employee with any substantiated complaint of abuse, civil or criminal, she said.
The most disturbing incident for FIG officials was the arrest of Larry Curry, accused of having sex with a 14-year-old and 18-year-old in the staff bathroom. Arrested in March 2002, Curry faces several felony charges and up to 60 years in prison. He has entered a plea of not guilty.
The 18-year-old, who is not being identified because she was a juvenile offender, said the sex with Curry was consensual. At first, she didn’t think Curry should have been arrested.
But later, after she heard about the 14-year-old, she said she began to realize he had exploited them both. She was far from home and desperate for attention, she said. Curry, 29 at the time, told her she was pretty. He got her lotion and chocolates from the prison store and slipped them under her pillow, she said.
Some of the workers who were supposed to be mentoring her were not much more mature than she was, she said. “I think she (Layne) hired some of them just to put people in there,” said the young woman, now age 19 and living with her 2-month-old son in Bartow. “You have ones coming in at 21 years old, 23 years old. . . . I would have really looked into the backgrounds more,” she said.
Around the time most of the incidents occurred, as many as 18 of about 75 youth care positions were vacant, Layne said. Staff turnover averaged 60 percent a year.
“We went through an absolutely horrific time where we had a lot of vacancies, and we just simply were trying to get folks in. We were still learning, and we had no real clear sense of what kind of individual would work well with this kind of environment,” she said.
GIRLS COMPETE FOR ATTENTION
In the first two years, FIG struggled to deal with the state’s most troubled and violent offenders, Layne said. “Our population is as tough as it gets,” Layne said. More than two-thirds of the girls have been victims of sexual abuse. Some were exploited by family members; others worked as prostitutes. Prohibited from calling their friends, they competed for attention from staffers.
“You want that male figure to flirt and mess around with,” said a 20-year-old former inmate from Boynton Beach, also not being identified because she was a juvenile offender.
Now a student at Palm Beach Community College, the 20-year-old said some of the girls wrote flirtatious letters and lifted up their shirts to flash the guards. Some of the guards flirted back, she said, but many did stay professional.
“I don’t want to give all the guards a bad name because it wasn’t everyone,” she said. “There’s things they can improve on, but of course the girls in there are going to make it bigger than it was.”
There is no one explanation for the sexual misconduct, Layne said. One of the guards seemed calculating, predatory, she said. Others were “stupid and immature” and took advantage of girls who were blatantly sexual around them.
Internal documents show that in some cases, staffers at FIG contributed to the sexually charged atmosphere. Layne fired lead supervisor Jimmy Page on May 26, 2000, less than two months after the program opened, after three female staff members said he sexually harassed them, according to an internal memo.
To attract better staffers, FIG has raised pay and hired a full-time recruiter, Layne said. “When we first opened, the pay rate was $7 an hour, and at that point, we knew it was absurd,” she said.
The current rate of $8.50 lasts through the probationary period, Layne said. Experienced workers get more than $10 an hour with benefits, including paid vacation, health insurance and retirement.
ALLEGATIONS LEAD TO CHANGES
Layne said that while FIG has struggled to attract and keep good staffers, it would be unfair to portray her entire staff as untrained and unskilled. Like in education and the social services, many people take low-paying jobs because they want to do meaningful, rewarding work, she said.
Most are professional and highly respected, Layne said. “They are being portrayed as these illiterate, low-paid . . . just cretinous people. They’re not.” After the allegations surfaced about Curry and the two girls, Department of Juvenile Justice spent $50,000 for a new digital surveillance system and added cameras to all the prison’s blind spots. Managers paired a male and female worker on each shift and added training to help staffers avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Those improvements help protect the girls from exploitation and staffers from false allegations, Layne said.
Darryl Olson, South Florida’s regional director of the DJJ, said FIG has made substantial improvements. Most of the incidents that alarmed the state attorney are more than a year old, he said.
DJJ has no qualms about firing private contractors that aren’t doing the job, Olson said. The department ended contracts with managers of four or five juvenile programs in Broward County during the past few years. After an offender escaped from the Palm Beach Youth Center last year, DJJ closed it down and hired new management.
But for now, the department has confidence in Ramsay, the publicly traded company that manages the girls prison, Olson said. DJJ opted last month to renew Ramsay’s $5.2 million annual contract for three more years. The company holds its profit margin to less than 10 percent, and FIG’s numbers so far have been below that, Layne said.
On the whole, Olson believes the grand jury will see a program that still needs work but has made a lot of progress with difficult girls. The investigation will bring attention to a population that most would rather forget, Layne said.
“I think in that sense it could be positive,” Olson said.
Copyright 2003 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
June 22, 2003 Sunday
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