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Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Friday, Feb. 8, 2008. By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Outgoing Juvenile Justice Secretary Walt McNeil said Thursday that he did not see any problem with allowing three employees of his state agency to work on a juvenile justice reform project in Texas – in [...]

Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008. By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer The closing of a Pahokee program for juvenile offenders is meant to help bring about a revolution in the way the state of Florida treats arrested teens. No longer, Department of Juvenile Justice leaders say, [...]

Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007. By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer The former Tallahassee police chief chosen by Gov. Charlie Crist to head Florida’s juvenile justice system this year announced soon after taking over that the state would fight crime in a new way. Department of [...]

Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Monday, Aug. 27, 2007. By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Local teens who are arrested in the next two years could become part of an experiment meant to help Florida leaders decide how best to prevent crime. The study, which researchers believe is the first [...]

Decades before Florida began inviting private companies to run prisons for teens, legendary businessman Jack Eckerd opened a different kind of program in the woods of Central Florida. With names such as E-Nini-Hassee that evoked the idyllic summer camps of the era, teens in the programs still gather around campfires, build their own rustic shelters [...]

Since the 1990s, Florida has repeatedly given juvenile justice contracts to for-profit corporations, saying the companies can do a better job and save the state money. But after years of lean funding from the legislature, for-profit juvenile justice programs aren’t doing a better job than the state, according to 2006 state data.

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Months after declaring the Florida Institute for Girls a failed experiment, the state decided to reopen its top-security building as a program for 80 boys. The Department of Juvenile Justice advertised the new program in January. But private companies that specialize in reforming troubled youth weren’t interested. [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Florida workers assigned to guard and mentor juvenile offenders will get tougher background checks, allowing supervisors to weed out those who have been arrested or fired from previous jobs. “It is my promise to you, the youth we serve and their families, to bring only quality staff [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Workers who guard and mentor teens in privately run programs for teen offenders make so little that some qualify for food stamps and other aid, according to a state report released Friday. The typical worker in a private residential center for troubled teens makes $18,663 a year, [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Pink is the color of ballerinas and Barbie dolls, frilly dresses and little girls. Now, it’s the color of cells for Florida’s violent teen offenders, too. The secretary of Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice, Anthony Schembri, hopes the pleasingly pink walls will help soothe angry, unruly youth. [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Florida will keep a central record of every public and private worker at juvenile justice programs to help stop the recycling of employees with histories of violence and incompetence, state officials say. A Palm Beach Post investigation published in December found hundreds of juvenile justice workers fired [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer The private contractors that run Florida’s programs for juvenile offenders pay their workers some of the lowest wages in the nation, a problem child advocates say is causing crippling staff turnover and putting teens in danger. The average Florida worker makes $17,398 a year to guard and [...]

By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT and KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writers A key lawmaker says he will have hearings next month to ask state officials why they have failed to prevent violent and incompetent people from working in Florida’s programs for teen offenders. Rep. Gus Barreiro, R-Miami, said he was shocked by a Palm [...]

My colleague William M. Hartnett and I built a one-of-a-kind, 17,000-record employee database for this investigation of hiring practices in Florida’s mostly outsourced and privatized juvenile justice system. That data allowed us to do what the state could not: Identify at least 200 employees hired by juvenile justice centers even though they had already been [...]

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer Healthy profits for a private company caused dangerous conditions and inmate injuries at a local prison while state officials looked the other way, according to a grand jury report released Monday. Premier Behavioral Solutions Inc. skimped on staffers and training at its prison in suburban West Palm [...]

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