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 partnership with a top executive for a large Florida contractor they were supposed to oversee.

The partnership came about after Richard Nedelkoff, who was then chief operating officer of one of Florida’s largest juvenile justice contractors, Eckerd Youth Alternatives Inc., was asked to take over reform efforts at the troubled Texas Youth Commission.

Nedelkoff, who makes $160,000 in Texas, reached out to Rex Uberman, assistant secretary for residential services at the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, and asked whether he could bring his expertise to Texas.

Uberman is responsible for distributing and overseeing $195 million in state contracts for programs that treat juvenile delinquents, including $19.2 million that goes to Eckerd each year.

Texas is not paying Uberman as a consultant, but is reimbursing his travel expenses, including airfare, hotel, rental car and food.

Uberman said Thursday that he knew Nedelkoff was still working for Eckerd Youth Alternatives when he agreed to help, and saw no problem with an unpaid arrangement. But he told Nedelkoff he preferred the request come from the state.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry obliged with a letter to McNeil, dated Jan. 16, that asked whether Texas could have Uberman’s help for 30 to 60 days, using about 25 percent of his time.

“Mr. Uberman comes highly recommended by Richard Nedelkoff, whom I recently appointed as conservator of TYC (Texas Youth Commission),” Perry wrote. “I believe that Mr. Uberman’s experience and expertise will prove helpful to the State of Texas particularly in the assessment of TYC facilities, operational reviews, policy development and strategic planning.”

FLORIDA REVISING ITS SYSTEM

McNeil, who is leaving the agency to take over the Department of Corrections, authorized the agreement. He said Thursday that he did not think there was a conflict of interest because Uberman and the two other officials were not working as paid consultants.

Nedelkoff left Eckerd Youth Alternatives through a mutual decision Thursday, to avoid “even the appearance of any impropriety,” Eckerd President and CEO David Dennis said.

Eckerd had agreed to allow Nedelkoff to work both jobs after he was chosen to lead the Texas agency in December, but decided that the “dual relationship is no longer one that he and I believe is tenable,” Dennis said.

“In trying to turn around the Texas Youth Commission, Richard has a strong need to bring in consultants from other states and state agencies, including the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice,” Dennis said.

Uberman, who makes a salary of $100,000 in Florida, said McNeil allowed him to spend two workdays in Texas this month. He also used five of his own weekend and holiday days on two separate trips, one over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.

Juvenile Justice also agreed to lend the time of Mary Mills, who oversees youth programs in North Florida, and John Criswell, who oversees quality assurance for the agency.

Those officials were scheduled to participate in a teleconference next week, Uberman said, but have not yet done any work, he said.

Florida’s juvenile justice system is in the midst of its own reform effort.

The Blueprint Commission report, released Tuesday, calls for sweeping changes in the way Florida treats delinquent youth, and key officials, including Uberman, are deciding which contractors’ programs will be expanded or reduced.

Eckerd Youth Alternatives, which was built decades ago by drugstore chain founder Jack Eckerd, has held its contracts for years but could, like any provider, lose money as the state shifts its priorities.

Catherine Craig-Myers, a Tallahassee lobbyist who represents many private juvenile justice contractors, but not Eckerd, as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, said she was surprised that McNeil would agree to lend three officials to Texas at a time when Florida needs them to fix a “broken” system here. Often when she calls the agency with questions and suggestions, Craig-Myers said, workers say they are understaffed.

“If we really are understaffed and we really do have a workload issue, how can the department afford to loan three of their employees to the state of Texas?” she said.

TEXAS PLANS HEARINGS

Texas state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who co-chairs a special legislative committee overseeing reforms at the TYC, said Thursday that he didn’t understand why Nedelkoff was bringing in people “who have business relationships with his private company,” and said he had “real concerns about the mixture of oversight and contracts.”

Whitmire said he would pursue the issue in hearings.

“I’m sure your elected officials would be just as interested as we are,” he said.

Roy Miller, who lobbies legislators for juvenile justice and other children’s issues as President of the Children’s Campaign Inc., said all state officials have to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

“I’m stunned that anyone would look at this and not see a conflict of interest,” he said.

“While their motivations may be sincere, the decision brings into question a wide range of relationships, and overall is poor judgment,” Miller said.

Uberman said he told Texas leaders that his time would be extremely limited once Florida’s legislative session begins this spring, and doesn’t anticipate spending more than two workdays a month in Texas.

He said the trips would be mutually beneficial to both states, allowing them to share ideas.

“Never in my wildest dreams two or three weeks ago, when the state of Texas asked me to help, would I think that anyone would have a concern,” Uberman said.

Capital Bureau reporter Dara Kam contributed to this story.

Copyright 2008 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
February 8, 2008 Friday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1B
LENGTH: 976 words

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, will the state send teens to large correctional institutions like Sago Palm Academy, where they are locked in cells originally built for teens convicted as adults.

The last of more than 250 teens at the Pahokee center will likely be transferred out of the program in June, bringing an end to an era when the state put much of its money into expensive facilities ringed with razor wire.

Many in the state’s juvenile justice system, including the leader of the private company that ran the Pahokee program, say they welcome the philosophical change from big institutions to smaller community programs, where they can spend more time working with the teens’ parents. But they question whether state legislators have the political will — and the money — to invest in that those ideals.

“The intention is great,” said Palm Beach County Juvenile Court Judge Peter Blanc. “So many times juveniles get no family therapy or family counseling and go right back into the frying pan.” But locally, he said: “All I see is closings. I don’t see any openings.”

The Department of Juvenile Justice plans to keep 40 beds in Palm Beach County for juveniles sentenced by the courts but has not yet decided where they will be. And until that happens, local teens who are arrested could go even farther from home than Pahokee.

The legislature included a proviso in its recent special session that says the state can no longer maintain institutions with more than 165 teens. Some programs will likely scale back; others like Sago Palm, are scheduled to simply close.

“Back in the early ’90s, we built prisons for kids, we really did,” said Catherine Craig-Myers, who represents the private groups that run juvenile justice programs under state contract as executive director of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association.

Research shows that smaller programs are more effective at preventing kids from committing more crimes, she said. But they are also more expensive, because they don’t have the same economy of scale.

Florida’s juvenile justice programs have long been starved of money, she said, and if legislators cut the budget in the current economic downturn, Craig-Myers said, “none of these good things are going to happen.”

Sago Palm’s facility outside Pahokee was originally built as a program for teens who were sentenced to the adult prison system. But it opened instead as a program for kids charged as juveniles.

The first juvenile program there, called the Pahokee Youth Development Center, began in 1997 with 350 kids and quickly became a nationally-known example of what not to do.

State investigators uncovered chaos, abuse and fights. The for-profit contractor that ran the center, Correctional Services Corp., admitted it held teens beyond the time they were supposed to be released so they could bill the state for more money.

Another for-profit contractor, now called G4S Youth Services LLC, took over the program eight years ago and made dramatic improvements. For the last several years, Sago Palm consistently earned strong marks on state evaluations. A total of 106 students have graduated high school there since the 2004, school district officials said, and the GED passing rate is 90 percent.

Blanc said he didn’t know of any specific problems at the center under G4S, but never had a great deal of hope for the kids he sent to the facility.

“I kind of had a general feeling that if someone went out there, it wasn’t going to be a happy ending,” he said.

Juvenile Court Judge Ronald Alvarez, who was one of the first to uncover abuses at the center under the former contractor, said he saw improvement under the new management but is still “delighted” to see the end of an era. If you treat children like criminals, he said, that is how they will act.

“I’ve been looking forward to this moment since the day they announced they were going to start it,” he said.

Gail Browne, President and CEO of G4S Youth Services, said she is sad to see Sago Palm close, but understands the state’s intention.

“I think if a small program is adequately funded, it’s certainly easier to run, and I think you can probably develop better relations with the families if the families live nearby.”

But small programs that don’t have enough money can be even more dangerous than big ones, Browne said. A bad program with few kids can more easily fly under the state’s radar, she said, and there are fewer sets of eyes to discourage mistreatment of kids.

The facility was built as a hybrid between an adult prison and a juvenile program, she said, with both cells and classrooms, razor wire and extra space for recreation. The company used a lot of creativity to convert it into a juvenile program, she said, “but I don’t think it’s an ideal setting.”

Many in Pahokee hope that the building will not become an empty monument to a state’s changing priorities.

Browne said that about 85 percent of the program’s 183 full-time jobs came from Pahokee or other towns around Lake Okeechobee. Most make around $10 or $11 an hour to start, and the total payroll is $7.5 million. The Department of Corrections could take over, preserving jobs in an impoverished town, but no decisions have been made.

Larry Wright, a Pahokee resident who works at the local flower shop, served on the advisory board that brought the program more than a decade ago. A program for juvenile offenders was initially a hard sell to local residents, but after much work and salesmanship from the state, the town embraced the idea.

Today, he said, “we just like having them here. They are good neighbors.”

Wright, who has volunteered at the program, said many parents visited the facility, and were grateful it had given their boys a second chance to avoid adult prison. He questions why nobody in Pahokee was consulted by state legislators or the Department of Juvenile Justice before the decision, when it would cost so many local jobs.

“The governor should be the one to come to Pahokee and just spend a few hours with us and look at our community and understand what we are going through,” Wright said.

State Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, said he told Gov. Charlie Crist he feared the closing would create an additional hit to one of the poorest towns in the state.

“I was very concerned that we are going to close a facility has been working well, in a community that depends so much on the jobs it creates — if nothing replaces it,” Aronberg said.

Staff writer Laura Green contributed to this story.

Copyright 2008 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 13, 2008 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 2C
LENGTH: 1,111 words

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 Juvenile Justice Secretary Walter McNeil said Florida would not keep dumping the bulk of its money into youth lockups. Instead, the state would take a balanced approach, investing in less expensive prevention programs that stop teens from skipping school, joining gangs and committing crimes.

Legislative leaders and youth advocates say they now are surprised that the agency and governor’s office presented budget plans that would do just the opposite – chopping millions from programs proven to reform teens who have not yet committed crimes as adults.

As the state held its first round of hearings last month on plans to reduce a $1.1 billion budget shortfall, Rep. Mitch Needelman, R-Melbourne, chairman of the House Committee on Juvenile Justice, wrote a memo saying that the agency’s proposed cuts would sabotage Florida’s attempts at juvenile justice reform.

The cuts to proven programs were “appalling,” he wrote to Rep. Dick Kravitz, chairman of the House Safety and Security Council, on Aug. 31.

The intent of juvenile justice reform, Needelman wrote, “was to abolish the archaic system that had failed juvenile offenders so miserably and ‘warehoused’ them in a mire of outdated policies until they finally aged out of the system and graduated into full-fledged adult criminals.”

Under the budget proposed by Crist, 45 percent of all public safety cuts would be at the Department of Juvenile Justice, a far greater percentage than the reduction at the Department of Corrections.

The proposal would take $3 million from Redirections, a program the legislature established in 2004 and expanded by $6 million to a budget of more than $11 million earlier this year. The program, which provides intense therapy for families of teens who are violating probation and committing crimes, would be forced to scale back its expansion plans by 422 teens statewide, some in Palm Beach County.

113 GIRLS WOULD BE DROPPED

The governor’s plan also would hamper a planned expansion of the PACE Center for Girls, a day school and counseling program, cutting its budget from $11.6 million to the $10.5 million it received in 2005-06. A total of 113 girls would be cut from the program, and the state likely would have to eliminate two centers, PACE spokeswoman Mary Marx said.

Roy Miller, who advocates for children’s issues as head of the Children’s Campaign, said, “It appears that some advisers in the governor’s budget office haven’t gotten the word about the new direction of public safety and juvenile justice in Florida.”

Anthony DeLuise, a spokesman for Crist, said that in a difficult budget year, the governor suggested cuts to programs that were scheduled to expand. Crist “is certainly still committed to the Department of Juvenile Justice and the many very important programs they provide,” DeLuise said.

West Palm Beach’s PACE Center for Girls provides education and counseling for 40 girls who are making mistakes that could one day get them locked up, killed or pregnant. Some have joined gangs or committed crimes such as stealing a car.

When they first come to PACE, said Executive Director Angela Clarke, many of the girls are confrontational or withdrawn. Gradually, Clarke said, workers peel back the layers of their anger to find the true problem. For many, it is a deep sadness. Statewide, a quarter of the girls have a father or both parents in jail, and 10 percent have seen a parent die.

HELPING TEENS AND PARENTS

Alicia, 16, said the program helps “girls who have lost their way.” Before she came to PACE, she said, her mother was worried for her and cried all the time.

Alicia started the program as a 10th-grader. After a little over a year in the program, she will return to her home school a senior, on track to graduate a year early. After college, she would like to help other teens who are struggling, maybe as a probation officer.

“I’m trying to make my mom happy,” she said. “That’s my goal.”

The Redirections initiative, started by the legislature in 2004, has similar goals. In that program, therapists teach teens how to resolve problems at school and at home. They work closely with families, helping parents regain control of their teens. State and national studies have shown that Redirections programs are effective at deterring crime.

Legislators will meet in a special session beginning Oct. 3 to make up the deficit, caused by a dip in the housing market and a drop in sales tax receipts.

Last month, every state agency was asked to recommend 10 percent in possible cuts to the legislature. It wasn’t possible to do that to the Department of Juvenile Justice’s $700 million budget without cutting into worthwhile programs, McNeil said.

He told state legislators he was not endorsing any of the cuts he was forced to bring to them and said he has been a strong supporter of programs such as PACE for more than a decade because he could see that they worked.

Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, chairman of the Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations Committee, said he has no plans to cut teens from juvenile justice programs.

“I’ll be right up front,” said Crist, no relation to the governor. “The governor’s proposal is significantly different than the Senate’s.” He said he disagrees with the governor’s plan, which “whacks into the Department of Juvenile Justice pretty significantly and then holds the Department of Corrections pretty harmless.”

Children’s Campaign President Miller said the state won’t be able to solve its budget crisis by ignoring teens on the brink of becoming serious criminals. “Florida won’t be able to build enough prisons if we don’t invest in children,” Miller said. “It will bankrupt the state.”

Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
September 20, 2007 Thursday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 979 words

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 of its kind in Florida, will randomly assign teens who are arrested or violate probation as juveniles into two groups. Some will be sent home and enrolled in an intervention program called Redirections. The others will be sent to a residential commitment program.

University of Florida criminology Professor Charles Frazier will lead the study, which will be paid for with a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. Frazier hopes to select about 750 teens across Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties – along with Broward, Indian River and Okeechobee counties – then follow the, to see which do better.

The study should give legislators answers about whether intervention programs work in the real world, Frazier said: “And that, we think, will be good not just for these three circuits but for the rest of the state and the rest of the country.”

Though judges in Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties have signed onto the project and are waiting for the first teen to be assigned to an intervention program, some juvenile court judges in Palm Beach County initially balked at the idea.

Palm Beach County Juvenile Court Judges Ronald Alvarez and Peter Blanc said they were concerned when they heard that a computer program would decide the fate of each teen randomly.

The youths in juvenile court are not laboratory rats, Blanc said when first presented with the idea last month. “I don’t want to say, ‘OK, you’re kid number four today, so you get (the intervention program) Redirections instead of commitment.’ ” A sentence handed down in his courtroom, he said, “is not an experiment, and it is not a research study. It is real life for these kids.”

Frazier said the random assignment of teens is like any clinical trial and a key element of his proposal for federal grant money. Only teens who the Department of Juvenile Justice determines are eligible for either intervention or commitment will be chosen, and judges will be notified that a teen has been randomly assigned to one group or the other. In the study judges keep the right to override those decisions.

Judges had a good meeting with Frazier last week but have a few more questions before agreeing to participate, Alvarez said. Frazier has done great work in other studies, Alvarez said, and the research he gathers would be valuable to judges and policymakers.

The concern for Blanc is whether the experiment may affect judges’ decisions about where teens will go. Blanc said he would need to look at all the evidence when deciding what sentence would give a teen the best chance of success, and could not sign off on a purely random assignment in the interest of a study.

The experiment will follow a segment of juvenile offenders: those who have gotten in enough trouble that they could qualify for a residential program but have not committed a crime more serious than a nonviolent, third-degree felony.

Teens who have committed violent crimes are typically charged as adults or sent to locked juvenile programs and are not eligible for the study.

Many of the children sent to residential programs have not committed a serious felony but have exasperated parents, teachers and judges. Some are charged repeatedly with minor crimes or violate probation by skipping school, running away or getting caught with kids who are using drugs.

In the past, judges typically had few options except to send those teens who repeatedly broke the rules to a locked program.

But the problem, some judges say, is that those programs often are 50 to 100 miles from the teen’s home – too far for parents to visit often. And when teens are released, they often go back to the same friends and dysfunctional families that caused their problems to begin with, said Paul Kanarek, who is administrative judge of the family division in the four-county judicial circuit of Martin, St. Lucie, Indian River and Okeechobee counties.

“If, in fact, we learn that keeping them at home and providing intervention or therapy is just as effective, or maybe more effective, than placing them in a commitment program, we could be saving a substantial amount of money and helping everyone,” Kanarek said.

The Department of Juvenile Justice started the intervention initiative Redirections in 2004, and contracts with a company called Evidence-Based Associates to provide programs across the state. The program in the Treasure Coast, called multisystemic therapy, assigns families to a therapist who is available on-call. Each therapist usually is assigned to five families and spends about 60 hours with a family over four months, teaching parents how to regain control and working with the teen to resolve problems with parents, school and friends.

The program in Palm Beach County, called functional family therapy, is centered on helping family members relate to each other better. In that program, therapists typically visit families once a week for an hour at a time.

Both models are used in hundreds of locations around the world. In Florida, the intervention programs have waiting lists, and there is not enough money to serve all the teens who qualify.

A U.S. surgeon general review in 2001 after the Columbine, Colo., high school shootings found those programs were among the few proven to prevent youth violence.

A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health followed with its own review of the literature in 2004.

The panel found that detention centers, boot camps and other get-tough programs often exacerbate problems by grouping teens with delinquent tendencies, “where the more sophisticated instruct the more naive,” according to a news release on the study.

The new study will be the first of its kind in Florida, Frazier said.

“What is unique for us, and why the federal government is interested in funding it,” he said, “is that it is a field experiment.”

Many studies are demonstration projects, he said, where the teens assigned to an intervention program may have different characteristics than those sent to a commitment program. But this study will find out how teens do in the real world, Frazier said.

Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
August 27, 2007 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1,051 words

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 and sing grace before dinner. But after years of lean state juvenile justice budgets, even the Eckerd heirs say they no longer have enough money to run effective programs in Florida.

By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

CLEARWATER – 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.

He made a fortune building the drugstore chain that bore his name and wanted to invest in programs meant to keep teens out of trouble. The first programs opened in the late 1960s, with names such as E-Nini-Hassee that evoked the idyllic summer camps of the era.

After a streak of high-profile juvenile crimes in the 1990s, Florida leaders increasingly sent teens to expensive correctional facilities with razor wire and clanging cell doors. To offset the costs of locking up more teens, legislators brought in for-profit management companies and froze residential program payment rates for a decade. Several have closed in scandal after children were abused.

But teens in the outdoor programs that Eckerd founded four decades ago still gather around campfires, build their own rustic shelters and sing grace before dinner. Eckerd visited the teens in his programs every year, often in the pair of green corduroy pants that he liked to wear around Christmas, said one of his daughters, Nancy Eckerd Hart.

The programs became his passion, and when they needed more money Eckerd took out his checkbook.

But Jack Eckerd died in 2004 at age 91 and his wife, Ruth, died last year. Their grown children now rely on donations from outside the family — and a state government that has not been as generous as their father. After years of lean budgets for juvenile justice, even the Eckerd heirs say they no longer have enough money to run effective programs in Florida.

Eckerd Youth Alternatives will supplement $21 million in Florida contracts for residential programs with $900,000 in private money this year to run eight residential facilities in the state, but it still runs close to the bone. And though its wages and benefits are among the best in the field, the agency cannot keep most of its young workers for more than two years.

Last year, the nonprofit agency decided to close Vernon Place, a girls program it had run for a decade under state contract.

Eckerd executives thought they could end behavior problems through the program, but only if they could pay for more clinical workers, smaller groups of girls and more time to reach out to parents.

“The state agreed that these were all important things to do, they simply didn’t think they could afford to pay for that,” said Robert McKeagney, chief operating officer of Eckerd Youth Alternatives. “We would still very much like to be working with that group of kids, but we are not going to pretend that we can accomplish certain things without the resources to do it.”

Smaller juvenile justice contractors have made similar decisions, and residential programs across Florida are disappearing. Five programs in Palm Beach and Martin counties that served teens committed by the courts have closed since 2004, most saying they didn’t have enough money to continue.

‘HIGHLY EFFECTIVE’ CAMPS

Eckerd Youth Alternatives is now a national organization, with a variety of programs for children in nine states. Last year, Eckerd ran three of the 14 residential programs statewide that the Department of Juvenile Justice rated “highly effective” in reducing recidivism, based on the low number of graduates who committed crimes in the year after they were released.

One of those was E-Nini-Hassee, the original girls’ program that Jack and Ruth Eckerd founded in 1969.

At the therapeutic outdoor program in Citrus County, which opened the year after a similar program for boys, teens sleep in platform tents they build themselves. They wake up early and clean the bathrooms. Year-round school helps the girls make up for the years they failed or skipped classes. No TV, cursing or makeup is allowed.

But the program isn’t intended to be strictly punitive; the girls play camp games and cut their own yule log for the holidays. Many times a day, they huddle to address a problem. At least once, the girls go on an overnight adventure trip such as hiking the Appalachian Mountains or canoeing on the Suwannee River.

Director Jo Lynn Smith, who started working at the camp in 1985, said many of the girls, even those who don’t succeed, look back on the program as a golden time in their lives. Camp gives them a way to escape drug abuse or problems at home, Smith said. Most are sentenced by the courts, but about a quarter go to the program after struggling in foster care.

Leah, 19, said she felt relieve rather than resentment when sent to E-Nini-Hassee.

“It’s a lot better place than where I was before,” she said. “I was ready to make changes.”

At camp, she said, “I don’t feel any pressure. We all dress the same: cargos, T-shirts and boots. All the same. No one is better than anyone else.”

E-Nini-Hassee is designed to address the underlying reasons the girls are acting out. Many girls sent to the program have been abandoned by their parents or have been sexually abused. One was left in a trash bin when she was a few days old. In one recent count, 13 of the 70 campers were in foster care because the state judged their parents unfit to raise them.

For Leanna, 17, camp became a kind of family.

She grew up in foster care and was adopted at 12. But that fell apart because of her behavior. So at 14, she went back to her biological mother, whom she barely knew. Camp helped her reconcile with her adoptive family, and she expected things to be better after her graduation from the program.

But she said she would miss E-Nini-Hassee.

“I’ll miss, I guess, the family spirit. … Camp is like a place where you get that 24/7,” she said. “When people are mad at you, you know they still love you and stuff. Whereas at home, if my (biological) mom were mad at me, she would say the words ‘I hate you’ or ‘I don’t love you.’ That is what I will miss. Where you can get unconditional love no matter what.”

Eckerd offers its employees better benefits than most juvenile justice companies, providing its workers free housing or reduced rent on the grounds of most of its programs. But the outdoor programs still rely on a constant influx of new employees, most a few years out of college and considering careers in fields such as counseling or teaching.

Recruiting director Robyn Roett said Eckerd Youth Alternatives has become a training ground for the public schools, because the agency offers great experience with tough kids but can’t pay its teachers nearly as much as a school district.

The youth counselors live with the teens 24 hours a day. One teen at E-Nini-Hassee said she figures their annual salary of $23,600 works out to “like, 25 cents an hour.”

Several of the teens said they formed tight bonds with their favorite counselors. It has been hard to see them leave, they said.

WON’T THROW IN TOWEL

Jack Eckerd’s mother died when he was 10. His father couldn’t care for him as a single parent, and when Eckerd was in his early teens, he was sent to military school.

After establishing his drugstore chain in Florida, he made two unsuccessful runs for Florida governor as a Republican.

But Eckerd was a social liberal in some ways, his daughter said, and his programs are based on the idea that kids are still young and malleable enough to change. “If we give up on that, we might as well throw the towel in,” Hart said.

Eckerd became the first private contractor to take over management of a locked juvenile justice program from the state. In 1982, at the request of then-Gov. Bob Graham, Eckerd agreed to run the Okeechobee School for Boys. It still operates as the Eckerd Youth Development Center.

Eckerd Youth Alternatives also runs after-school programs, a transitional program for teens leaving foster care, reentry programs for young offenders returning home and a New Hampshire alternative school.

In the 1990s, the state reacted to high-profile juvenile crimes with a hard turn toward law and order. Teens once viewed as immature or rebellious came to be seen as dangerous threats to society.

The lock-’em-up mentality didn’t sit well with Eckerd, Hart said.

“I remember being at the meeting when the state decided boot camps were the new thing. … And I remember my father, I think it was on a phone call, he said: ‘You can tell them for me, we are not running boot camps, we are not supporting boot camps, and we will not be any part of boot camps in the state.’ ”

Last month, Florida Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Walter McNeil told legislators he would embrace one of Hart’s goals: scrapping the mission statement that says his agency exists to protect the public safety.

McNeil wants to go back to the purpose when it was founded in 1994, which balanced punishment with treatment.

But it is unlikely that the legislature will approve any budget increase for residential programs this year.

Since Jack and Ruth Eckerd died, the organization has relied on fund-raising events, individual donations and gifts from companies such as Publix Super Markets.

The donations help Eckerd pay for things that other programs cannot, including software, a virtual library and stipends for program graduates.

Teens who win the awards can buy glasses, uniforms or even lawn mowers for careers in landscaping. But they must update the organization on their progress.

Hart remembers her father expressing frustration with some of his friends who wouldn’t help his programs because they didn’t see how delinquents affected them.

To that, her father would say: “Well, of course they affect you. If they are not stealing from your retail establishment, you are going to pay for them to end up in one of our crowded prisons.”

Hart said she hopes the state will invest in juvenile justice as her family has.

“We want to work with the state,” Hart said, “and we are willing to put our money where our mouth is.”

Copyright 2007 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
April 16, 2007 Monday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 1639 words

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

When the state shut down its failed prison for teenage girls in suburban West Palm Beach, it moved inmates to a new program that soon had many of the same problems.

At the Umatilla Academy for Girls in Lake County, security cameras caught five workers dragging girls by their arms or legs in violation of state policy. Some of the teens skipped school, stole razors from a secure room and said they were shown R-rated movies such as Freddy vs. Jason. Police were called to stop a major disturbance in which out-of-control girls hurled chairs and vacuum cleaners, state records show.

Florida Department of Juvenile Justice inspectors also found that the academy’s for-profit management company, Diversified Behavioral Health Solutions Inc., had failed to fill dozens of positions required in its $5.4 million annual contract.

The state shut that program down, too, only 17 months after opening it.

Since the 1990s, Florida leaders repeatedly have given juvenile justice contracts to for-profit corporations, saying the companies can do a better job and save the state money. Last year, key legislators decided to privatize the state-run Palm Beach Regional Juvenile Detention Center on 45th Street in West Palm Beach, again saying a private company could provide more services for kids while saving the state at least $100,000 a year.

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.

The 18 state-run residential programs, which pay youth-care workers thousands more a year on average than private companies, were less likely to be cited for incidents such as abuse and excessive force, according to rankings in the Department of Juvenile Justice’s 2006 Residential Program Report Cards.

An informal review by researchers at The Justice Research Center in Tallahassee also found that the state-run programs did slightly better last year than the private programs at reducing the number of teens who committed crimes after release. But the sample of teens was not big enough to determine whether the difference was significant or merely the result of random chance, researchers found.

For-profit programs did as well on average as state-run programs on quality-assurance inspections, but lagged on total performance scores, which took into account the inspection scores, substantiated incidents, recidivism rates and more.

Before the 2005 closing of the Florida Institute for Girls in suburban West Palm Beach, guards were criminally charged with having sex with teens, and four girls’ arms were broken in violent restraints.

A grand jury report released in 2004 found that the first for-profit contractor to run the center, Premier Behavioral Solutions, had locked girls in their rooms while they were supposed to be in school or other activities because it couldn’t hire enough workers to guard them.

The Umatilla Academy for Girls paid $10 an hour to start, more than most centers, said Joshua Ford, president of Diversified Behavioral Health Solutions. But like many juvenile justice contractors, the company had to force employees to work 16-hour shifts twice a week because it couldn’t keep enough workers on the job. The average youth-care worker in Umatilla’s first year stayed for only 83 days, according to state reports.

A state monitor who visited the program during its first few months of operation said neither the girls nor the workers could describe any consequences for bad behavior. Half of the case managers did not have a college degree and the youth-care workers seemed to function merely as prison guards, one state monitor wrote in August 2005. Employee files in May 2005 contained no evidence that 20 of 22 employees had been trained to restrain girls without hurting them.

A monitor calculated in March 2006 that the state was paying at least $689,761 a year for positions the company had not filled.

Ford said he didn’t pocket that money as profit. The program struggled with turnover, he said, but any money he saved on empty positions went to pay overtime and workers compensation costs for employees working double shifts.

In financial reports he sent to the state in the fall of 2005, he projected a loss of more than $1 million. The company “never made any money,” he said, and wasn’t able to stay afloat when the state stopped sending girls.

Circuit court records in Lake County show that Diversified Behavioral Health Solutions owes more than $500,000 in unpaid bills.

PROGRAM’S WOES STIR ALARM

Ford, 33, began his career as a nurse and said he became interested in mental health treatment. He ran a program for girls at Bowling Green in Central Florida, and won a second contract in 2004 to open the Umatilla Academy for Girls.

The program served girls the state calls “high-risk,” meaning they were serious or repeat offenders, often with histories of trauma and abuse.

The program opened in March 2005.

One month later, the state announced that the Florida Institute for Girls would close. Seventeen inmates from the institute eventually transferred to Umatilla.

Ford said he takes responsibility for the center’s problems but that he would have been successful if given more time.

In any program for tough kids, “you are going to have staff that do terrible, idiotic things,” he said.

But poor employees were replaced and the program improved dramatically after its first year, he said.

He contends that the state’s monitoring reports were unfair, ill-informed and often overblown. In the case of the stolen razors, a contractor who came to tint the window turned his back on them, Ford said.

But other observers also worried that the workers at Umatilla weren’t helping the girls. In the summer of 2005, attorneys from the Palm Beach County Public Defender’s Office and the Juvenile Advocacy Project for the Legal Aid Society became concerned about local teens sent to the program.

According to the attorneys, one girl said she was not getting meaningful help for her drug addiction and many girls said the program had no anger management classes that the court required them to attend.

During a July 5 visit, one teen from Palm Beach County told her attorney, Barbara Briggs, that little was happening at Umatilla but “confusion, gossip and drama.”

The girls told the attorneys that they had never met the person who was prescribing them powerful drugs, a charge Ford denies.

“If treatment issues are not addressed immediately, it will not take long to replicate the dismal failure of the Florida Institute for Girls,” the attorneys said in a letter to the state.

On Aug. 9, staff member Otis McDuffie, 21, was arrested after video surveillance showed him dragging a girl down the hallway by her feet. The teen had rug burns on her back, elbows and shoulders.

McDuffie eventually pleaded no contest to a second-degree misdemeanor.

A week after the incident, the chief medical director and north regional director for the Department of Juvenile Justice made an unannounced visit to review the surveillance tapes. Video showed that three other workers also had dragged girls and then failed to report the incidents as required. The inspector general found that a fifth worker dragged a girl across the floor by her arms on Aug. 19.

Then, between midnight and 2:20 a.m. Nov. 4, workers lost control of the facility. Several girls refused to go to bed and got up to make phone calls. One staff member reacted by ripping the phone out of the wall, accidentally hitting a teen in the nose, according to an inspector general report.

Girls threw plastic chairs and vacuum cleaners, and one teen tried to break a window with a jug from the water cooler, the report said. About 10 to 15 girls who were supposed to be in bed ran through the hallway, according to state employees who reviewed security footage of the incident. One girl gave a foot massage to a staff member.

Though no one was seriously injured, workers were not able to get the girls to bed until the police came, the inspector general said.

After warning the company it was on the brink of losing its contract, a state monitor made a final visit in July 2006. The final report said training for workers was more organized, and that clinical workers were taking notes to document teens’ progress and working sporadically with some of the girls’ families.

But on July 19, the therapy sessions were still not happening as often as they should have been, a state monitor wrote. And only 39 of the 70 youth-care positions were filled.

The state decided to terminate the contract.

WAGES GROW; BIDS DWINDLE

In 2006, the state had 124 residential programs for teens sentenced by the courts. Of those, 18 were run directly by the Department of Juvenile Justice, 52 were run by for-profit companies and 54 were run by nonprofit contractors or other government agencies.

Many residential programs say they struggle with crippling turnover. But the loss of employees is worse at private companies that pay lower wages, according to a 2005 report by the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability.

The legislature approved a budget increase for private residential programs in each of the last two sessions, which allowed them to give workers modest raises.

In 2005, private for-profit programs paid workers a median wage of $17,906 a year, compared with $19,881 at programs for teens managed by nonprofit contractors, the study found. State workers in comparable state-run residential programs made a median of $22,762 that year.

A Palm Beach Post review of 2006 state data shows that two-thirds of the state-run programs had no incidents or a low number of incidents such as abuse or excessive force committed by workers, compared with less than half of for-profit programs. Those ratings are based only on the size of the program, not the type of offenders sent there.

Many companies have stopped bidding on new programs, and the state often has little choice among contractors. State records from January 2006 through March 2007 show that only 10 of 27 residential juvenile justice programs put out to bid attracted more than one offer. Six had no takers, and the remaining 11 had a single bidder.

The state rejected bids from both for-profit companies for the Palm Beach Regional Juvenile Detention Center this month, saying neither met its minimum standards. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office considered bidding on the contract but passed, saying it would need much more money to pay salaries close to what employees make at the adult jail.

G4S Youth Services LLC, which runs the Sago Palm Academy in Pahokee and has more residential programs than any other company in Florida, earned an “effective” ranking from the state on five of its programs last year for reducing teen recidivism rates. But the company chose not to renew its contract for the juvenile detention center in Southwest Florida in 2005, saying the state wasn’t offering enough money.

President and CEO Gail Browne said her company makes its money by cutting overhead costs, not salaries for direct-care workers. She said she makes less than half the salary of the top executive at one of the state’s comparable for-profits and doesn’t have a secretary. Her company has managed to make low profit margins because of its size.

“I’m not surprised when I see some of the smaller operations fail,” Browne said. “I don’t know how they do it.”

Staff researchers Angelica Cortez and Melanie Mena contributed to this story.

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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.

The agency offered $124.80 per teen, per day, about $40 less than the cost of state-run detention centers. After years of extreme cost cutting, most private companies agree they can no longer promise to help difficult teens – or even guarantee their safety.

Lacking a single bid, the state has turned to Youth Services International, a Sarasota-based company headed by Correctional Services Corp. founder James Slattery. The company is now negotiating to take over the program.

Correctional Services, which acquired Youth Services International in 1998, managed a program for 350 boys in Pahokee that made national news for mismanagement and abuse. Like the Florida Institute for Girls, the Pahokee Youth Development Center drew fire for excessive force, lack of meaningful treatment and poorly trained guards.

Correctional Services held 10 teens beyond their release dates so it could bill the state for more money, canceled school for 13 days running and failed to produce some budget records. The prison got a quality score of 37 out of a possible 100 before the company and state mutually decided to end the contract in 1999.

Department of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman Cynthia Lorenzo said the state is willing to negotiate in part because those problems occurred seven years ago.

“In the event that we successfully negotiate a contract, we will monitor their performance, as we do all programs,” Lorenzo said.

Youth Services International Senior Vice President Jesse Williams, who was hired in 2003 to oversee 16 programs nationwide, says the company won’t repeat the problems of the past.

The company runs a center in Broward County rated “highly effective” in a recent state report. It has improved operations by appointing a worker to monitor quality standards at each of its seven Florida programs, Williams said.

But some don’t think it would be possible for anyone to operate a successful program here at the state’s bare-bones rates. Officials at both the Pahokee program and the Florida Institute for Girls said at the time that many of their problems were caused in large part by their failure to keep qualified workers at wages of less than $9 an hour.

Across the state, juvenile justice companies say the state’s cost cutting has finally pushed the entire system to a breaking point.

Martin County Sheriff Robert Crowder got the attention of state legislators this year by threatening to close his well-respected boot camp. Other residential programs that receive even less money have more quietly disappeared.

STAFF TURNOVER THREATENS YOUTH

According to the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, which represents the state’s private contractors, buildings are falling into disrepair because there is no money to fix them. Community service projects meant to teach children responsibility are canceled because there aren’t enough workers to watch them.

Companies say they have replaced nurses and psychologists with less qualified employees who are unable to deal with the children’s medical and emotional problems. Juveniles whose lives are already in upheaval are mentored by an ever-changing roster of guards, who typically last no more than a year on the job.

Many of those workers in private residential programs make so little that they qualify for food stamps, according to a recent state report. Some are routinely required to guard difficult and violent youth for 16 hours straight because so many of their co-workers have quit.

Executives at G4S Youth Services LLC, a division of the global security firm Group 4 Securicor, thought about bidding on the Palm Beach boys program but passed.

The company, which took over the failing Pahokee program in 1999, has told the state it is within “a heartbeat” of pulling out of one of the six programs it runs in Florida because it can’t keep good workers.

The company has lost more than 600 workers in its state programs since May 2005, Chief Operating Officer John Morgenthau said. Even experienced workers committed to the juvenile justice field are quitting.

“I am having those people come to our supervisors with tears in their eyes, saying ‘You know I love what I am doing here, but I just can’t do it anymore. I’ve been working double shifts, 16 hours a day, five days a week for six months,’ ” Morgenthau said.

Teens who look to the workers as mentors and role models don’t know who is going to be there the next week, Morgenthau said. And supervisors are forced to leave violent teens alone with inexperienced new hires, he said, “walking out and crossing their fingers and hoping nothing stupid happens.”

Florida turned over nearly all of its juvenile programs to a mix of for-profit corporations and nonprofit agencies in the 1990s. Juvenile detention centers similar to adult jails largely remained under state management, but longer-term residential programs were outsourced to private companies. State leaders pitched the change as a way to reform a troubled system and cut expenses.

For years, the private programs eked by, mainly by paying well below the benefits and salaries paid to state workers.

But the rates the state pays to companies that now run those programs have barely budged since the Department of Juvenile Justice was created in 1994. Some costs, such as gasoline and insurance, have roughly doubled over that same time period.

Mark Fontaine, who represents the private contractors as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, believes that the enterprise has finally reached its breaking point.

Of 22 programs put out to bid since July 2004, five were canceled or had no bidders, Fontaine wrote in a paper distributed to legislators. Thirteen more got a response from only one bidder. In addition to the Palm Beach County program, a 72-bed center planned for Miami-Dade is in limbo because the state can’t find any takers.

Legislators have proposed spending increases in the past, but clashed over how to allocate the money. Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, who chairs the Senate’s Justice Appropriations Committee, said in 2005 that he feared for-profit contractors could use a rate increase to pad profit margins instead of helping kids. He wanted the money earmarked for salaries of the front-line staff.

Rep. Gustavo Barreiro, R-Miami Beach, who serves on the House Juvenile Justice Committee, preferred an across-the-board increase. The state, he argued, should not be in the business of telling private contractors how to spend their money.

YOUTH FACILITY, ADULT CULTURE

Youth Services International was founded in 1991 by former Jiffy Lube Chairman W. James Hindman. The company went public in 1994 and merged with Slattery’s publicly traded Correctional Services Corp. in 1998. Sarasota-based Correctional Services Corp. managed both juvenile and adult facilities until 2005, when Boca Raton-based company GEO Group Inc. bought it for $62 million.

GEO Group kept the adult prison contracts but sold its juvenile programs back to Slattery, who now runs the operation as Youth Services International. The private for-profit company has six lobbyists registered to do business in Florida, according to state records.

The company has drawn criticism inside and outside Florida.

In 2004, Maryland’s Juvenile Services Secretary told The Baltimore Sun he was “shocked and surprised” by conditions at a program run by the company. The reform school hired dozens of people with criminal histories who shouldn’t have been working there, according to the newspaper, and failed to prevent teens from getting items that could be used as weapons, such as scissors.

The Sun also quoted the state’s juvenile justice chief as saying the company couldn’t account for millions of state dollars it spent because “there was no budget.”

Williams said problems at the school were not unique to the company. The company had to deal with a very challenging population of boys and an outdated building, he said, and took a loss on its state contract in order to make progress there.

The state of Maryland took over when the company chose not to continue the contract and has since decided to close the center.

Correctional Services Corp. also found itself in the middle of a scandal in 2003, when former New York Assemblywoman Gloria Davis admitted to taking bribes. She said the company gave her free round-trip transportation from her home to the capital in exchange for her help getting state contracts, setting off a wider investigation.

The Associated Press reported in 2003 that Correctional Services Corp. was fined $300,000 – then a record amount for New York state – for failing to report accurately its gifts to Davis and other lawmakers.

Slattery denied any wrongdoing at the time, saying a settlement was in the best interest of the company.

Williams said he believes the company is in a much better position to focus on juvenile programs now that it no longer runs prisons for adults. Youth Services International is running smaller programs with more services, he said, and has improved background screening of its workers.

“We want to ensure a quality operation in every respect,” he said.

Some who remember the Pahokee center aren’t eager to see a repeat.

Palm Beach County Legal Aid Society attorney Barbara Briggs represented a teen at the center who lost weight because he was losing his meals in bets with other kids. The boy was younger and smaller than the others, Briggs said, and the others ganged up on him.

With its violence and power struggles, Briggs remembers, the center “had taken on a culture more similar to an adult prison,” she said.

Briggs was not happy to hear about the state’s plan for its new program.

“It’s depressing, that’s all. It’s just depressing,” Briggs said.

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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 to work in these facilities,” Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary Anthony Schembri told the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice this week.

A series of abuses in programs for juveniles called attention to state problems screening its workers.

In 2004, The Palm Beach Post reported that hundreds of workers had been hired despite being fired from previous jobs for records of misconduct. Managers said in many cases that they did not know about those workers’ backgrounds.

After 17-year-old Omar Paisley died begging for medical help at the Miami-Dade detention center in 2003, The Miami Herald reported that the assistant superintendent in charge there was one of hundreds of state workers with arrest records.

State officials once searched employees’ criminal backgrounds every five years, relying on workers to honestly report their own arrests between checks.

But beginning Dec. 15, more than 14,000 youth care and detention workers, probation officers and volunteers will be required to submit fingerprints to the state. Officials will be able to match those records to arrest logs, and find out almost immediately if one of their employees is charged with a crime, said Steve Meredith, acting inspector general for the Department of Juvenile Justice.

The state has also created a new system that allows supervisors to check workers’ job histories. Nearly two-thirds of Florida’s juvenile justice workers are employed by private contractors, which typically kept separate records and failed to share information about bad employees.

Private contractors will now report the name, date of birth, Social Security number, start and end dates of every employee to a central state database. That information and the employee’s work record will be online in a database that prospective employers can search.

But the state is still struggling to end scandals over workers’ treatment of teens in its care.

This week, the department fired the supervisor of a Tallahassee youth lockup and five other workers for placing a severely mentally disabled boy, then 15, in the care of another teen detainee who was a convicted sex offender. Three teens in the detention center told police they saw the sex offender sexually abuse the boy, who has an IQ of 32.

Workers at the center asked the offender to diaper and bath the disabled boy, then failed to report his rape, according to an internal investigation.

Florida’s juvenile justice programs are also continuing to wrestle with rampant turnover of workers, who are quitting at a rate of 40 percent a year.

Probation officers and guards for juvenile offenders are still paid thousands less than those who supervise adult prisoners. Many juvenile justice workers are leaving soon after they are trained, Schembri told lawmakers this week.

“I need your help on this issue desperately,” he said.

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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, thousands less than employees in similar state-run programs. But the executives who run private programs under state contract are doing fine – taking home higher salaries on average than their counterparts in state government, the study found.

Legislators asked the Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability for the study earlier this year, after The Palm Beach Post reported that the workers in privately run programs for teens make some of the lowest wages in the nation.

The average worker stays on the job for less than a year, The Post found, and some private companies unwittingly hired workers who had been fired from past jobs for violence, abuse or incompetence.

Judges sentence teens to the programs, about 90 percent of which are run by private managers under state contract. Some are managed by nonprofit agencies, and others are managed by publicly traded corporations based in other states or overseas.

The front-line workers in most private residential programs aren’t required to have more than a high school diploma and aren’t always trained to reform difficult, aggressive teens, the study said. State-run residential programs require 240 hours of training, compared to 120 for privately-run programs.

During researchers’ visits, “youth at a number of facilities indicated that they were routinely verbally abused, cursed, and humiliated by staff,” the state report said. “For example, staff reportedly responded to poor behavior by saying, ‘That’s why your parents don’t come to visit,’ and ‘That’s why you don’t have a family.’ ”

The average staff turnover in programs meant to rehabilitate teen offenders is 55 percent, and leaders of several programs told legislators this year that they are losing workers to warehouses and retail stores.

Last year, A Palm Beach County grand jury report said turnover was so bad at the Florida Institute for Girls in suburban West Palm Beach that teens were forced to miss school and activities because there weren’t enough people to watch them.

Better-paid employees tend to stay on the job longer, the OPPAGA study found. The Pensacola Boys Base, which has a median salary of $28,019, did not lose any employees in the year surveyed. In contrast, the Hastings Youth Academy in northeast Florida paid $16,641 and had 105 percent turnover in one year.

And the profit motive does make a difference: Programs run by private companies paid their workers a median of $17,906 a year, compared with $19,881 at those managed by nonprofit agencies. State workers in similar programs make a median of $22,762 a year.

Key legislators initially agreed last year that privately run programs needed an $11 million increase from the state, but later reduced the amount after disagreements over how it should be spent.

Sen. Victor D. Crist, the Tampa Republican who chairs the Justice Appropriations committee, said Friday that the study shows executives at private contractors tend to take care of their own salaries before spending on lower-paid workers. He said he will try again to bring salaries to $24,000 statewide, with enough oversight to make sure the money goes to the right people.

Rep. Gustavo A. Barreiro, R-Miami Beach, said he would consider an across-the-board expenditure that contractors could use for raises or incentives, but does not want to set a minimum salary.

“I don’t think it is the state’s responsibility to dictate to the private providers what they should pay their workers,” he said.

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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.

After mixing paint and studying swatches to achieve the perfect blush, state workers painted one room pink at two juvenile lockups – one in the Panhandle and one in the Tampa Bay area.

If it works, more detention centers statewide could be pretty in pink.

“I want us to be bold,” Schembri said this week. “I want us to do things like this.”

Florida’s project is based on researcher Alexander Schauss’ popular study two decades ago that found pink walls help people relax.

According to Schauss, who tested hundreds of colors, the pink must be precise. It cannot be hot pink; it cannot be too pale. It must be a middling shade, about the color of Pepto-Bismol.

Schembri, a former New York corrections commissioner who likes to be known as a maverick, decided to give the theory a try. His staff took a swatch to the Benjamin Moore paint store in December, then sent a swatch to Schauss to make sure they had a pleasing pink.

Workers painted one cell at a treatment program for delinquent boys in Jackson County and one in the state-run detention center in western Hillsborough County. They plan to paint a room in a third center this spring.

The state is monitoring the two centers to see if rose-colored rooms really do work better than the standard beige or blue.

When a teen gets agitated or threatens to attack staff, workers lead him to a small pink room. They wait for up to 15 minutes and keep an eye on him while he cools down.

Ideally, Schembri said, the pink cells will reduce the number of kids and staff members hurt in Florida’s lockups for young offenders.

When kids in the centers get dangerously aggressive, workers are trained to pin their arms or take them down to the floor. Struggles can lead to bruises, broken arms and more serious injuries.

It costs the state about $50 to bathe a room in pink – less than a trip to the emergency room. If it might prevent injury, Schembri said, an unconventional idea is worth a try.

When Schauss’ research was first released, the country was captivated by his idea that something as simple as color could make anyone behave. Public schools experimented with colors, and Dan Rather did a segment. One film played the cool jazz Pink Panther theme while showing footage of a man unable to lift a weight while looking at pink-colored poster board.

The Department of Defense tried the color for a holding cell at a Navy base in Seattle and got good results. Several police departments followed suit.

The city of Greenacres was one pioneer in Pepto-Bismol pink. Police opened a station on Jog Road around the time of Schauss’ study and tried the color on a holding cell.

The bubble-gum color, which Lt. Steve Booth can only describe as “pink, I mean pink,” has stayed up for more than two decades. The department uses the room to house recently arrested criminals for a few hours while they are booked, before they are released or transferred to the main county jail.

Greenacres never kept before-and-after data on violent outbursts in the pink room, Booth said. Anecdotal data is mixed:

“Everyone is a case by case situation,” Booth said, “depending what type of alcohol or drugs might be onboard.”

Scientists differ on how much a color can affect mood. Some don’t believe that pink is more soothing than baby blue or mint green. But there does seem to be a consensus that pastel colors are relaxing while bright primary colors are more exciting.

Many in fields from marketing to interior design believe that color does make a difference. Hospital rooms are painted in neutral or light colors, while casinos and amusement parks go for bold. Retailers spend millions on color, lighting, music and even scents that will manipulate customers into staying longer and buying more.

A host of recent studies have claimed that red catches our attention, blue suppresses appetite and even that the right shade of orange helps new mothers breast feed.

Warren Reeves, the assistant superintendant of the Jackson County boys program, was skeptical about the pink project at first.

The program treats nearly 100 boys and men, most aged 14 to 22 and arrested for violent crimes such as battery or assault. Reeves didn’t know if a pink cell would make the difference.

Most of the boys are just sent to their own cells when they get upset, but about five so far have gone to the pink room. It really does seem to be working, Reeves said, though the center will need more evidence.

“It’s not enough for me to get behind it and say it works 100 percent of the time,” Reeves said. “But it has changed my outlook.”

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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 for abuse or misconduct who were hired again in centers run by different companies. Most supervisors at those centers did not know they had hired employees with records of beating or abusing teens in their care.

State officials do not now know who works at the more than 100 programs for teen offenders that are funded by taxpayers but operated by private companies and nonprofit organizations.

The creation of the statewide employee database will allow the Department of Juvenile Justice to tell its 40 private contractors, which manage nearly all of Florida’s residential treatment programs, whether a job applicant has worked at a similar facility. Officials don’t yet know what other information will be included.

“We want to make sure we are hiring the right people to work with our kids,” Juvenile Justice Inspector General Lynne Winston said Friday.

The state’s lack of a database like the one the Post compiled during its investigation allowed many bad employees to continue working in the field, despite personnel records at their previous companies specifically noting they were not eligible to be rehired.

In some cases, workers lied about job histories on their applications. In others, hiring supervisors tried to check with previous employers, but were stymied by companies that gave neutral references. Several contractors lost employee files, and other records disappeared when private contractors went out of business.

Under the inspector general’s plan, the contractors that run programs for the state will enter the date of hiring and date of termination for every person who works around teen offenders.

Supervisors at both state and private programs could check the database for an employee’s information. Winston said she hopes it will be in use by April.

The Department of Juvenile Justice now notifies its contractors if a prospective employee has a criminal record, was investigated by the state or has applied to work elsewhere in the system. A more complete record of where and when everyone worked will help tighten that screening, Winston said.

Mark Fontaine, who represents the state’s private contractors as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, said he welcomes the database.

The goal is clear, he said. Workers with a record of hurting teens should not get jobs in residential programs.

“Nobody wants to hire those people, and no one wants the liability of having those people,” Fontaine said.

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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 mentor difficult juveniles offenders in residential programs, says the Florida Juvenile Justice Association. That is $8.36 an hour – about what they could make to supervise fast-food workers, stock shelves or collect tolls on the turnpike.

And it is less than a juvenile correctional officer makes to do the same job in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana, The Palm Beach Post found in a survey of 20 other states. Despite a lower cost of living and smaller tax base, the state of West Virginia pays its workers nearly $3,000 a year more than Florida’s private contractors.

Juvenile judges, attorneys and child advocates say it is foolish to invest so little in the programs designed to keep troubled teens out of adult prisons.

“That’s horrific,” said Pam Roebuck, a Martin County prosecutor who has worked with juveniles for nearly two decades.

The people who help parents reform troubled kids have critically important jobs, Roebuck said, and have to be role models for the kids they supervise.

“At $17,000, you’re just not going to get people who are educated and highly experienced with children,” Roebuck said.

Representatives of the private contractors that run the youth programs say the programs are nearing a crisis. Teens are being hurt by young, inexperienced staff members. Workers are quitting almost as fast as programs can train them.

In a report published in December, the Post found hundreds of people hired to guard juveniles despite records of violence, abuse or incompetence in previous jobs and turnover topping 60 percent in residential programs managed by private contractors.

A Palm Beach County grand jury report last year said wages as low as $8 an hour and poor training contributed to violence and chaos at the Florida Institute for Girls. Workers sometimes locked the girls in their room, forcing them to miss school and activities, because they did not have enough people to guard them.

Increasing numbers of lawmakers say they are convinced that the salaries need to be raised. Sen. Victor Crist, a Tampa Republican who chairs the Justice Appropriations Committee, announced that he will fight for enough money to increase the salaries of juvenile workers to $20,000 a year.

In most parts of the country, state governments run lockups for the most serious teen offenders. But Florida has privatized most of its wilderness programs, vocational schools and teen lockups to cut costs. Wages in privately managed programs, already lower than the state’s, then remained nearly frozen as the cost of living has risen.

The legislature has not provided a substantial budget increase for the programs in 12 years.

Mark Fontaine, who represents the private programs as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, said facilities once attracted more committed workers who intended to make juvenile justice a career.

But many, he said, are now making so little money that they have to leave if a higher-paying job comes along. Three programs in northern Florida are concerned about losing staff to a Family Dollar Stores distribution center that recently opened in Marianna, Fontaine said.

Donnie Read, who oversees a vocational program for boys in Liberty County, said teenagers leaving the program can make more in welding and construction jobs than the people paid to supervise them. He competes for staff with logging crews and trucking companies in the area.

Those jobs may not be as rewarding as turning around a life, but they often pay more. And they are “a whole lot easier and less stressful,” Read said.

Many centers also lose staff to Florida’s adult prisons, where corrections officers start at $29,000 a year. But not all states have such a large gap between the adult and juvenile systems.

In Minnesota and West Virginia, for example, juvenile workers make the same wages as prison guards. And though West Virginia consistently ranks among the lowest in per-capita income, it invests more than Florida in its juvenile workers. The state pays workers in correctional facilities and less secure group homes a minimum of $20,180 a year.

Other states also aim to attract college graduates, many paying thousands more a year for a degree. In Washington state, centers employ a few security staffers who monitor security cameras and transport youths. Some are assistants with two-year college degrees, but each unit has a counselor with a bachelor’s degree who makes at least $34,092 a year.

Most staffers in Missouri also have bachelor’s degrees, and the rest are required to spend a year in training. Even overnight staffers are prepared to offer counseling and therapy.

Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Ronald Alvarez said he hopes more state leaders will recognize the importance of juvenile programs.

“Children are not a high priority in Florida,” Alvarez said. “Very few people in the positions of power are willing to say, ‘What will it really take to safeguard our children?’ ”

But if taxpayers don’t invest in programs to reform teen offenders, Alvarez said, they’ll be spending even more to house prisoners for decades.

“You get what you pay for down here,” Alvarez said.

JUVENILE-WORKER WAGES
Staff members who supervise teens in Florida’s privately run programs for juvenile offenders make less money a year than workers in at least 20 other states.

New Jersey – $41,834
California – $34,284
Michigan – $29,786
Ohio – $29,661
Illinois – $29,496
Minnesota – $28,309
Washington – $27,636
Georgia – $23,614
Missouri – $23,520
Virginia – $22,864
North Carolina – $21,389
Tennessee – $21,300
South Carolina – $20,643
Alabama – $20,625
Texas – $20,592
Kentucky – $20,248
West Virginia – $20,180
Louisiana – $19,344
Oklahoma – $18,292
Mississippi – $17,688
FLORIDA – $17,398

In Florida, nearly 90 percent of residential programs are managed by private contractors. The salaries listed are averages and vary program to program. They do not reflect higher wages in a small number of state programs or boot camps run by sheriff’s offices.

Sources: Florida numbers come from a January survey by the Florida Juvenile Justice Association. All the other numbers come from a Palm Beach Post survey of 20 state governments.

Copyright 2005 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
February 7, 2005 Monday
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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 Beach Post investigation that revealed more than 200 workers were hired at juvenile justice centers in recent years despite being fired from similar jobs for attacking, abusing or neglecting teens in their care.

“People who hurt children have no business being in a position where they can do it again,” said Barreiro, who has considerable influence over the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice as chairman of the House Justice Appropriations Committee.

The Post found that many of the fired-and-rehired employees were able to work with teens again because the taxpayer-funded private companies that run most of Florida’s juvenile centers refuse to share critical personnel information with one another.

The state has enabled such secrecy by failing to enforce Florida’s public records law, which requires the juvenile agency and its contractors to exchange information such as job applications, disciplinary records and letters of termination.

“Not having the ability to look at somebody’s personnel file is setting you up for a huge failure,” Barreiro said. “And you’re putting kids in danger.”

The state must add bite to its toothless enforcement of the records law and force its contractors to share personnel information, Barreiro said.

“If they need some statutory language in order to mandate that, then they are going to get it,” he said.

State Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach, echoed many of Barreiro’s concerns. Klein said he would seek a meeting next week with the state’s top juvenile justice officials to find out what they are doing about issues raised in The Post’s investigation. Klein said he would push the Senate Criminal Justice Committee to have its own hearings if their answers are not to his satisfaction.

“If these private organizations are bringing in people with low-quality records, we’re obviously not getting good, quality service,” Klein said. “I want to know why the Department of Juvenile Justice isn’t jumping all over that, terminating contracts.”

State Rep. Mitch Needelman, a Brevard County Republican and vice chairman of the House Juvenile Justice Committee, said many of the problems The Post uncovered resulted from the deeply entrenched culture of secrecy that once permeated the Department of Juvenile Justice.

Needelman said he is optimistic, however, that the new administrators who took over the troubled agency this summer will deliver on their promises to rebuild the state’s juvenile justice system. Given such bold promises, “this is the perfect time to be talking about” hiring problems The Post uncovered, Needelman said.

Several legislators joined juvenile justice advocates in calling on the state to compile information on all current and former juvenile justice workers and their job histories, as The Post did during its investigation.

The state and its contractors have no way of telling whether someone applying for a juvenile justice job has been fired from a similar position.

“The most expedient way (to fix the system’s hiring problems) is to create a centralized personnel database that all employers have access to for inquiries and background checks,” said Roy Miller, president of the Children’s Campaign Inc.

Mark Fontaine, who represents private providers as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, said the state also needs to do a better job explaining the public records law to its contractors.

“There have been numerous memos, seminars and other communications with providers concerning the public records law,” Tom Denham, spokesman for the Department of Juvenile Justice wrote in a statement to The Post.

“The secretary does not feel that a manual is necessary.”

Copyright 2004 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
December 8, 2004 Wednesday
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STORY AND DOWNLOAD LINKS
Main story: Revolving door for fired workers
Sidebar: Records crackdown would reveal problem workers
Sidebar: What we found and how we did it
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (1.3 MB, 3 pages)

RECOGNITION FOR ‘REVOLVING DOOR’
Finalist, Freedom of Information Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors
Runner-up, single story, Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism

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 Beach, grand jurors determined. Leaders at the Florida Institute for Girls locked inmates in their cells and canceled school because there weren’t enough guards to watch them.

Low-paid staffers did not have enough training to prevent violence and injuries. Officials for the state responded to the critical report and ongoing problems Monday by ending its three-year, $15.6 million contract with Premier. The company will run the prison until a replacement is found.

But before the news media brought attention to injuries and sexual misconduct at the prison last year, state oversight was lax, grand jurors wrote. Unannounced visits were rare. Requirements for staff training were never enforced. The state seemed “unconcerned” with repeat violations, the report says.

In a prepared statement, outgoing Department of Juvenile Justice Secretary William Bankhead pledged that the state will act on recommendations of more staff, better training and closer monitoring.

“Rest assured we will continue to strive for excellence in all our facilities,” he wrote. Bankhead asked for and was granted medical leave three days before the report became public.

When the maximum-security prison for female offenders opened nearly four years ago, it was one of the first of its kind in the country. Juvenile justice leaders said its innovative treatment program tailored for girls could be a national model.

But Premier Behavioral Solutions, a publicly traded company, did not invest enough money in the program, according to the 16 grand jury members.

The prison’s plan to control the girls’ behavior was taken from programs that worked with less-troubled boys, jurors wrote. Yoga, aerobics and dance programs fizzled without workers to run them. When staff was short, girls were locked in bare cells and forced to miss school and outdoor activities. Classes were canceled 41 times in less than seven months during 2003 because the prison did not have enough staff to supervise them.

The “inexcusable” cancellations frustrated the girls and caused them to act out, the jury said. In was not a coincidence, they wrote, that a violent struggle that fractured a girl’s arm in July happened after the girls had been locked up nearly all day.

Staff shortages also compromised security and left the girls at risk, according to the report. The prison assigned only one staff member to monitor 32 security cameras, often without a lunch break. And though company policy prohibited male guards from working alone with teenage girls, they sometimes did. One guard left alone on the wing was arrested on charges that he fondled an inmate. He was convicted of assault.

Another male guard had sex with two inmates in the bathroom. Many employees were dedicated, but work at the prison was almost intolerable, grand jurors wrote. Staffers were paid $8.50 an hour – far less than the state pays – to deal with troubled girls who often made up abuse reports and physically attacked the staff.

The result was an exodus. Ninety percent of the workers hired when the prison opened in April 200 were gone by the end of the year. On a staff base of less than 100, more than 400 workers have resigned or been fired to date.

“The ability to attract and retain youth care workers with the necessary skill and maturity to deal with this type of offender is virtually impossible at the current pay scale,” the grand jury report said. Premier paid youth care workers $17,680 a year. The state pays $25,200 for the same job.

Guards broke the arms of four girls in their care, in some cases because the guards weren’t trained. Some weren’t taught how to properly restrain violent inmates until they had been on the job from four to six months. The state required 120 hours of training before workers started, but most started work with the troubled girls after only a week.

“In fact, there was no testimony as to any time the facility was in compliance with this provision except the original staff on opening day,” grand jurors wrote.

When a state juvenile justice official was presented with this repeated failure, he testified that the state should do away with the training requirement.

“The Grand Jury finds this position to be completely unacceptable,” the report says.

For years, Premier was out of compliance on this standard and others, but the state continued to renew its contract. This month, state leaders asked a judge to expunge sections of the report that criticized their oversight. The judge refused.

The state also cut the number of South Florida inspectors from eight to six and reduced the number of investigators who look into reports of abuse, because of recent budget cuts. The state also has closed a statewide training academy for new workers.

Premier spokeswoman Isa Diaz said Monday that the decision to drop the contract was mutual. Premier will continue running 12 other juvenile programs in Florida, five of which earned top ratings from the state. Diaz would not comment on the grand jury findings.

A new grand jury will convene in June to ensure the state has met the report’s 83 recommendations. Bankhead’s statement said the prison already has cut down on the number of false reports, and grand jurors agreed the prison has made some strides.

But the private company must sacrifice some profit to hire adequate staff, they said.

“This is what our tax dollars are paying for,” the grand jury concluded in bold type, “and anything less is unacceptable to the citizens of this State.”

Copyright 2004 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
February 24, 2004 Tuesday
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