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Dallas Morning News
Firm's leaders linked to problems :
Cornerstone closed Montana facility after several violations found
July 29, 2007
By Jennifer LaFleur
Executives of the Colorado-based
Cornerstone Programs Corp., which manages the Garza County Regional
Juvenile Center in West Texas, have a history of involvement in
troubled juvenile facilities in other states.
Cornerstone closed its Swan Valley
Youth Academy in 2006 after a Montana State Department of Public
Health and Human Services investigation found 19 violations,
including neglect and failure to report child abuse and an attempted
suicide.
"Intake process was particularly
harmful to youth, and many have been made to vomit due to excessive
exercise and drinking large amounts of water," Montana officials
wrote in their findings.
"There was a number of charges of
abuse filed against the director of the program and the second in
charge," said Cornerstone chief executive Joseph Newman. The bad
press hurt business and so it closed, he said.
Mr. Newman said state officials
later cleared them of all the abuse charges, but Montana officials
said they had no record of that.
In Texas, Cornerstone's Garza
facility has been put under corrective action plans to improve staff
training, documenting grievances and group therapy sessions. But the
company has hired a new director and added new staff to Garza, which
it began managing in 2003.
In 2005, a 17-year-old inmate at
the facility became paralyzed after falling on his head in an
attempt to do a back flip off a table. A lawsuit by his family
against the facility, settled in 2006, alleged that a guard not only
failed to prevent the stunt, but challenged the youth to attempt it.
The officer was fired after the incident.
The Garza County facility
consistently has received positive reviews by the Texas Youth
Commission. "The Garza County Regional Juvenile Center is an
exemplary program," a TYC monitor wrote in the facility's 2006
contract renewal evaluation – the same year Swan Valley closed.
Cornerstone was founded in October
1998 by Mr. Newman and board chairman Jane O'Shaughnessy, about six
months after another company they operated ran into trouble in
Colorado.
That other company, called Rebound,
operated the High Plains Youth Center in Brush, Colo., which housed
juvenile offenders from around the country.
In December 1995, a University of
Illinois at Chicago psychologist hired by the state's Department of
Children and Family Services issued a damning report on High Plains,
and the agency later began removing its youth from the juvenile
prison.
"Unit staffing practices appear to
be a numbers game where management attempts to balance the competing
pressures of safety and profit," wrote Dr. Ronald Davidson, a
faculty member in the university's psychiatry department. The
facility also had a "consistent and disturbing pattern of violence,
sexual abuse, clinical malpractice and administrative incompetence
at every level of the program."
A Human Rights Watch report later
found that High Plains "fell short of reasonable, even minimal,
performance."
Colorado officials closed High
Plains in 1998 after a 13-year-old inmate from Utah committed
suicide and a state investigation found widespread problems with
physical and sexual abuse.
State officials also had uncovered
problems at other Rebound facilities in Colorado.
Rebound's nonprofit Adventures in
Change program did not meet requirements to be licensed for drug and
alcohol treatment nor meet "acceptable standards for habitation,"
according to a 1996 state audit.
Auditors said the services, such as
education, family counseling, vocational training and employment,
"are not routinely provided."
In his resignation letter as the
facility's clinical coordinator, Paul Schmitz wrote: "This is no
longer a professional treatment environment ... and is not supported
by the company as such."
In 1997, Florida officials severed
the state's contract with Rebound to operate the Cypress Creek
juvenile detention facility after repeated problems, including
reports of disturbances that led to the arrests of several inmates
for inciting a riot.
Rebound also had operated in
Maryland, where it ran the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School briefly in
the early 1990s. Mr. Newman was the deputy secretary of Maryland's
Department of Juvenile Services from 1992 to 1994, according to the
state. He joined Rebound in 1995.
The Hickey contract ended in 1993
after dozens of escapes, cases of alleged abuse and other policy
violations.
Dr. Davidson, the Illinois
psychologist, said the past performance of Cornerstone and Rebound
should raise concerns.
"Anyone who had bothered to check
the record of this corporation in Colorado and Florida and Maryland
... would have easily discovered a troubling history of incompetence
and fecklessness," he said.
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