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Young offenders get lost in the
shuffle
Transfers can keep them locked up for months or years longer than
expected December 19, 2004
By Rene Stutzman and Katy Miller
Florida has regularly locked up
many underage offenders for months or years longer than they were
told, shuffling them from program to program and forcing them to
restart their terms.
It's a practice that can harm the
young people the system is supposed to help, stealing a wide swath
of their adolescence and keeping them locked up in a
sometimes-violent environment long after they might have been sent
home.
Often, even those who stayed out of
trouble and followed the rules were forced to start their terms
over, a six-month Orlando Sentinel investigation found.
In one case, an 11-year-old
arrested in Lee County wound up serving three years after going into
a program that typically lasts three to five months.
The boy, who was considered a
low-risk offender, was initially placed in a group-treatment home in
Hillsborough County. Eleven months later, he was moved into a
halfway house in Hendry County. Nine months after that, he was
transferred again, to a halfway house in Bradenton. He was finally
released 15 1/2 months later.
A 14-year-old offender arrested in
Bay County was transferred and locked away for four years, costing
the state at least $160,000, just shy of what students pay for a
four-year degree at Harvard University.The Sentinel analyzed Florida
Department of Juvenile Justice data from 1999 through 2003 and found
that:
The department transferred 3,631
offenders during five years, an average of 726 a year. That,
according to the department's own calculations, was about 10 percent
of its annual admissions. The transfers extended the offenders'
stays dramatically -- up to four times longer than those who were
not moved.
The extended stays inflated the
cost of treatment at least by an estimated $20.3 million during the
five-year period studied by the Sentinel.
In the overwhelming majority of
transfers, an offender was moved from one privately run program to
another. Children's advocates argue that all those transfers raise
serious questions about the ability of the department to manage its
programs, the bulk of them operated by private companies.
Carole Shauffer, executive director
of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, a nonprofit group of
lawyers who work for children's rights, including in Florida, calls
the agency's system of juvenile transfers "a major injustice."
"You can wind up spending years in
what should be a three-month program," she said.
Officials at DJJ say transfers
aren't necessarily bad. They're merely a midcourse change that helps
offenders get the treatment they need.
The department has no interest in
keeping offenders longer than necessary, said Assistant DJJ
Secretary Charles Chervanik, who is in charge of the agency's
long-term treatment programs.
"It's not about time. It's about
treatment," he said. Some offenders simply do not respond to the
treatment offered by certain programs, he said.
"Is it good public policy to
transfer a kid three or four times? You know, if it's necessary to
treat that kid, I don't see that it's a bad thing," Chervanik said.
His boss, DJJ Secretary Anthony
Schembri, has been on the job six months.
"I don't see any problems here,"
Schembri said of transfers.
Yet, others are troubled by the
practice.
Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge
Scott M. Bernstein called the number of transfers surprising.
"I want to investigate this
further," said Bernstein, who was recently reappointed by Florida's
Supreme Court to a committee studying families and children. "I'm
going to take this to my statewide panel and begin my own
investigation."
AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE
Florida's corrections system for
juveniles is very different from the one for adults. In the adult
world, a judge punishes a criminal by sentencing him to a set amount
of time -- for example, five years -- and the defendant is then
locked up in a state-run prison for that term, with perhaps a small
portion pared off for good behavior.
If he's transferred, his sentence
does not get longer.
In the juvenile system, there is no
set sentence. The judge merely determines whether the offender
should be "committed" into the department's long-term care -- not
for punishment, but for treatment for the child's problems. The
judge decides whether the offender should go to a treatment program
that is designated for low- , moderate-, high- or maximum-risk
offenders.
After that, DJJ makes virtually all
of the decisions, including how long an offender will remain under
treatment. DJJ decides which of the state's more than 160 long-term
programs an offender will enter. It also approves all transfers.
Because state law considers this
treatment rather than punishment, there is no set time an offender
must serve. On any given day, 6,500 to 6,600 are under the state's
residential care in a variety of programs designed to last weeks,
months or even years. Ninety percent of offenders in long-term
treatment are not transferred. They go into a program, generally
conform to the rules, convince the department they've learned how to
behave and are sent home. The largest proportion serves about eight
months.
But if an offender is transferred
from one program to another, his time will almost certainly
increase. That's because, when most offenders transfer to a new
program, providers require them to start over.
Most programs involve a ladderlike
behavior-modification system: Behave, and you'll advance a step and
get more privileges. Offenders, whether they're new to the system or
to a program, typically start on the bottom rung.
So an offender transferred after
two months in a six-month program usually must start his time from
the beginning -- turning a six-month stint into eight months. If he
is transferred again, those eight months could become more than a
year.
The Sentinel found that, from July
1998 through June 2003, DJJ made 4,170 transfers, involving 3,631
youngsters.
Nearly 390 offenders were
transferred more than once. Five were moved four times.
Why?
Six out of 10 transferred offenders
are moved, Chervanik said, because providers cannot control their
behavior. That happens though programs are supposed to have rules
spelling out how to control youngsters who act out or become
violent.
Three of 10 are moved because they
need specialized treatment, such as for substance abuse or mental
illness, Chervanik said.
The rest are shifted to a new
program because their old one closed or because a contractor quit or
was fired.
Chervanik said that starting over
is not a given each time an offender is moved, but defense lawyers,
offenders and a state auditor who has evaluated the agency say
that's what happens. Even Chervanik's old boss, former DJJ Deputy
Secretary Francisco Alarcon, told state auditors two years ago that
most transferred offenders were required to start from scratch.
One example is a 12-year-old boy
arrested in Palm Beach County. DJJ placed him in a group-treatment
home for low-risk offenders March 3, 1999, according to agency
records. Four months later, it moved him to another low-risk
program, this one in Orange County. He stayed there for seven
months, and then the department moved him to a group home in Brevard
County. After six months there, he was released. All told, he served
17 months for an offense a judge concluded should have sent him into
a four-month program.
Transfers might not be a bad thing
if the offender got credit for time served or for progress made,
defense lawyers and children's advocates say.
"They all start over again," said
Melissa Zelniker, an attorney with Legal Aid Service of Broward
County who represents indigent offenders in the foster-care system.
"So, instead of being locked up for two years, they end up being
locked up for four or five years."
ANGRY, DIFFICULT
There's no evidence that a longer
stay "fixes" an offender, said Paul DeMuro, a senior consultant to
the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore organization that gives
away millions of dollars each year to programs for juvenile
offenders. In fact, extended stays, he said, can make the resident
"angry and more difficult to handle."
Former Circuit Judge Frank Orlando
of Broward County, who handled juvenile-delinquency matters for 12
years, now serves as director of the Center for the Study of Youth
Policy at Nova Southeastern University's law school.
"You are going to hear there are
high rates of kids in the system with mental-health problems," he
said. "Many, many of those kids develop mental-health problems
inside the system."
It's difficult to compare Florida's
transfer rate with that of other states because they handle juvenile
cases in a variety of ways. Some don't keep transfer records. Others
leave treatment to individual counties.
Still, Florida's transfer rate of
10 percent compares poorly with some states that do operate similar
centralized systems.
Missouri, for example, shifts 7
percent of its juvenile offenders among programs. In Georgia, the
transfer rate is half Florida's.
One state with more transfers is
Texas, where nearly all offenders are moved from one program to
another at some point. But in Texas, offenders usually are not
required to start from scratch, said Tracy Levins, an administrator
with the Texas Youth Commission.
That's because they're not bounced
between providers. All programs are run by the state.
HOW THE MONEY'S SPENT
This year, Florida's DJJ expects to
spend $290 million on residential treatment for its underage
offenders. The state pays, on average, $85 to $144 per offender for
every day each is confined.
In 2002, for example, moderate-risk
offenders who completed their stints without being transferred
spent, on average, 238 days in the system. Moderate-risk transferees
spent about 50 percent longer and cost the state an additional
$9,900 each.
The Sentinel estimated that, during
the five years it studied, transfers cost the state an extra $20.3
million. To arrive at that number, the paper analyzed a department
database -- the most recent available -- that tracked the comings
and goings of 35,107 juvenile offenders from fiscal 1999 through
2003.
Of those, 27,882 began and
completed their treatment during the five-year period the paper
examined. And almost 10 percent were transferred at least once.
Twice in the past three years, the
audit branch of the Florida Legislature criticized DJJ for making so
many transfers. The Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government
Accountability looked at the same data as the Sentinel, except it
had three instead of five years' worth.
It said DJJ transferred too many
offenders and pointed to 1,000 who, through no fault of their own,
were stuck in the system 50 percent longer than average.
That, the report said, tied up
valuable bed space and wasted money. Those things, auditors wrote,
were "disturbing."
The Sentinel's analysis used the
audit's 50 percent standard to estimate how much extra the transfers
cost the state from 1999 to 2003.
The analysis found that 1,292
transferees who began and ended their terms during the five-year
period were stuck in the system at least 50 percent longer than
average. Their extra treatment cost taxpayers an estimated $15.3
million.
An additional 337 transferred
juveniles who spent at least part of their time in the system during
the five-year period also were stuck in programs at least 50 percent
longer than average. Their extra treatment cost the state an
additional $5 million, the Sentinel estimated.
DJJ officials called the Sentinel's
findings outdated and unreliable.
They're outdated, Chervanik said,
because the department began working months ago to bring down the
number of transfers.
The analysis is unreliable,
officials said, because DJJ could not guarantee the accuracy of some
offenders' release dates in the database. The most prevalent
problem, the Sentinel found, was the department listed some
offenders as having been released in the year 2050. That affected a
fraction of the cases, and the Sentinel corrected those errors,
following the department's advice.
The department also complained that
the Sentinel included offenders whose entire stays did not fall
within the five years.
CONTRACTORS DOMINATE
Most of the transfers were
requested by private companies that control 87 percent of the beds
in Florida's juvenile-justice residential system.
In April, the Sentinel reported
that DJJ and its contractors were responsible for 661 confirmed
cases of child abuse or neglect during nine years, according to data
provided by another state agency, the Florida Department of Children
& Families. Most of the abuse occurred at programs run by private
companies.
A DJJ report found that two-thirds
of its programs for high- and maximum-risk offenders last year
flunked or received D's on a department report card on their
cost-effectiveness.
Schembri, the department's new
secretary, in July ordered a crackdown on physical abuse.
Many of the department's
residential providers are nonprofit, but three of its top five are
not. They are Securicor New Century LLC of Richmond, Va.; Premier
Behavioral Solutions Inc. of Coral Gables; and Correctional Services
Corp. of Sarasota. Combined, they account for a third of the
system's beds.
Securicor was involved in at least
792 transfers during five years, according to DJJ data. For Premier,
the number was at least 873; and Correctional Services Corp. and an
affiliate, Youth Services International, accounted for 736.
Industry executives said they
emphasize helping kids.
"Nobody wants to hurt a kid. Nobody
wants to have a kid escape and have a kid at risk," said Mark
Fontaine, executive director of the Florida Juvenile Justice
Association, a trade group of DJJ's private providers. "We're in
this business to change lives."
As for transfers, he said, "I'm
not, obviously, going to say we've wasted money," but there have
been talks between department officials and providers on how to
reduce them.
WRONG MEDICINE
Transfers sometimes punish
youngsters when the real failure is with the program, said DeMuro,
the Casey foundation consultant.
When programs are to blame, he
said, a transfer is the equivalent of giving a sick child the wrong
medicine and, when that doesn't work, ordering him to choke down
even more.
Sometimes, programs are to blame.
The department has closed 20 in the past three years, some because
they performed poorly.
Chervanik said the number of
transfers at DJJ has dropped this year. However, his count excludes
dozens of cases the agency previously tallied, such as when a
program closes.
That new way of counting is more
accurate, said department spokesman Tom Denham.
The department has no interest in
keeping offenders longer than necessary, Chervanik said. One of his
biggest problems, he said, is finding enough beds for everyone who
has been ordered into one.
However, the department has
recently cut more than 100 residential beds, Fontaine said.
That means transfers tie up a state
resource that's becoming more limited.
One reason transfers are down is
because the department is more often saying no when providers ask
for them, said Ann Pillsbury, a department manager in Jacksonville
who reviews transfer requests.
In the first nine months of this
year, the agency refused 92 transfer requests, Chervanik said.
Another reason they're down,
Pillsbury said, is that, several months ago, the agency began
evaluating offenders more thoroughly before they were first
committed to a program. That includes gathering information about
their psychological makeup as well as schoolwork and home life.
Marie Osborne, chief of the
juvenile division at the Miami-Dade County Public Defender's Office,
calls the high number of transfers "unfair."
"If you're having that level of
transfers, then the department is making very poor decisions at the
front end in matching children with programs," she said. "Or the
programs themselves are not living up to what they should be doing.
You just can't have that many kids being transferred."
Shoes sit in a hall as youth-care
worker Richard Mehlenbacher walks along it recently at Cypress Creek
juvenile center in Lecanto. Shoes must be left outside dorm doors, a
signal the offenders are inside.
Wire tops fencing at Cypress Creek
Juvenile Offender Correctional Center in Lecanto. The Department of
Juvenile Justice has no interest in keeping kids longer than needed,
Assistant Secretary Charles Chervanik said.
A corrections officer stands sentry
as offenders walk down the hall at Cypress Creek Juvenile Offender
Correctional Center in Lecanto recently.
The number of offenders the
department transferred during five years, an average of 726 a year,
which is about 10 percent of its annual admissions.
$20.3 MILLION Estimated amount the
longer stays inflated the cost of treatment during the five-year
period studied by the Sentinel.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
A total of 35,107 young offenders
were admitted to Florida's network of long-term juvenile-treatment
programs from fiscal 1999 through 2003, the most recent years for
which data are available. The Sentinel acquired from the Florida
Department of Juvenile Justice a database that includes each
admission and transfer in those years. The Sentinel concentrated on
the 3,631 offenders transferred from one program to another.
The database had complete records
for 2,577 of those transferred offenders and partial records for
1,054. The newspaper counted transfers year by year and checked
where offenders were sent and where they came from.
It then narrowed the field to
1,629 transferred individuals who were locked up at least 50 percent
longer than average.
HOW TRANSFERS
WORK
For an underage
criminal to be sent to one of Florida's more than 160 long-term
treatment programs, a judge must order him "committed" to the
Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
The judge decides
the level of security but is precluded by law from picking the
program. That and virtually everything else that will happen to the
offender for the next several months will be decided by DJJ. The
department controls where he lives and how long he stays there.
From fiscal 1999
through 2003, the department transferred an average of 726 offenders
a year.
For many
offenders, that translated into very long sentences. Usually,
when an offender was transferred, he had to start over, getting no
credit for the time served.
That's because,
unlike in adult prisons, juveniles in Florida have no set sentences.
They're locked up until DJJ is convinced they're ready for release.
Longer-than-normal stays for some young Florida criminals
According to an
Orlando Sentinel investigation, many underage criminals in Florida
who were transferred served time in institutions for months or years
longer than they were originally told.
Here's how 3
fared:
Case No. 1:
AVERAGE TERM
FOR LOW-RISK OFFENDER: 3-5 MONTHS
13-year-old boy
arrested in Duval County and considered unlikely to commit violent
crime is ordered into a group-treatment home.
Initial placement
Placed in a group home run by White Foundation, based in
Jacksonville, Aug. 6, 2001.
HIS STAY THERE:
6.5 months
1st transfer:
Feb. 20, 2002 To a wilderness program called STEP in Yulee.
HIS STAY THERE:
1.5 months
2nd transfer:
April 9, 2002 To the Peace River Outward Bound, another wilderness
program near Arcadia. Released Nov. 14, 2002.
HIS STAY THERE:
7.3 months
Total time
served: 1 YEAR, 3 MONTHS (original 3-5 mos. sentence)
CASE NO.
2:
AVERAGE TERM
FOR MODERATE-RISK OFFENDER: 6-9 MONTHS
13-year-old boy
arrested in Santa Rosa County is considered moderate risk and
ordered into halfway house.
Initial placement
Pensacola Boys Base, a halfway house in Pensacola, on March 15,
2000.
HIS STAY THERE: 1
month, 24 days
1st transfer: May
8, 2000 To Okaloosa Youth Development Center, a more prison-like
program.
HIS STAY THERE:
1.5 years
2nd transfer:
Nov. 1, 2001 To North American Family Institute's Intensive Halfway
House in DeFuniak Springs. Released Jan. 15, 2003.
HIS STAY THERE: 1
year, 2.5 months
Total time
served: NEARLY 3 YEARS (original 6-9 mos. sentence)
CASE NO. 3:
AVERAGE TERM
FOR HIGH-RISK OFFENDER: 1 YEAR
A 14-year-old boy
arrested in Okeechobee County is deemed high risk and ordered into a
food-industry program in St. Johns County. Initial placement
Hastings Youth Development Center on Oct. 10, 2000.
HIS STAY THERE:
Nearly 10 months
1st transfer:
July 30, 2001 To Sago Palm Youth Development Center, a more
prison-like program in Palm Beach County.
HIS STAY THERE:
Nearly 5 months
2nd transfer:
Dec. 18, 2001 To Sago Palm Sex Offender Program, same campus.
HIS STAY THERE:
17 days
3rd transfer: Jan. 4, 2002 Back to
the general population at Sago Palm.
HIS STAY THERE: 5 days
4th transfer: Jan. 9, 2002 To
Eckerd Intensive Halfway House, a less-secure program in Okeechobee
County. Released May 30, 2002.
HIS STAY THERE: Nearly 5 months
TOTAL TIME SERVED: 1 YEAR,
NEARLY 8 MONTHS (original 1 year sentence)
SOURCES: Florida Department of
Juvenile Justice, Sentinel research ORLANDO SENTINEL .
THE BIG PLAYERS IN JUVENILE
CORRECTIONS IN FLORIDA
Florida's Department of Juvenile
Justice directly manages just 12% of the state's long-term-treatment
system for underage offenders. Four private companies - 3 of them
for-profit - control more than 40% of the beds.
Provider: Securicor New Century
LLC
Provider type: For profit
Number of beds: 1,191
Percentage of total beds: 17%
Provider: Florida Department of
Juvenile Justice
Provider type:
Number of beds: 856
Percentage of total beds: 12%
Provider: Premier Behavioral
Solutions Inc.
Provider type: For profit
Number of beds: 747
Percentage of total beds: 11%
Provider: Eckerd Youth
Alternatives Inc.
Provider type: Nonprofit
Number of beds: 549
Percentage of total beds: 8%
Provider: Correctional Services
Corp./Youth Services Int'l.
Provider type: For profit
Number of beds: 398
Percentage of total beds: 6%
Reproduced with permission of the
copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.
Document Text Rene Stutzman can be
reached at
rstutzman@orlandosentinel.com or
407- 772-8038. Katy Miller can be reached at
kmiller@orlandosentinel.com.
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