LIKE ANY 14-YEAR-OLD, David G. really knew how to irritate
adults. As a juvenile in the custody of the state, he was
obnoxiously defiant.
When a youth services worker demanded he come out of his
cell, David laughed, bent over and passed gas at the man.
The boy, judged delinquent for third-degree battery, was also
distressingly troubled. He had been treated at five psychiatric
centers. When he was frustrated, he would repeatedly bang his
head against the concrete wall of his cell at the Central
Arkansas Observation and Assessment Center in North Little Rock.
The center is operated by the Division of Youth Services, a part
of the state Department of Human Services.
On March 16, 1997, David was taken upstairs to a Quiet Room,
a "timeout" cell for troublemakers. His brown jumpsuit was taken
away. He wore only underwear. Two older, bigger boys in green
jumpsuits were already in the 11-by-11-foot cell.
"Beat him up and do him good. Don't leave any marks," the
staff member ordered, according to the two older boys.
During the next 30 minutes, numerous staff members and other
teen-agers heard David repeatedly screaming and crying for help.
He was beaten, spat on, slapped and taunted. He said the older
boys twisted a sheet into knots and beat him with it, according
to a state police report.
Then, he said, he was held down while one of the boys stuck a
broom handle into his rectum.
He was removed from the area for a few hours. And then,
despite his desperate pleas to be left alone, the sobbing boy
was taken back to the Quiet Cell where two other boys slapped
him, threw water on him and hit him in the head with combs and
brushes while cursing him.
When David reported the alleged beatings and rape to a
teacher, Arkansas State Police investigator Dorothy Plumb was
assigned to the case. She declined to be interviewed for this
story. But transcripts of her interviews with the boy show she
was skeptical at first.
"David, this is kinda hard to believe," she said.
"I am telling the truth," the boy insisted.
Over the next few weeks, Plumb would change her mind. The
four boys involved confirmed the beatings but denied the rape.
David's name surfaced in another abuse allegation. This time,
a staff member hogtied him and placed the screaming boy face
down on the concrete floor in his underwear. Hogtying children
is forbidden in state institutions. It is considered cruel and
unusual punishment and is an offense reportable to the state
Child Abuse Hot Line.
The nightmarish treatment of David G. is not an isolated
case. It is one of dozens of abusive incidents buried in state
files or in the memories of staff members and children too
frightened or too discouraged to report them.
A year-long investigation by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
has uncovered a state juvenile delinquency system in which:
- Children have been routinely degraded; verbally,
physically and sexually abused; hogtied; forced to sleep
outside in freezing weather; and threatened with punishment
and even death by staff members if the children report the
abuse.
- Staff members have slugged children in the face and then
refused to allow them to be treated by a nurse. They have
locked children naked in cells overnight after turning the
air conditioning on high.
- Troubled youths as young as 11 have been taken away from
their parents and placed in the state's custody only to be
subjected to the whims of untrained staff members, some with
criminal backgrounds.
The allegations of abuse have been verified. They involve
employees at the O&A, the Alexander Youth Services Center and
sporadic incidents at the two serious-offender camps operated by
Associated Marine Institutes, a Florida corporation.
The Arkansas juvenile justice system will face worldwide
scrutiny when Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11,
appear before Craighead County Circuit-Chancery Judge Ralph
Wilson Jr. for a hearing in juvenile court. That hearing was
scheduled for this week but has been postponed and has not been
rescheduled.
The boys have been at a detention center since the March 24
shooting deaths of four students and a teacher at Westside
Middle School near Jonesboro. Ten other people were wounded in
that attack. Under Arkansas law, children under 14 cannot be
tried as adults.
If the judge declares the boys delinquent, they probably will
be sent to the O&A for evaluation and then to the lockdown unit
of the Alexander Youth Services Center.
The story of David G. is eerily similar to an April 1998
allegation of sexual assault and abuse that a Democrat-Gazette
reporter presented to DHS Chief Counsel Jonann Coniglio in an
attempt to protect children from further abuse.
Gov. Mike Huckabee called a press conference April 24, vowing
that all children in state custody would be protected.
"Kids are going to be given a level of protection that
apparently they may not have been," Huckabee said. "And every
effort is being made to not jeopardize their safety."
But children in DYS facilities are in danger.
Officials cannot guarantee that their staffs will be able to
protect the Jonesboro area boys from attacks by teen-agers angry
about the shootings. Some teen-agers have boasted they will hurt
the boys.
And DYS also cannot be sure that Mitchell and Andrew -- who
will undoubtedly be locked up until they turn 18 -- will not be
abused by the staff.
Arkansas' juvenile justice system has been reformed twice in
the past decade.
In 1987, the Arkansas Supreme Court declared the system
unconstitutional. Two years later, children had their own court
system, complete with judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
In 1991, the state was sued in federal court for abusive
conditions at the Pine Bluff Youth Services Center. That
facility warehoused more than 200 children. The dormlike
facilities were overcrowded and understaffed. Allegations of
abuse were not being investigated. Kids were attacking other
kids.
"The major complaint was that there was simply no security
from violence," said Rogers attorney James Luffman, who filed
the suit. "Kids were running the show themselves, and in some
instances, there were indications the guards were using bigger,
tougher juveniles as enforcers."
The state settled the case quickly and agreed to federal
monitoring of the institution.
In 1993, the Pine Bluff campus was closed and replaced with a
system of smaller facilities considered more conducive to
rehabilitation and incarceration.
Reform was in the air. A special 1993 legislative session
called by then-Gov. Jim Guy Tucker on children's issues seemed
to herald new proposals.
The new system received a lot of publicity but only a
fraction of the money needed to prevent escalating juvenile
crime and to effectively treat the children it had in custody.
The DYS had existed years before but had been folded back
into another division of the DHS. It was revived again in 1993
and charged with supervising juvenile delinquents and the
Families In Need of Services (FINS) programs.
Ruth Whitney was DYS director in March 1997 when the David G.
incident occurred. She faced a dilemma.
State police investigator Plumb had complained to her state
police supervisor that O&A Director Gary Rogers was impeding the
investigation.
A security guard alerting Plumb to other abuse claims was
admonished by Rogers, who wanted all abuse complaints funneled
through him.
Furthermore, Rogers insisted Plumb limit her investigation to
the David G. case. Plumb had broadened her scope. Staff members
and youths at the facility had provided an array of allegations
to Plumb that they said had never been investigated.
Rogers asked employees about Plumb's interviews and faxed the
information to DYS Director of Operations Larance Johnson at the
central office in downtown Little Rock.
Johnson supported Rogers' actions. "The state police didn't
stay focused on the incident. They went way off to the left
field," she told the Democrat-Gazette.
She said Plumb was upsetting the facility by not following
procedure. If anything else were uncovered, the allegation was
to be called into the Child Abuse Hot Line. Hot-line workers
would determine if an outside investigation were needed.
If the hot line did not bring investigators in, DYS would do
its own investigation to determine if policies had been
followed.
"What we needed her [Plumb] to do is to focus on the
particular incident. Tell us what else she found in a follow-up
memo," Johnson said. "Right then, we were trying to deal with
this young man. It seems like we could never get to the end of
the assault for her moving to other things."
Johnson said Rogers had heard complaints from the staff
members about how they were being treated during their
interviews with the state police. The staff put their statements
in writing.
Rogers felt that Plumb's investigation was biased against
black employees. At that time, 97 percent of the approximately
105 staff members who dealt directly with the children were
black. Johnson and Rogers are black. Plumb is white.
There were only three white workers dealing directly with the
kids, and they were reporting most of the kids' abuse
allegations.
The entire O&A staff was 80 percent black. Among the
children, 70 percent were black and 30 percent were white. Abuse
allegations involved black children and white children.
"Plumb's investigation smelled funny, but I don't want to use
the race card," Johnson said.
Whitney was surprised by the controversy. In November, four
months before Plumb began the David G. inquiry, several white
staff members at the O&A center had complained to the DHS
Special Investigations Unit that abuse allegations were not
being investigated at O&A. They also insisted that there was
serious tension between black and white staff members.
Concerned, Whitney set up a DYS committee to look at several
issues, including racial tension and abuse reporting. Its
findings, released April 8, 1997 -- just days after Plumb
arrived -- stated that neither abuse nor racial tension appeared
to be problems at O&A.
On April 24, 1997, Whitney reassigned Johnson and Rogers. She
ordered Lloyd Warford to find out what, if anything, was going
on at the O&A.
Warford, a former deputy prosecuting attorney in Pulaski
County, had been with the division a year, evaluating contracts
and community-based services.
"Abuse was not going to be tolerated while I was in charge,"
Whitney said. "I directed him to physically relocate to O&A
because of the conflicting information I was receiving."
On May 18, 1997, a shocked Warford wrote a memo to Whitney
outlining his impressions of the North Little Rock center.
"Within 72 hours of assuming control of the facility, I was
convinced that the monitoring reports you were receiving were
grossly inaccurate," he wrote. Warford reported:
- Staff members were openly hostile and uncooperative.
- The handful of staff members who did write up abuse
allegations felt threatened by co-workers.
- Abuse reports had been destroyed or removed from the
facility.
- The assessment staff -- the reason the facility existed
-- had little or no contact with the youths they were
assessing. The assessments were essential in deciding
whether to place children in the few slots allocated for
drug or sex-offender treatment or to send them to one of the
state's serious-offender programs.
"Generally order was being maintained by threats and
intimidation," he concluded. "This facility is in crisis."
[Warford's emphasis]
The problems were just beginning.
It would soon be clear that the much-needed Department of
Youth Services reform had been undermined by politics, racial
infighting and employees intent on protecting co-workers at any
cost.
The Central Arkansas Observation and Assessment Center, the
former North Little Rock jail, was an unlikely place to evaluate
the mental and emotional condition of juvenile delinquents.
"That would never have been a spot that we would have
selected," said R.B. Friedlander, then-director of the DYS. "It
happened within a blink of an eye.''
She said she was called to a meeting at the jail with
then-Gov. Tucker.
"It was clear to me that the decision had been made, and it
would be our facility," said Friedlander. "Then, we just worked
to make it the best we could make it. It was never totally
appropriate. It was a jail."
The DYS master plan called for five O&A centers across the
state.
Instead, DYS was saddled with one O&A center that required
major renovations and wouldn't be ready for months.
North Little Rock officials transferred the jail to Pulaski
County. The state agreed to rent the jail for $230,000 annually
from the county. The bulk of the money was used to retire bonds
for the new Pulaski County jail.
The center, designed to house 84 children, officially opened
Aug. 7, 1995. Within two months, it averaged more than 100
juveniles daily and has held as many as 135 children. Staffing
was never adequately increased. And high staff turnover added to
the problems.
"It's like the Field of Dreams," explained Tom Dalton, former
DHS director. "If you build it, the kids will come. We got
jammed. We were the point of intake. But we didn't control the
point of intake. The juvenile judges did."
On Nov. 14, 1995, DHS administrator Jerry Evans wrote a memo
to Whitney pointing out problems with the building.
"The facility environment requires that juveniles and staff
be constantly on top of each other due to the close, cramped
quarters," he stated. "The facility does not really fit our
needs for an O&A center, that seems clear to me."
Worse yet, the serious-offender wilderness programs were
behind schedule. The Alexander Youth Services Center, the
state's only lockdown facility, was bulging. There were few
places to send the children after they were evaluated.
So, they lingered at the O&A.
Originally, the more violent offenders were to be kept
upstairs. With overcrowding, that became a lost luxury.
Murderers began rooming with shoplifters, and rapists roomed
with credit-card abusers and children who hunted deer out of
season.
There appeared to be no end to the children entering DYS
custody. Commitments to DYS rose from 690 in calendar year 1991
to 1,005 in fiscal 1996 -- a 46 percent increase.
It originally was expected that the boys and the handful of
girls in state custody would move on in 30-45 days. The average
length of stay at the O&A center eventually rose to 83 days. One
boy was kept nine months. Girls were sleeping in showers with
pillows and blankets. When Warford descended upon O&A in April
1997, the frustration level was at an all-time high.
The physical environment exacerbated the problem. The youths
were occasionally taken to the rooftop to play basketball.
Otherwise, they could go weeks without seeing daylight in the
windowless facility. The air-conditioning and the heating
systems broke frequently. The boys' jumpsuits, underwear and
socks were cleaned at two-week intervals. Raw sewage spewed up
through drains in the showers when toilets were flushed. Poor
ventilation intensified the odor.
To add to the tension, sentences were not reduced for the
time teens spent at the cramped facility. They were anxious to
serve their time and get home. Verbal and physical attacks
against other teens and the staff occurred daily. In turn, an
aggravated staff lashed out. Some employees ordered rougher
teen-agers to scare those who were discipline problems, which
usually resulted in some kind of physical attack.
In addition, a thinly veiled underground sprang up among the
boys. The more vulnerable children were forced to barter food to
ward off beatings or attacks by sexual predators in the crowded
cells. Toothbrushes and pencils were sharpened into lethal
weapons to be used on staff members or opposing gang members.
The mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed teen-agers kept
the facility in an uproar, provoking an already-unstable
atmosphere.
It was Pine Bluff again. Only worse.
