Denied school while jailed, teen's filing says

A 17-year-old charged as an adult has accused the Pulaski County jail in a court filing of locking him and other teenagers in cells for 23 hours a day, seven days a week for several months, preventing them from receiving state-required schooling.

Vincent Shabazz, who faces several felony charges related to robberies, made the accusation in a motion filed this week as part of his pending criminal cases that asks a judge to allow him to be placed in a facility that provides adequate educational services.

Officials with the Pulaski County sheriff's office, which operates the jail, disputed Shabazz's claims regarding a blanket practice of locking youths in their cells for 23 hours a day. They also noted that the jail does provide some educational services for youths charged as adults.

The jail's 29-bed juvenile cellblock, known as the F Unit, has been put on 23-hour lockdown for periods of time in the past, but only because of fights and other poor inmate behavior, said Capt. Carl Minden, spokesman for the sheriff's office.

"It's not a protocol to keep the unit on lockdown, but it happens, and it's because of their behavior," Minden said, noting that many of the teens are aggressive and have been charged with violent crimes such as aggravated robbery, rape and murder.

One of Shabazz's attorneys, public defender Dorcy Corbin, filed the motion and said that several other teenagers have previously reported being allowed out of their cells for only one hour a day for weeks or months at a time.

The youths described it as a routine practice in the F Unit, she said.

"To my knowledge, the children have been locked down in the adult jail 23 hours a day, seven days a week and not provided educational services," she said. "And of course, none of those children have pled guilty or been convicted of anything."

Cheryl Barnard, who is also a public defender in Pulaski County, said she also had multiple teenage clients independently reporting the same type of 23-hour lockdown a year ago.

"That's just the pattern and practice of how they handle the kids in the adult jail," said Barnard, who is not involved in Shabazz's case.

Shabazz faces charges of aggravated robbery, robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault and theft related to at least two robberies, including one in January 2014 at the Burns Park Tennis Center in North Little Rock.

North Little Rock police have accused Shabazz and two other teenagers of abducting a man at gunpoint, then forcing him to drive to an ATM and withdraw money.

The teenagers are said to have then released the man in a wooded area.

Shabazz was arrested a few days after the robbery and placed in the Pulaski County Juvenile Detention Center, according to a previous Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article.

Shabazz, who was 15 at the time of his arrest, was transferred to the adult jail in spring 2014, according to his motion. He was housed in the jail until June 2.

Shabazz claims that while he was held at the adult jail, he and other youths were allowed out of their cells for only one hour a day since at least August 2014.

In a written response to the newspaper's questions, Maj. Matthew Briggs, who is second-in-command at the jail, confirmed that Shabazz had been placed on disciplinary lockdown in a cell by himself for much of his time in the F Unit, but only because of his aggressive behavior.

"On his 15th day in custody, he assaulted a staff member and was placed on Emergency Administrative Segregation. He spent most of the remainder of his stay in segregation due to numerous disciplinary issues and assaultive behavior towards staff and other inmates, including actual attacks," Briggs wrote.

"Each time he was taken out of segregation, he attacked staff members, other inmates, or threatened to harm himself and was placed back on segregation status," he added.

Briggs noted that both two-person general population cells and single-person disciplinary cells, like the one in which Shabazz was housed, are located in the F Unit because inmates under 18 have to be segregated from adult inmates.

The whole unit can be placed on "restrictive activity time," including 23-hour lockdown in order to maintain control, but "they are not permanently locked down," Briggs added.

In his motion, Shabazz said that during his months in the jail, he was not allowed to go to school or participate in any educational programs despite being within the age range -- 5 to 17 -- of mandatory school attendance set out in Arkansas Code Annotated 6-18-201.

The motion argues that Shabazz is required by Arkansas Code Annotated 6-18-211 to attend "no less than 350 minutes of planned instructional time each day."

Briggs said the sheriff's office allows school course work and testing to be made up in the jail, but said that requires the involvement of the child's parents and school district.

Also, "individuals with predetermined learning disabilities that have Individual Education Plans are allowed, facilitated by the originating school district of which the juveniles are still enrolled," Briggs said.

Briggs said the jail provides the same educational programs to juvenile inmates as it does to adult inmates, but he noted that many of the youths are not allowed to participate in GED classes because of the severity of their charges.

Corbin said she believes that the youths housed at the jail are not being provided the type of educational programs they are entitled to under state law.

"Laws requiring schools to provide educational services to juveniles should not be suspended because a juvenile is located in an adult detention facility rather than a juvenile detention facility," Corbin wrote in the motion. "Only the General Assembly has the power to set aside laws."

In response to questions about whether adult jails are required to provide a certain type of educational services to children charged as adults, Kimberly Friedman, spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Education, referred a reporter to a question-and-answer form provided to school districts for data entry purposes.

The form contains the questions, "If a student is at a correctional facility (county jail) that is refusing to provide services, do you exit the student?"

The Education Department's response reads, "a county jail does not provide services; they have no educational program. The district would have to make arrangements with the county jail to send a teacher to provide services. If the jail is not willing to work with the district, then the district would exit the student as DO (dropout)."

In Shabazz's case, he has since been transferred from the adult jail to the Pulaski County Juvenile Detention Center, where he attends school with other children, but the order housing him in the youth lockup expires after 90 days.

His pending motion seeks to have Shabazz housed in the juvenile detention center for the entirety of his pretrial detention so he can attend school.

Circuit Judge Leon Johnson is presiding over each of Shabazz's cases. The judge is to take up the motion during an Aug. 27 hearing.

Information for this article was contributed by John Lynch of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

A Section on 08/07/2015

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