The state Youth Services Division puts incarcerated youths at continued risk of sexual abuse by housing sex offenders with others, the head of Arkansas' youth justice watchdog agency told legislators Thursday.
"The juveniles in the dorms at the Alexander Youth Services Center are at considerable risk of sexual victimization," said Scott Tanner, coordinator of the Arkansas Public Defender Commission's Juvenile Ombudsman Division. "Separating juvenile offenders on this basis should be prioritized."
Under Act 1030 of 1999, Tanner's division has complete access to all state-run youth lockups. The act also requires the division to develop regulations to separate offenders based on several factors, including whether the offender has been convicted of a sex crime.
Russell Rigsby, director of the division, acknowledged after the meeting that the division is technically in violation of the law by not guaranteeing segregated housing on the basis of sex offenses.
When asked if any sex offenders were housed Thursday at Alexander with other offenders, Rigsby responded that he didn't know because the population changes daily. But he said the division is addressing the issue with several construction projects.
Tanner testified before the House Interim Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth. He provided committee members with information showing what types of youth offenders were housed together at the Alexander center on March 30 and April 2 of this year.
Of the 100 nonsex offenders in Alexander on March 30, 46 were housed in the same room or grouped in a day area with one or more sex offenders. On April 2, two of the rooms had one nonsex offender housed with three or more sex offenders, and four rooms housed three or more sex offenders together, which both Tanner and Rigsby said could be just as ill-advised.
The doors to the rooms are left open, and Tanner said he observed sex offenders sneaking into other rooms and got reports from youth of physical and mental abuse from guards.
Rigsby defended to lawmakers his beleaguered agency's efforts to protect youth offenders, and said he hadn't been provided with any specific reports to back up Tanner's observations. Rigsby provided the committees with a thick packet of information responding to the concerns raised by Tanner.
He also said the division's development of policies to address these issues must take into account the standards of the American Correctional Association, from which the division is seeking accreditation of its facilities.
"A snapshot photo of the system at any particular day is ill-advised in terms of giving an accurate impression of what is actually taking place," Rigsby said. "You will not see instant, but rather gradual, success as we go along."
That explanation didn't satisfy Sen. Kevin Smith, D-Stuttgart, who asked Rigsby if he could guarantee that if Smith's nephew entered the Alexander center Thursday night the child wouldn't be housed with a sex offender and subjected to possible sexual abuse.
"My God, we're talking about kids here, and we shouldn't be making excuses," Smith said.
Rigsby said he couldn't make such a guarantee because of the constant influx of all types of youth offenders into the center. The current building configuration leaves little choice but to group disparate categories of offenders together, he said.
That won't change until the completion of a separate unit at Alexander, scheduled for this summer, in which each sex offender would be housed in a separate room, Rigsby said.
"I would rather allow a child to be let out of the facility than for another child to become a victim of sexual abuse," he said.
A reconfiguration of the complex into an "open dormitory" style in which all offenders would be more visible to staff is scheduled for completion in December.
Reps. Hank Wilkins, D-Pine Bluff, and Sue Madison, D-Fayetteville, told Rigsby that while the conditions cited by Tanner were observed over just two days, they serve as a reliable warning sign.
"The last thing we want is for a child to come into the state [facility] and end up worse off than they were before," Madison said. Rigsby agreed.
Madison was co-chairman at committee meetings after a June 1998 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette series detailing multiple problems at the division, including physical and sexual abuse of inmates.
The committees issued a report finding fault with Gov. Mike Huckabee and others for not heading off problems in the division swiftly enough. Huckabee contended that he took action as soon as he learned there were problems.
A three-part series published in March by the Democrat-Gazette detailed continued problems in the division and Rigsby's five-year plan for making improvements.
Rigsby estimates his plan will cost an additional $9.9 million each year. The division's annual budget is currently $48 million.
That five-year plan, which began this year, includes:
- Reshaping five regional youth camps around the state into comprehensive treatment complexes at Alexander, Harrisburg, Lewisville, Mansfield and Dermott;
- Tearing down antiquated dorms at the Alexander campus and the Mansfield wilderness camp and replacing them with modern, high-security structures;
- Reorganizing the Alexander staff and hiring better-skilled workers and paying them more;
- Creating a major complex at Dermott to house 18- to 21-year-olds and to separate more violent offenders from the general population;
- Hiring 14 more staff monitors to travel to every division facility and evaluate the care of children each month, which would bring the monitoring staff up to 20;
- Adding hundreds of slots for children in the treatment programs.
Huckabee became governor July 15, 1996. Since 1997, there have been four directors of the Department of Human Services, of which the division is a part, and six directors of the division itself.