A group of juvenile court judges urged legislators Thursday to give the director of the state's Division of Youth Services the money he needs to reform the troubled agency by emphasizing rehabilitation and treatment programs for young offenders.
"We can do a much better job with our children, but we need to loosen the purse strings," said Judge Wiley Branton Jr. of Pulaski County. "Since I've been on the bench, we've never adequately funded our juvenile system. The children we fail to save today are the ones who populate our prisons tomorrow. If we don't fix them now, we've broken them for life."
Members of the House Interim Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs and the Senate Interim Committee on Children and Youth agreed that more money is needed.
But with a tight budget expected over the next few years, the competition for precious state dollars will be fierce during the 2001 legislative session, said Sen. Mike Everett, D-Marked Tree.
"We will do our best, but it's going to be a chore," said Everett, chairman of the Senate committee.
Branton and fellow juvenile court Judges Gary Arnold of Saline County and Thomas Brown of Jefferson and Lincoln counties said they still have concerns about the specifics of the five-year improvement plan outlined earlier this year by division Director Russell Rigsby. But they agreed that the concept behind it is a step in the right direction.
Brown noted reports of abuse at division facilities in recent years.
"I've not had good experience with the Division of Youth Services providing good rehabilitative services," Brown said. "I've worked hard so not to have to send kids there, to keep them in school at all costs. If we can stop them up front [from committing more serious crimes], we can prevent them from getting worse."
In a quarterly report to the committees, Rigsby said progress is being made toward implementing the first phase of the plan, which includes input from service providers, juvenile court judges and others.
The plan's second phase includes renovations of existing facilities at Alexander, Mansfield and Dermott, including provisions to adequately separate sex offenders from others.
One of the first steps expected to be implemented in the second phase is the separation of those types of offenders at the Alexander Youth Services Center, Rigsby said after the meeting. He thinks that will be done in 90 days.
Scott Tanner, coordinator of the Arkansas Public Defender Commission's Juvenile Ombudsman Division, told the committees that conditions at division facilities, particularly at Alexander, are still problematic:
- Youths are still mistreated by lockup workers, though not on the scale of several years ago.
- Youths have been denied access to grievance procedures to report the abuse by lockup workers.
- Continued lack of counseling and other rehabilitative services for sex offenders.
- Insufficient training of lockup workers.
- Lack of coordination between the Youth Services Division and the Children and Family Services Division, both part of the state Department of Human Services.
"We need to stop the revolving door system, where a child doesn't leave just because DYS needs to provide a bed for another child," Tanner said.
Everett and the House committee chairman, state Rep. Sue Madison, D-Fayetteville, asked Tanner several times to provide more specifics to back up his allegations. Madison said when Tanner next reports to legislators, he needs to come with specific documentation to support his complaints.
"We need the nitty-gritty," Madison said.
Madison was co-chairman at committee meetings after a June 1998 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette series detailed 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 initially estimated that his plan would cost an extra $9.9 million each year. The division's annual budget is now $48 million. Rigsby said Thursday that thanks to anticipated reallocation of resources within the agency, he now expects to ask for only about $2.8 million in new funds annually to implement the plan.
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 rehabilitation/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.
Under Act 1030 of 1999, Tanner's division has complete access to all state-run youth lockups. The act also requires the Youth Services Division to develop regulations to separate offenders on the basis of several factors, including whether the offender has been convicted of a sex crime.