Kids Sexually Abused In Arizona's Juvenile Corrections

The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Is a Bloody Mess

It's not typically a headline-making department. The state's most violent juvenile offenders go to the adult system; most kids wind up at the ADJC after committing a series of petty crimes. In October 2008, only 126 of the 625 kids in custody were there for violent crimes.

The agency's mandate is to rehabilitate, not punish. These are, after all, children. Their records are kept secret and expunged once they turn 18.

You may not have known of it, but the U.S. Department of Justice is well aware of the ADJC. Twice now, the state agency has fallen under scrutiny and federal orders to improve services and ensure safety.

The 1987 civil rights lawsuit Johnson v. Upchurch ultimately led to federally mandated changes at the agency, which had famously kept one boy in solitary confinement for several weeks.

Conditions for kids behind bars in Arizona got better — for a while. Then they got worse.

In 2001, the Department of Justice began making inquiries into conditions at the ADJC, after a series of stories in New Times revealed concerns about the safety of both staff and kids, as well as potential civil rights violations. In 2002 and 2003, three boys in ADJC custody committed suicide. The DOJ ultimately investigated under CRIPA, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, confirming much of what New Times had originally reported.

Again, things got better, though internal critics have always wondered just how much. The Department of Justice was satisfied, however, and closed its case in 2007.

No one from the outside has paid much attention since. And even when they have, it's tough to figure out just how closely anyone's looking. This fall, the Arizona Auditor General released a report on suicide prevention at the ADJC. The report was largely glowing, leading the Arizona Republic, the state's newspaper of record, to hand out high-fives in a story headlined, "Arizona's Juvenile Jails Free of Suicides Since '03."

The story and the audit didn't mention how close some of the calls were, even though the report acknowledged reviewing agency documents from March to May 2009; presumably, those would have included several of the incidents mentioned above.

The audit also praised the department for improving staff/youth relations, while ignoring three recent criminal cases in which ADJC staff were sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to having sexual relationships with kids.

And perhaps auditors failed to interview the staff members New Times spoke with, all of whom presented grave concerns about conditions at the ADJC — while insisting they like their jobs and want to continue working with kids who desperately need them.



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The employees' concerns vary from person to person, with an overriding theme: This agency — charged with taking care of sometimes violent and mentally disturbed kids — is not very professional.

The ADJC employees warn that a public-records request will reveal only some of what's going on at the agency.

"All someone has to do is write an IR [incident report] and put 'confidential' on it," and it's kept secret, one guard says. (To the agency's credit, many of the records provided by the ADJC for this story are, in fact, quite damning.)

A tour of the facilities is pointless, too, another guard says — even for the federal investigators, who were treated to a whitewash, several of the employees say.

"Anytime anybody comes to do an inspection, we know months in advance," one comments. It's easy to make things look good.

Another, who has worked for the ADJC since the Upchurch case, sees a real change in the kids coming into the system today.

"The kids we have now are nothing like the kids we had in those days," he says. "The kids we had then were real criminals."

He adds, "I wish we had counselors for every single one of them, and then I wouldn't have a job . . . We have psych associates that are overly taxed. Usually at any given point and time we'll have three psych associates to deal with 100 kids."

As for the community-based care that the agency is pushing for, which results in early release, the employee says, "Those kids come right back."

Norman Davis, chief presiding judge for the juvenile division of the Maricopa County Superior Court, echoes this.

"The first year I thought I was saving everybody. The second year, all the kids came back," he says, laughing ruefully and adding that obviously this is an exaggeration.

As for the extent to which mental illness affects the behaviors of the kids he sentences, Davis says he's really not sure.

"The longer I go — mental illness, what does that mean, exactly?" he asks, rhetorically. "Things of the mind are very difficult to get ahold of.

One shared concern among those interviewed for this story is staffing numbers. The CRIPA investigators strongly suggested that in many cases, each housing unit needs to have two staff members on hand at all times — including at night. And yet that tends to be a time, staff say, when corners are cut.

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The Kids Are Not Alright
The Department of Juvenile Corrections is supposed to watch -- and rehabilitate -- troubled teens. But no one's watching the department.?
Editor's note: The names of juveniles throughout these stories have been changed to protect their privacy. Although their criminal case files are public record, their corrections files are not.
Suicide at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections


From Brewer to Arpaio, No One's Listening to the Experts About How to Save Money or Protect Civil Rights and Public Safety When It Comes to Juvenile Corrections

Suicidal Tendencies: The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Is a Bloody Mess
December 17, 2009
Terri CapozziDavid GasparArizona Department of Juvenile CorrectionsPrisonsCriminal Sentencing and Punishment The boys in the Nova cottage at Adobe Mountain School had been locked in their cells for six days. They had not been allowed to go to school or to the cafeteria or to chapel. No weekly phone calls. They had not showered, or washed their clothes. Some had been without a mattress on their metal bed frames for weeks. Leftover food and garbage sat on the floors of their cells; some boys banged on the doors, demanding to use the bathroom. A streak of dried urine ran under the door of one cell. Inside there was more urine and feces on the floor.

Terri Capozzi followed a trail of blood, seeping into the hallway, to the door of the cell belonging to a boy named Roberto. She looked through the window.

"The room was in complete disarray," Capozzi, the youth rights ombudsman for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, would later write in a memo obtained by New Times. "Looking down on the floor, I saw the bottom half of a pint milk container set carefully in the middle of the blood-spattered floor. It appeared that the container was filled to the brim with blood.

" . . . As I stepped into the empty room, I noticed on the floor not far from the milk carton a wad of white gauze bound together. It was blood-soaked on one end. When I looked up at the walls, I realized that the container was a bucket, the gauze a rudimentary paintbrush and that [Roberto's] blood was the paint. The walls were filled with carefully drawn ornate designs, carefully rendered. I was awestruck by what occurred in this room."

Capozzi was told the mess had been made in the past 30 minutes, but her associate, Adobe Mountain youth rights specialist Brenda Lewis, confirmed it had been there for at least several hours. Roberto, a 15-year-old serving time for burglary, had been in and out of the infirmary for days, treated for self-inflicted cuts.

The Nova boys were locked down because they'd been misbehaving, and were supposed to be participating in a marathon group-counseling session. But just one brief session had been held the previous night, they told Lewis, when she visited them early on the afternoon of Day Six.

As Capozzi and Lewis left the cottage, the boys were allowed to go to dinner in the cafeteria for the first time in almost a week. Capozzi was speaking with Roberto -- he had never cut himself before coming to Adobe, she would write, but now was "clearly mentally compromised" and suicidal -- when Joe Taylor, the school's superintendent, approached. He called her into his office and ordered her off school property, angry that she'd crossed him by speaking with kids without his permission, undermining him and his staff.



The response: Taylor has since been promoted to ADJC assistant director, in charge of the agency's Safe Schools program.

As for Roberto, he was released from Adobe but returned in November, after he ran away from a residential treatment center. And he's still cutting himself .

The story of Roberto and what happened in the Nova cottage may be particularly chilling, but it is not the only example of abuse of children in the custody of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections. Contrary to the agency's name, policymakers long ago gave ADJC the mandate to rehabilitate troubled kids, not punish them -- and certainly not abuse them.

And yet reports of mistreatment -- including verbal and sexual abuse, inappropriate use of restraints and solitary confinement, and violence against both juveniles and staff -- are common at the state's facilities, which typically house just under 1,000 Arizona youths at a time.

New Times has spent more than nine months investigating conditions within ADJC. Among the findings:

ADJC no longer follows the practices put into place by a federal court order in 1993 that were designed to ensure that proper conditions are maintained for youth in detention. ADJC violates the intent of the now-expired court order by:

• Routinely putting children in solitary confinement in specialized "separation units" for days or weeks, sometimes even months, without adequate education or other services.

• Locking children in their cells for days at a time, also in violation of a department policy that prohibits lock downs lasting longer than two hours at a time.

• Providing substandard mental health services. Undertrained staff counsel children, and there are waiting lists for beds in mental health cottages.

• Failing to provide enough staff. The staff-to-youth ratio should be at least one staff member for every eight youths.

In addition, ADJC violates its own internal policies and goes against acceptable national practices in the following areas:

• Staff members often use violence to control kids when it is not necessary. Sometimes staffers are disciplined, sometimes not.

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2001-07-05/news/the-kids-are-not-alright/