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USA
Youths could come home
A watchdog for juvenile corrections said plans to
reopen youth residential services at the former State Training School at
Plankinton will be a positive step for troubled youths and their
families if a Wisconsin-based company has a better track record in
incarcerating juveniles than its most recent predecessor there did. “Do
I want these kids back in the state? You bet I do,” said Deb Phillips of
Whitewood, who founded the Parents Who Care Coalition after the
heat-exhaustion death of 14-year-old Gina Score at the Plankinton
facility in 1999.
South Dakota will contract with two new intensive
residential programs for youths in 2007 that will allow state agencies
to bring home some of the 130 young South Dakotans who are currently
placed in out-of-state facilities and to keep more kids in state in the
future.
Clinicare, headquartered in West Allis, Wis., will
offer intensive residential services to 66 youths, male and female, at
Plankinton beginning in January. Clinicare follows in the wake of the
failed Cornell Companies contract. Houston-based Cornell pulled out of
Plankinton after only a few months of operation in 2004 in a rate
reimbursement dispute with the state of South Dakota.
A second state contract will go to Lutheran Social
Services of Sioux Falls, which will house 18 youths with severe and
chronic mental-health disorders in a program to begin in the spring of
2007 at a facility in Sioux Falls.
Currently, 130 youths are placed in out-of-state
facilities through the state Department of Corrections or Department of
Social Services, according to a DSS news release. Thirty-seven of those
youths are in the care of DSS, which has a total of about 1,200 children
in its care on any given day.
The Department of Corrections, which has about 950
youths in custody and in after-care services each month, has 93 youths
placed out of state. All of those youths will be assessed and considered
for return to the state, but most will remain where they are if they are
making good progress in treatment, according to Doug Herrmann, juvenile
services director for DOC. “Those doing well out of state will complete
their placements,” he said. The new programs likely will house youths
who are placed in the system in the future, he said.
Phillips said she is unfamiliar with Clinicare, which
operates in nine states and has provided out-patient and residential
treatment to youths since 1967. “I just found out their name, she said
of the contract with Clinicare. I want to make it explicit that I’m not
saying Clinicare has the same problems that Cornell had.”
Phillips criticized Cornell’s track record of lawsuits
and complaints about abuse and mistreatment of juveniles at some of its
79 facilities in 18 states. “I had serious questions about Cornell after
I found out how they operated, she said. Phillips said the public
deserves more information about potential service providers, especially
for-profit companies, before the contracts are awarded. The process is
so quiet. I would have wanted more notice.”
Phillips got involved with juvenile corrections
because of her now-grown daughter who was in the custody of DOC from the
ages of 14 to 18 for truancy and other noncriminal behaviors. The girl
was placed in a variety of residential settings but never out of state.
Although Phillips said reopening Plankinton could be a positive step,
South Dakotans should be asking whether children are safer and better
treated in state or out of state. “Would you rather have them out of
state where they are getting good programming or back here where they
may be mistreated?” she asked.
Helen Long of Parent Alliance Concerning Teen Support,
or PACTS, a Rapid City group that supports families struggling with
challenging behaviors, said bringing children in residential care closer
to home, friends and family should improve treatment outcomes. “I think
it’s a great thing. The whole purpose of treatment is to get better . .
. and to heal the family, Long said. But when you send kids out of state
and families don’t see each other, then they can’t communicate, they
can’t make the relationship between parent and child stronger, and they
can’t heal.”
Several area providers of mental-health services to
youth praised the new programs as good for at-risk children and their
families in South Dakota. “We’re lucky that these two new facilities
will be available so we can keep some of our children at home, and they
won’t have to go out of state,” said Bill Colson, chief operating
officer of Children’s Home Society and Black Hills Children’s Home near
Rockerville.
BHCH treats children ages 4-13, so it would not
compete with the two new programs, which probably will house older
youths with more intensive needs, Colson said. “We’d see them as
partners, not competitors,” he said.
“It’s good for kids,” Jim Kinyon, director of Catholic
Social Services, said. “When you send a kid to Missouri or some other
state, you pretty much eliminate the chance for his or her family to be
involved in their treatment.”
Long said families of the kids in custody often are
poor and find travel expenses to be insurmountable obstacles to regular
visits.
Barb Fierro, development director at Wellspring, Inc.
in Rapid City, said the new programs in Plankinton and Sioux Falls will
treat a “different kind of kid” than Wellspring typically sees.
Wellspring provides residential and outpatient mental-health and
chemical-dependency treatment to youths. “These kids would probably be
more severely emotionally disturbed kids, Fierro said, but it remains to
be seen if any of Wellspring’s court-ordered clients would be placed at
one of the new sites instead. But Wellspring always has a waiting list
of 30-35 kids .. so freeing up some slots here would not be a bad
thing,” Fierro said.
Mary Garrigan
7 October 2006
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/10/07/news/local/news03.txt
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