Juvenile Services Secretary Seeks Strategic Plan Restructuring State Services For Chidren (Secretary Devore and his senior staff were interviewed by LWVMD President Lu Pierson and Voter Editor Marcia Reinke in the Maryland Juvenile Services offices at One Center Plaza in Baltimore City on September 11, 2007) by Marcia Reinke Raze Cheltenham! Close Waxter! Make Hickey secure! Get rid of the mold and the mildew, foul bathrooms with broken toilets, and the “boats” serving as beds on the floor! Stop the youth on youth violence! Eliminate the suicides! Get special education and mental health treatment for these kids. The catalogue of inadequate services and deplorable conditions in some of Maryland’s juvenile facilities, made public in screaming headlines and in monitoring reports, is daunting. But to Donald DeVore, Maryland’s new Secretary of Juvenile Services and his handpicked administrative team, they are not just a challenge but the starting point for a comprehensive plan. The plan, now on the drawing board, will involve not only Juvenile Services, but the Departments of Education, Social Services and Mental Hygiene, the Office for Children and the governor himself. “When I was interviewed by Governor O’Malley for this job, I committed to developing a strategic plan for children in Maryland which has never been done before,” DeVore said at a September interview in his Baltimore office with board members from the State League. “We’ve received $500,000 from the legislature. And we have already held meetings with the other departments. “People don’t like to hear this but it is the truth. Seventy-five to 80% of our kids are children who earlier in their lives experienced problems associated with maltreatment and neglect. And when they commit their first act of delinquency and are adjudicated, the other agencies have sort of washed their hands of them and made them our responsibility. What we want to do, and the other secretaries have committed to, is to develop a continuum of care for kids so that we can have a tracking system and an integrated service model,” he said. That may involve services for the “mom”, to whose home the kids will usually be returning to live. It will involve arrangements for transitioning them back into the public schools where they probably disrupted classrooms in the past. It will involve drug abuse treatment and mental health counseling. And it will probably require a restructuring of the Maryland departments that serve children so there are links between the child welfare person, the social worker, the juvenile courts, the detention center, the probation officer, teachers and mental health personnel, he said. Juvenile Justice administration is not new to DeVore. Unlike his well-meaning, but politically appointed Maryland predecessors, DeVore has had a 33-year career in juvenile justice work. He comes to Maryland from Connecticut where he was charged with operating the state’s juvenile justice system. Lured out of retirement in a leafy Philadelphia suburb, DeVore was originally asked to handle a mini-riot at a treatment facility which was already in the headlines due to the indictment of the former Connecticut governor. “The present governor was on his way out, and the lieutenant governor was coming in to fill the unexpired term, and suddenly there was this riot. Kids were hurt and staff members were hurt. I was called in to work with Francis Mendez of the Connecticut juvenile justice staff. We had six weeks to reform this place. And we did it,” he said. Mendez has accompanied DeVore to Maryland and now serves as deputy secretary of administration here. “We worked seven days a week, sometimes 15 to 16 hours a day, in reforming what was originally a really violent place for children into one that we thought we could be proud of,” he said. At the end of the six weeks DeVore was asked to run the entire Connecticut juvenile justice program. “My wife didn’t want to move to Connecticut. We were in our dream house, a beautiful Victorian, English Tudor. Our six kids were all settled. So when I accepted the position I worked for six months by myself. Then my wife finally came too,” he said. The DeVore family moved last month into a home in Roland Park. Moving to Maryland was easier. They have owned a summer place near the Sassafras River for 23 years, he explained. Returning to the Connecticut story, DeVore said that he and Mendez finally recommended closing the facility in which the riot had occurred, because the original population of 240 kids had shrunk to 53. “What a lot of these kids really needed were mental health services…services in a lot of other areas,” he said, suggesting similarities with Maryland. Closing the facility was not easy. Connecticut is one the country’s most unionized states, and when DeVore recommended closure the unions representing the 400 persons employed there “went nuts,” he said. The placement of workers when a facility is closed remains a major problem whenever and wherever it occurs, he said. Prior to his work for the State of Connecticut, DeVore had been a U.S. Department of Justice federal monitor there, as well as in Oregon, and had served as a consultant to the Department of Justice. “It was a great job. I loved it. .As a federal monitor I found that when I asked people to do something, they did it,” he said of his monitoring work. “What happens is that the U.S. Department of Justice, through its Civil Rights Division, monitors justice in all the states and territories, and if they believe that the provision of care to clients, be they juveniles or adults, is not constitutional, then they send a team to investigate and report, usually to the office of the state Attorney General,” he said. Explaining that it is this monitoring procedure which has unearthed problems over the years at Cheltenham, Hickey and the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, he said a state has two alternatives on receipt of negative findings. One alternative would be for the state to litigate because it does not like the findings. Recognizing, however, that the federal monitors “usually do a pretty good job,” most states agree to correct the deficits and enter into consent judgments. Then the federal judge will select a monitor to go out quarterly to conduct inspections and interviews to determine whether the defendants (in this case the state) are coming into compliance. Normally consent agreements last for three years, although in Connecticut, when DeVore was the monitor there, they sometimes lasted for eight. The turnaround process in Connecticut, which could be duplicated here, involved three things, he explained. First came “enormous staff training,” to change the culture of violence. Second came a “beefing up of the delivery of services to the kids, a total redesign.” Third was a “huge emphasis” put on planning . There was also an emphasis on serving more kids in the community, so the number of kids in out-of-home placement dropped significantly, he said. The Maryland Department of Juvenile Services currently has some 32,000 children under supervision, of which “less than 3,000 closer to 2,000, are in any kind of committed status. …meaning kids that are removed from their communities,” he said. The rest are under court orders but are receiving services while living at home. Detention centers like Hickey, Cheltenham and Baltimore Juvenile are only for kids who are awaiting trial or placement after trial. “It’s like jails and prisons for adults,” DeVore said. These facilities do not have kids who are been adjudicated (like sentencing for adults) except for the few for whom residential treatment is being sought. Until 2005 Hickey served some 400 kids for both detention and treatment. Now Hickey has 72 kids, all in detention. Populations in detention centers fluctuate but average 140. The average stay in a detention center is less than two weeks, sometimes just two days, he said. The state also has treatment centers. Victor Cullen, near Frederick, just opened and houses 12 kids, with a capacity for 48. The Schaefer House in Baltimore City houses 19 boys. And the Department licenses 70 privately operated treatment centers throughout the state. ”Typical placements are in group homes and may have around 12 kids,” he said. Waxter is the state’s primary treatment center for delinquent girls, a facility which a Maryland juvenile justice monitor said should be closed as recently as September 15. “It’s a physically dreadful facility,” DeVore said, adding that his department has nevertheless done a lot to provide programs and services. “We’re actually very proud of the work we’ve been doing with girls. I come from a very strong background in services for girls which I brought here to Maryland. Within the first week I was here, I asked certain departments to report directly to me on girls’ services. And we’ve done some really neat things. We’ve set up a gender specific certification program for our workers who work with girls. “It’s interesting that in my 33-year career in juvenile justice, it is only within the last 10 years that we’ve realized girls need to be treated very differently from boys,” he said. A Washington Post reporter who visited Waxter this month, “because she had heard how bad it was,” found that most of the girls had very positive attitudes. “All were interacting in some way. One group was playing basketball. Another was practicing for a fashion show. I plan to attend that fashion show,” he said. In western Maryland the Department operates four youth or forestry camps. One is for boys from Montgomery County and west. The others have proportionally more kids from Baltimore City, but also include boys from southern Maryland and the Eastern shore. “These are neat places. These are not boot camps any more,” he said, referring to newspaper accounts a few years back, detailing brutal conditions at some of these facilities. At the time of our interview DeVore had recently returned from a tour of these camps, which were originally youth conservations facilities. Each houses about 40 boys out in the wilderness. The boys get to do some camping, hiking, mountain biking and white water rafting. “The kids love this stuff, especially those from Baltimore City,” he said. The surrounding communities are very supportive for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Department is one of the areas’ largest employers. But the kids also do community work and have not caused any trouble. Most of the time they are involved in school, completing their education or vocational training, and receiving treatments as needed. “Actually the kids do extraordinarily well there,” he said. “Based on my limited experience of just six months, I think there are two different Marylands and western Maryland is very different. Most of the kids there are happy. They smile. They have good things to say. The staff likes the work. They’re professional. Very different,” he said. Asked about substance abuse and gangs in the juvenile population, DeVore said “drug abuse is very pervasive in the great majority. And we are providing treatment for that. “But the gang issue is a really interesting. We have almost no gang activity or gang identification out in the camps. I can’t say that is true in other facilities,” he said. “The camp culture negates gangs. Not to get into a lecture about it, but the reason kids join gangs is that gangs provide a family structure .that many of these kids don’t otherwise have. And if you provide an alternative with a positive peer culture, kids would much rather be part of that.” Educating the juvenile populations is another challenge. A monitor’s report on the Baltimore City center recently indicated that 45% of the kids there are in need of special education. With an average age of 15, the average reading level is fifth grade. DeVore thinks, moreover, that across the state the 45% figure for special education is low. As a result of federal monitoring before DeVore arrived, Juvenile Services and the State Department of Education (DOE) are working toward having the DOE people take over all the teaching in the juvenile facilities. DOE is now handling the education in the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, the Hickey School, the Victor Cullen Center, the Carter Center on the Upper Shore and the Eastern Shore Children’s Center. By 2012 all the facilities will be operated by DOE. “I think that is wonderful for a couple of basic reasons,” DeVore said. “Education for our population has to be very specialized and they know how to do it. And quite honestly the Department of Education has much deeper pockets,” he said. He explained that transitioning to the DOE programs is now underway. “We were at Hickey this morning,” he said. “When the Department of Education took over they brought in beautiful new modular education buildings. They have added more space for vocational training. If you were to walk through the classroom buildings …which I’d be happy to take you to any time…you’d see computers everywhere, a full library, reading specialists, special ed teachers, transition counselors…helping kids to transition back into the public schools when they leave. “You see the majority of kids are released and they go right back home. Transitioning these kids back into the public schools is one of the hardest things I’ve had to face in every state where I’ve worked,” he said. These kids were problems, had a history of being disruptive, before they were adjudicated and the public schools are not eager to welcome them back. It’s a tough nut to crack, especially in Baltimore City,” he said. The most recent recidivism figures, from 2005, show that about 60% are rearrested, although the re-adjudication rate is lower than that. In the majority of cases, however, the violations are of technical terms, like not going to school, or not going to counseling or having “dirty urine” Aside from the dirty urine, these are not necessarily violations of the law but they are violations of the technical terms of probation.” he said. “I’m not saying any recidivism is good. It’s not. “But that is why we need a comprehensive, strategic plan,” he said.