Editor’s note: This article is by Jim Kenyon, of the Valley News, in which it was first published March 1, 2015. It is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 can be found here.
ESSEX — On Aug. 24, 2011, Sam Ramsey was headed to the gym with nine other teens to play a nightly game of pickup basketball at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center.
He never made it.
A counselor at Vermont’s only locked facility for troubled youths noticed he wasn’t wearing the appropriate clothing.
The counselor, Sandra Hoffman, ordered Ramsey to his room to change out of his denim pants and into gym shorts.
Ramsey, then 16, said his shorts were in the wash. Hoffman, a former prison guard with the Vermont Department of Corrections, didn’t buy it. She escorted Ramsey back to his room, where she found a bin “full of soiled clothing and his room smelled of urine,” according to a Vermont State Police report.
Things went downhill from there.
Hoffman told police that Ramsey got angry when she informed him that his room needed cleaning. He began swearing and stormed out.
In a lounge area, he picked up a large wooden table and flung it on the floor, she said.
Ramsey’s outburst didn’t stop there, Hoffman told police. She said Ramsey charged across the room, grabbed her hair and slammed her into a wall. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to do. At 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Ramsey was a kid in a man-size body.
By this time, other Woodside employees had heard the commotion. They rushed to Hoffman’s aid and tackled Ramsey, who apparently still had hold of her hair.
The staff was “able to regain control of Ramsey through the use of mechanical restraints and de-escalation techniques,” the report said. Hoffman was treated at a nearby hospital for bruises and strains to her shoulder, neck and back. A patch of hair was also ripped from her scalp. The Chittenden County State’s Attorney’s Office, which handled the case, wanted Ramsey to serve prison time for the assault.
But that had to wait; Ramsey was still a juvenile.
The Vermont Department for Children and Families, which operates Woodside, continued to keep Ramsey in its custody. What happened in the ensuing seven months while Ramsey stayed locked up at Woodside is a story in itself.
But first, some background.
I wrote about Ramsey in a Nov. 23 story that was a follow-up to the Other Side of the Valley series, which I wrote in 2001.
I first met him in the summer of 2000, when he was 5 and about to enter kindergarten at the Ottauquechee School. He lived with his mother, Kerrie, and two older brothers at a Hartford campground. A year earlier, Kerrie had fled an abusive relationship in Florida and relocated to the Upper Valley with her three boys.
Although Kerrie had a decent-paying job as a respiratory therapist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, she couldn’t swing $850 in monthly rent for a Quechee condo and $800-a-month in electric heating bills during the winter. The family spent a few months camping out while Kerrie saved enough money to afford a rental house.
Last summer, I renewed acquaintance with Kerrie and Sam. As I wrote in November, he’s struggled with mental illness since elementary school. Over the years, clinicians have diagnosed Sam with, among other things, intermittent explosive disorder, child onset conduct disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder — all conditions that can be the root of destructive behavior.
Kerrie, who has lived in Windsor since 2003, did everything she could to help her son. She made sure he received regular counseling, in and out of school. She relinquished custody to DCF, so he’d be eligible for around-the-clock mental health services. Most of Ramsey’s teen years were spent in residential treatment centers for troubled youths with psychiatric illnesses.
Nothing seemed to work.
In seven years, he spent time in six institutions, including several stints at the Bennington School, a private residential treatment and special education facility in southern Vermont for “fairly aggressive youths.”
By the spring of 2011, Ramsey, who had recently turned 16, had become too much for the Bennington School to handle. DCF shipped him to Woodside, a 30-bed facility for kids ages 10 to 17. Since opening in the mid-1980s, Woodside has served as Vermont’s juvenile detention center. Youths who are in DCF custody, or have been ruled “delinquent” by a judge, can be detained at Woodside indefinitely.
About the same time that Ramsey arrived, Woodside hired Jay Simons as its chief administrator. Simons had spent 18 years with the Vermont Department of Corrections, including the previous seven years as a prison superintendent.
Woodside, however, was supposed to be making the transition from primarily a detention center to a facility that took a more therapeutic approach in dealing with troubled youths. The change allowed the state to qualify for millions of dollars a year in federal Medicaid payments.
While Woodside is “definitely not a youth prison,” Simons said, it’s been his priority to make staff and juveniles feel more secure. “Kids and staff who don’t feel safe don’t do good work,” he said.
‘23 and 1’
After his altercation with Hoffman, Ramsey said, his living quarters changed. He was moved to the “back hall,” which consisted of four single rooms, separate from where other kids slept. Ramsey’s room, and the three others with it, were known as “wet rooms.” Each had its own stainless steel toilet and sink.
For nearly seven months, Ramsey said, he was seldom allowed out of his room. In adult prisons, this form of punishment is known as “23 and 1,” meaning inmates are kept in solitary confinement for all but one hour a day.
Ramsey said he was told by Simons that he was being segregated from other youths because he had “misbehaved, and other kids were scared of me.”
In the beginning, Ramsey’s meals were brought to him. From his room’s small window, he could see the railroad tracks that ran on the other side of Woodside’s 12-foot-high perimeter fence. “I knew it was getting close to lunchtime when the train went by,” he said.
During the one hour out of his room, Ramsey said, he was sometimes allowed to play basketball — by himself. “I hated not being able to talk with other kids. It was like I had zero contact with other kids.”
By law, youths detained at Woodside must attend its in-house school. But Ramsey said he wasn’t allowed to go to classes with other kids. The staff dropped off schoolwork at his room. “They’d bring me textbooks and worksheets, but a lot of time I didn’t know what to do, especially math,” said Ramsey who, at age 20, still doesn’t have a high school degree.
Some Woodside employees were kinder to him than others, Ramsey said. They brought him young adult books from the library that they thought he’d enjoy. He read some of James Patterson’s Daniel X sci-fi series and most of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games books. “That’s when I became a reader,” he said. “I used to hate reading, but I didn’t have anything else to do.”
In 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch issued a 140-page national report, Growing Up Locked Down, on the use and effects of solitary confinement on youths under age 18.
“The solitary confinement of adults can cause serious pain and suffering and can violate international human rights and U.S. constitutional law. But the potential damage to young people, who do not have the maturity of an adult and are at a particularly vulnerable, formative stage of life, is much greater,” the report said.
“Experts assert that young people are psychologically unable to handle solitary confinement with the resilience of an adult. And, because they are still developing, traumatic experiences like solitary confinement may have a profound effect on the chance to rehabilitate and grow. Solitary confinement can exacerbate, or make more likely, short- and long-term mental health problems. The most common deprivation that accompanies solitary confinement, denial of physical exercise, is physically harmful to adolescents’ health and well-being.”
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU estimated that, in 2011, more than 95,000 youths were held in prisons and jails. The report focused on adult prisons and jails, but found that “solitary confinement is apparently used in juvenile facilities on occasion.”
When the solitude became too much to bear, Ramsey came up with ways that forced Woodside’s staff to let him out. He’d roll his bed sheet into a ball and stuff it down the toilet, flooding his room and the hallway.
“They’d give me a mop and tell me to clean it up, but I didn’t mind,” he said. “It bought me time out of that room.”
The one-hour that Ramsey spent outside his room was usually at suppertime, when other kids were in the cafeteria. With a staff member looking on, Ramsey said, he would eat dinner by himself in the lounge. He could watch TV while he gobbled his food. He could also use the hour to play basketball, take a shower or call his mother.
Kerrie Ramsey has always been her son’s strongest advocate. But with Sam in DCF’s custody, she was powerless to do anything about his solitary confinement. He still hasn’t recovered from the experience, she said.
“Sam absolutely loves people,” she told me. “He loves to do his magic tricks, tell bad jokes and play sports, like basketball.”
The time he spent in solitary confinement made her son “more explosive,” she said. “He lashed out, and the vicious cycle continued.
“He was a very emotional child. I think knowing that he was so disliked probably was the worst thing for Sam.”
After DCF placed her son at Woodside in 2011, Kerrie made the two-hour drive from Windsor to Essex once a week. She stayed for a couple of hours. After her son was moved into solitary confinement, however, their weekly visits were limited to an hour, she said.
One or two Woodside employees kept watch in the small meeting room where the visits took place. She could bring her son his favorite snack — Utz brand honey barbecue potato chips — and a bottle of flavored water.
When his mom visited at Christmastime, she brought a box of gifts. Her son could unwrap them, but everything had to go home with her, including the long underwear he asked for. “They wouldn’t even let him keep that,” she said.
As springtime approached, Ramsey said, he was allowed out of his room more frequently. “I got two hours, if I was lucky,” he said.
Room Change
Asked during an interview at Woodside about what Kerrie Ramsey and several former Woodside employees said about Sam’s months in isolation, Simons denied the facility practices solitary confinement.
“We don’t do that,” he said. “It’s not part of our program.”
In late October, I helped Ramsey file a written request for his DCF case file, in the hopes that it would shed more light on the time he spent at Woodside.
Three months after making the request, Ramsey has yet to receive any documents from DCF. “We have been working diligently on Sam’s records, however, it is a voluminous amount,” DCF’s records officer wrote in an email. “We will hopefully be done soon.”
That was nearly three weeks ago.
On a pre-arranged visit in November that I made with Valley News staff photographer Sarah Priestap , Simons offered a tour of the two-story facility.
He showed us the “wet rooms,” where Ramsey said he spent much of his time. They were vacant. In one room, someone had scratched “Do Crime. F— Time” on the cinder block wall.
Prior to Simons’ arrival in 2011, the four rooms were used for a much different purpose. They were reserved for kids who were doing well in school and exhibiting good behavior.
At Woodside, kids are locked in their rooms at night. The wet rooms offered a little bit of independence. The kids didn’t have to bang on their door to use the bathroom at night. “Kids thought it was cool to have a toilet and a sink in their room,” Simons said.
Under Simons, the rooms now make up what is called the Intensive Stabilization Unit, or ISU. Youths at Woodside are known to sometimes “lash out violently” and must be segregated until they regain control, he said.
The ISU is sort of a timeout room for teenagers. They remain in the ISU for only “as long as they need to be,” Simons said. “It’s not a punitive place. Kids don’t get sentenced to (the ISU). They come out when they’re safe.”
In one room, the toilet, sink, bed and desk have been removed. The walls and doors are lined with special padding. Kids who are having difficulty coping are placed in the room for short periods to “punch the walls, kick the door, and yell,” Simons said.
The idea is that they can let out their frustrations and anger without harming themselves or others.
Before Simons arrived five or six years ago, Woodside placed kids in isolation for lengthy periods, he said. “If a kid was in one of those rooms it was because they were dangerous.”
‘Ongoing Concerns’
The 2012 national report issued by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch documents the problems with placing children in solitary confinement.
But for the state of Vermont, there’s another potential problem.
Last year, Vermont received more than $2 million in federal Medicaid payments because Woodside is considered a residential treatment facility that provides in-patient mental health and substance abuse treatment for juvenile delinquents.
That’s much different than a juvenile detention center. If word got out that Woodside was placing kids in solitary confinement, the state could lose millions of dollars a year in federal Medicaid payments.
A.J. Ruben is the chief staff attorney for Disability Rights Vermont, a nonprofit organization based in Montpelier that receives federal funds to investigate abuse, neglect and serious rights violations of people with disabilities in the state.
Over the years, Disability Rights’ clients have included youths detained at Woodside. Since a 2006 investigation, stemming from an incident in which a 14-year-old boy suffered a broken wrist while being restrained by a staff member, Woodside has made “vast improvements,” Ruben said.
Seclusion, another name for solitary confinement, is being used less and less, he said. Still, Ruben said he thinks Woodside is walking a fine line.
“We’ve had ongoing concerns about their use of seclusion,” he said. “Woodside is getting all this Medicaid funding, so there is a contradiction there. The state has a duty to comply with Medicaid rules.”
But pinpointing when and why Woodside places kids in isolation is difficult.
“What gets you there?” Ruben asked. “If you throw a cup against the wall, can they put you in isolation and keep you there as long as they want?”
The state can claim that Woodside is no longer a detention center, but that “doesn’t change the reality of it,” said Marshall Pahl, an attorney with the Vermont Defender General’s Office who represents juveniles sent to Woodside. “It’s very much a prison-like facility. I’m well aware they have used solitary confinement on some juveniles.”
Like Ruben, Pahl said he has seen improvements. In the last year or so, “Woodside has made some very significant policy changes around isolation and segregation,” Pahl said. “Consistently, there were kids being kept in segregation who weren’t going to school. They are now. It’s a lot better than it was.”
Prison Time
After Ramsey’s altercation with Hoffman, the female counselor, Woodside staff members told their DCF bosses that the facility “was no longer an appropriate placement” for him, according to his juvenile court records, which he gave his public defender permission to share.
In March 2012, Ramsey, Simons and another Woodside employee boarded a plane to Atlanta.
Their destination was Devereux, a private residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed teenagers in Kennesaw, Georgia.
While Ramsey was undergoing treatment at Devereux, which is part of a national, not-for-profit mental health care chain, the assault charge against him continued to wind its way through Vermont’s adult court system. In May 2012, Ramsey pleaded guilty to the assault on Hoffman. In exchange, he was placed in the state’s “youthful offender” program.
On Dec. 30, 2012, Ramsey turned 18 at Devereux. Eight months after his birthday, two county sheriff’s deputies from Vermont were dispatched to Georgia to drive Ramsey home.
That new home would be a prison cell.
The state argued — and a judge agreed — that Ramsey had failed to make sufficient progress in his treatment program at Devereux, which was costing the state $86,500 a year. Ramsey’s “youthful offender” status was revoked. And since he had turned 18, he was old enough to go behind bars.
For the incident at Woodside, which occurred when he was 16, Ramsey was sentenced to up to three years in prison — at a cost to taxpayers of about $50,000 annually. If Ramsey serves his maximum sentence, he won’t be out until early 2017. In a state prison system with 1,900 inmates, Ramsey, who turned 20 in December, is one of the youngest. Fewer than 80 inmates are under 21.
Like many inmates, Ramsey has his ups and downs. He’s closing in on earning his high school degree. He plays a lot of basketball, and he recently competed in the prison’s chess tournament.
But he still struggles with his mental illness at times. In November, he stopped taking his twice-daily doses of Depakote, a mood stabilizer. “I was trying to wean myself off it,” he said. “I was doing pretty well for a while.”
Then he got into an argument with his cellmate at the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport. For starting the fight, Ramsey spent Thanksgiving week in solitary confinement, or, as it’s known in prison, “the hole.”
After he got out, I asked him how it had been.
“It was like Woodside all over again,” he said.
