A lack of secure places to house violent youths in Vermont has caused dangerous situations both for those teenagers, and for the people assigned to care for them, several officials told state lawmakers on Friday.
Diane Wheeler, the Franklin County deputy state’s attorney, said that, while there are mental health and substance misuse treatment facilities for youth, there’s a lack of services for juveniles who don’t need those services but are violent.
“We don’t have a place for those juveniles to go,” she told lawmakers during a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Human Services Committee.
“Where are these teens going?” Wheeler asked. “The answer is currently hotels and St. Albans Police Department, at least in Franklin County, and that’s not safe for anyone.”
Friday’s hearing came on the heels of a report that a state social worker was sexually assaulted last month by a teenager in state custody. The female staff member had been assigned to oversee the teenager in a St. Albans hotel, where he was sent because no transport was available at the time to take him to his next placement.
The hearing also followed the closing last fall of the 30-bed Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex, the state’s only juvenile detention facility. That state-run facility was closed because of steep reductions in the number of young people being sent there. The state is now finalizing a contract with Becket Family Services to operate a six-bed secure facility for youth in Newbury.
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, said Friday’s hearing wasn’t held specifically to address the St. Albans case, but the larger issue of what services Vermont has to deal with violent youths.
“I would say overall there is stress in our child protection and juvenile system in terms of youth,” Sean Brown, commissioner of the state Department for Children and Families, told lawmakers.
He said that stress stems from several factors, including the Covid-19 pandemic that has slowed down the ability to move youths in and out of programs. Also, he said, problems arranging transports for youths mean that certain young people have to be kept longer in police stations and hotels.
Brown said he’s been working with the sheriff’s departments to help improve that situation and remove the need to hold violent youths in places that aren’t secure.
“It’s not acceptable what happened several weeks ago with the youth in a hotel in St. Albans,” he said. His department has since stopped the practice of keeping youths in hotels.
“I think we all recognize we need to implement new measures to prevent that from occurring again,” Brown said.
When secure placements for youths in Vermont have been needed, the state has had access to a facility in New Hampshire, Brown said. The state hopes to have the Vermont facility in Newbury open by the end of the year.
Meantime, Brown said, his team is working “to make sure that there’s a process for state’s attorneys to be aware of — how we can refer youth and receive court approval to put a youth there,” Brown said of the New Hampshire facility. “We are close to finalizing that.”
Wheeler, the Franklin County prosecutor, said getting a youth into a secure facility in New Hampshire is not easy.
To send a child out of state without a parent or child’s specific agreement, “you need a court order, so you need a court hearing,” she said. And the problem generally arises at off hours, when courts are not open or can’t be contacted right away.
“So the question for the short term,” Wheeler said, “is where do they go?”
Bennington County State’s Attorney Erica Marthage echoed Wheeler’s concerns, including the need for a secure, short-term setting for youth when it is appropriate.
“We’re not going to make this population go away,” Marthage said. “We need to have something that is a temporary, safe, secure placement for those youth we just have no place for.”
Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees Association, reiterated comments he made in an interview with VTDigger earlier this week, saying the closure of Woodside has left Vermont without an important placement option for youth.
“Clearly,” Howard said, “there is a trickle-down effect in the system, and the lack of beds in the system, and the lack of community resources, that has been exacerbated by the closing of Woodside.”
The state employees union had strongly opposed closing Woodside, which housed youths deemed delinquent by a court.
Marshall Pahl, chief juvenile defender and deputy defender general, told lawmakers the pandemic has greatly affected dealing with troubled youths in state custody, particularly when it comes to lining up transports promptly from one location to another.
“It’s really important for a system to be really responsive,” he said. “When someone says, ‘Look, this kid’s behaviors have reached a threshold we can no longer accommodate in our program,’ we need a system that can absolutely respond to that quickly and respond to that effectively.”
That doesn’t mean a new Woodside, he said.
“I think the testimony today reflects what we really need to be doing is developing that middle system of placements, for kids who may not demand a fully secure, fully locked environment,” Pahl said.
After the hearing, Brown said several examples raised during the testimony, including the St. Albans assault, involved youths who entered state custody through the child welfare system, not through the justice system. As a result, those youths would not have been eligible for placement in Woodside, even if it were still running.
“This is about a broader systemic issue,” he said.
Rep. Ann Pugh, D-South Burlington, chair of the House Committee on Human Services, said another Woodside may not be the answer.
“Not all youth who become aggressive and out of control in fact are delinquent, but in fact got into placement because of trauma and other kinds of situations,” she said during the hearing,
“I think we need clarity,” Pugh said. “Do we need a place for juveniles who are aggressive and/or do we need the capacity for children and youth who come into the state’s responsibility, but not as delinquents?”
“I think, actually, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Sears told Pugh.
“The question is not whether we need Woodside; that’s gone,” Sears said, “The question is how we can better coordinate the services for these kids to better protect the communities and obviously the folks who deal with it.”
Howard said he didn’t dispute what Pugh and Sears had to say.
“We need something,” he said, and not just for youths deemed delinquent by a court.
“It was harder to get into Woodside than Harvard,” Howard said. “A resource doesn’t matter if you can’t use it.”