Flanagan: The closing of Catalina.

An editorial to the AZ Daily Star from the Director of the Department of Juvenile Corrections...

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Catalina facility's closure, move ultimately will serve troubled youths better

http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/article_55d36874-9747-52a1-8e25-4fd9143a5c21.html

Charles Flanagan

"The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy."

- Alfred North Whitehead

While the vast majority of Arizona's youths never have problems with criminal conduct, some do. There are many factors that can often derail these young people on the path to adulthood, leading them toward self-destructive behavior. The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections believes that rehabilitation, treatment, education and positive enforcement are the most effective avenues for getting our young people back on the right track to live happy, safe and productive lives. I firmly believe in the agency's vision: "Safer Communities Through Successful Youth."

As the new director for the department, one of my goals is to provide troubled youths with the best resources possible in order to turn their lives around. As part of this charge, I am making some changes to more effectively serve the entire state and provide the widest possible range of services to each of the youths in our custody so that we can successfully reintegrate them into our shared communities. Most prominent among these changes is the planned closure of Catalina Mountain School in Pima County.

By the end of September, the 70-74 youths currently at Catalina Mountain will be transferred to the Department's Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex in Maricopa County. This relocation will accomplish several goals. It allows the department to close its most outdated unit (Catalina Mountain was built in 1967); takes advantage of efficiencies by consolidating youths and services at a single complex; and makes available the state's full range of programs and treatment options to every child in the state's custody and care.

The goal of this plan is to provide a concentration of all resources and services on a single campus, making available specialized treatment for substance abuse, mental health concerns and sex offenders. Currently, specialized treatment for mental health issues and sex offenders is not available at Catalina Mountain School, which also houses only male youths. Consolidation also will allow the department to add a Skills-4-Work program to the Adobe Mountain School, enabling youths to learn trades associated with culinary arts, cosmetology, building trades, sewing, fire science, working with wildlife and other technical careers.

The consolidation of youths, staff and programs to a single complex will result in estimated cost savings to the state of nearly $1.5 million in fiscal 2012 and $3.8 million in fiscal 2013. In fact, we anticipate a savings of approximately $100 per youth, per day, by combining operations rather than maintaining the Catalina Mountain School.

I understand this closure and relocation will result in disruption for some department staffers and families of youths in custody. The department's goal is to employ or facilitate the employment of the majority of Catalina Mountain School employees. The concentration of staff at one facility will enhance coverage for youths in crisis and provide a larger, more professionally diverse staff with expertise in a range of areas.

Additionally, the department will make available video visitation in Tucson for families of youths from Southeastern Arizona who are relocated to the Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex. The department also will maintain the area's parole services, private-sector service providers and community service activities, and is exploring the establishment of halfway houses.

The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections takes seriously its mission to positively impact the thought process and behavior pattern of youths in its custody. I believe the consolidation of services and programs to our Adobe Mountain/Black Canyon complex will help us perform that mission more effectively and efficiently.

By joining together in this effort, we have the tremendous opportunity to provide a positive outcome for troubled youths.

Charles Flanagan is director of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

AzDJC's Flanagan closes Catalina Mountain School

Sorry to be so slow with this, folks...I'm still on hiatus. I'll comment on all this later.

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Tucson's Catalina Mountain School for troubled youths to close

AZ Daily Star

July 12, 2011

The state will close the Catalina Mountain School on North Oracle Road by Oct. 1, the director of the Department of Juvenile Corrections said Thursday.

Director Charles Flanagan said it isn't sound fiscal or correctional practice to operate the Tucson school plus two others just north of Phoenix.

Catalina Mountain School will stop admitting kids "in about a week," Flanagan said.

He told employees about the closure at a meeting early Thursday afternoon.

The shutdown will save the state nearly $1.5 million this fiscal year and $3.8 million in 2013, he said.

The 74 males at the 124-bed Tucson school will be moved to Black Canyon and Adobe Mountain, which are operated as one facility.

The Tucson school is the one closing for several reasons, he said, including:

• All girls and juveniles who are sex offenders or need mental-health treatment are already sent to the Phoenix facilities.

• Tucson doesn't have as many career-training programs, and fewer options for moving and managing boys who have behavioral problems during their incarceration.

• Youths now at Catalina Mountain will have better access to programs for substance dependence. Flanagan said 90 percent of the kids have substance use histories and roughly 60 percent are substance-dependent.

a "huge loss"

Pima County Juvenile Court officials were surprised by the announcement.

While the court does not send a lot of children to the facility, officials said the move could be a detriment to youths who won't have direct access to family and friends.

Judge Karen Adam, who presides over Pima County Juvenile Court, described the facility's closure as a "huge loss."

It's important to place youths in their community because they can receive visits from friends and family, and it's easier for them to reintegrate to society, Adam said.

Juvenile Court Director Rik Schmidt echoed Adam's concerns.

Flanagan, the state's Juvenile Corrections director, agreed that a downside to the closure is that some kids will be farther away from family.

However, he said, only 15 percent of the youths receive family visits at least once every two weeks. Only 30 percent of the boys at Catalina Mountain are ever visited by relatives, he added.

Juvenile Corrections will set up a video visitation system to ease the burden of families driving to Maricopa County.

The department will move its parole office to central Tucson.

About a quarter of the boys at Catalina Mountain are from Pima County, with 15 percent from Cochise. Many of the rest will actually be closer to their homes once they move. They were sent to Tucson to keep the head count up.

The average stay in the state juvenile system is about seven months, but it is about three months at Catalina Mountain.

Most are in the system for property crimes.

There are between 30 and 40 Pima County juveniles in the state's three facilities, said Pima County's Schmidt. The number committed there has decreased over the years. In 2010, Pima's Juvenile Court sent 61 juveniles to state facilities. About five years ago, it sent more than 100, he said.

employee, volunteer losses

Besides the relocation of the detained youths, the loss of employees and 119 volunteers are the other downsides to Catalina Mountain's closure, Flanagan said.

"These people are committed to this profession," he said. "These are good, good people."

He said he hopes to find places for the volunteers in community corrections and parole services.

Some of the 124 Tucson employees will be offered the 68 jobs to be added at the Phoenix schools, he said. Transfer offers will be based on state employment rules, and he estimated about 30 will end up working in Phoenix.

Six employees will remain to provide security at the Tucson campus through the end of the department's lease next June 30.

The state owns the buildings on land leased from the state Land Department. That department will decide whether to sell the property or lease it to someone else.

The Phoenix schools have about 330 youths and about 270 vacant beds.

In the last fiscal year, it cost $132,218 to house a child at Catalina Mountain, compared with $95,765 at the Phoenix schools.

"That's still too high in our estimation," Flanagan said of Phoenix, although he said there is no national standard for juvenile costs because state laws differ. Arizona juvenile corrections houses kids up to age 18, while in some states it's longer.

DID YOU KNOW?

Catalina Mountain School, at 14500 N. Oracle Road, was built in the late 1960s, and is the oldest of the state's three juvenile centers, said Department of Juvenile Corrections Director Charles Flanagan.

Bullying and suicide at Adobe Mountain School: Update.

I was sure I'd already posted this update, but it appears not. So, here it is for the record, and for anyone who still hasn't seen it yet. I've also updated some links in the side column to include relevant resources.

Our condolences to the families of both the child and the staff member from Adobe Mountain who died last month.

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Suicide at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections

By Amy Silverman

published: June 17, 2010

Current and former staff at Adobe Mountain School in North Phoenix tell New Times the May 25 death of a boy in custody was a suicide — breaking a seven-year, suicide-free streak for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

And a former ADJC inmate who roomed briefly with the boy who died says he's not at all surprised that his acquaintance took his own life, given both his behavior and the conditions in which he was placed.

Last week, an ADJC spokeswoman said the agency was not commenting on the case beyond what little was said the day after the boy's death, but she said that Director Michael Branham may release more information in the next few days.

New Times is not releasing the name of the boy who died because ADJC has not confirmed whether his family has been informed. The 17-year-old boy who knew him is also not named in this story because he still is on parole and fears that giving his name would hurt his chances with work and school. Juvenile court records are not public.

According to a staff member in the Adobe Mountain housing unit Crossroads, the boy was found dead by the unit's morning staff with a plastic bag over his head and a blanket over that. The staff member and other Adobe Mountain personnel say the boy had been dead for quite some time, leading to questions about whether department policy requiring frequent welfare checks was followed.

The former roommate describes the deceased boy as overweight with "hair to his nose," lots of bumps and cuts on his arms, and a high-pitched voice. Staffers say the boy was moved to Crossroads, a unit for violent kids, from Triumph, the mental health unit, after he assaulted a teacher.

That could have led to his suicide, the former inmate says.

"I have a very strong reason why [he] had killed himself. Because he was moved to unit Crossroads. You can't put a kid who was in Triumph into an assault unit . . . There are kids who will bully you. They will beat you up," he says.

The former inmate, who was released from ADJC late last year, says it was clear that the boy was seriously mentally ill — something more aggressive kids tend to make fun of.

"You kind of look down upon Triumph because it's a mental health unit; you're like, these kids are retards."

The former inmate recalls that he first encountered the boy last July.

"When I first seen him, I seen him in the cafeteria," he says. "He would freak out and hit the floor and start screaming . . . The staff would restrain him, and he would say, 'Yeah, hurt me.' It was weird. I just thought he was kind of crazy."

Kids threaten suicide all the time, the former inmate says (he admits he did, too, so he could get a break from school), but he says he knew this kid meant it. The two were roommates for a week.

"Me and him used to talk; we would talk. He would tell me things about his mom and things when he was little. His dad lost his job, and then his mom didn't have a job, and his brother was the only one working. He would tell me, like, he couldn't deal with life."

The former inmate says cutting was common when he was at Adobe Mountain. Not at Durango, the county juvenile facility, where he'd been previously — there, you couldn't find anything to cut with. But kids at Adobe Mountain had easy access, he says, to staples and pieces of Plexiglas. The boy made bloody streaks on his arms with a paper clip, the former inmate says.

And one day, "I came back to my room — I was in the Boy Scouts in there; I had come back to the unit — my room was all trashed. Everything was thrown everywhere."

The boy was sitting with his head on his knees, crying. The former inmate called for staff, and the boy told them to "fuck off," and they took him to Separation, the solitary confinement unit.

After that, the boy was placed with a new roommate.

But the former inmate kept watching.

"There are a lot of blind spots in the units that the cameras don't catch," he says, so staff never saw the boy getting hit in the bathroom while he was trying to brush his teeth or getting "punked" for his snack.

"I could see how stressful he was already and how scared he was . . . All he wanted to do was get away from everything."

Anyone watching the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections knew it was only a matter of time before tragedy struck. Trouble is, no one's really watching.

The agency is under-funded and overwhelmed. Its own officials estimate that as many as 30 percent of its inmates are seriously mentally ill, and last year, New Times wrote extensively about suicidal behavior among the teenage population.

This is not a new challenge. In the past three decades, ADJC has twice been under federal scrutiny for human rights abuses. Most recently, in 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation under CRIPA, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, after a New Times investigative series and a string of suicides drew attention to an agency few in the state even know exists.

Lately, ADJC has been in daily headlines, as Governor Jan Brewer and the state Legislature tried to move financial responsibility for these kids (most of whom are not violent — the most violent juvenile offenders wind up in adult court) to the counties. That didn't happen; the counties and state are still negotiating about what will take place next year.

One thing's for sure: Someone had better increase funding for mental health treatment for these kids.

The federal government washed its hands of Arizona years ago, wrapping up its investigation and subsequent oversight. In early 2009, the Arizona Republic reported on the findings of a state audit, which found that there had been no successful suicide attempts at an ADJC facility since 2003.

But no one bothered to report how close some of the calls were. That was the subject of New Times' December story.

The May 25 death is under joint investigation by the Department of Public Safety, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office, and the Department of Juvenile Corrections, ADJC spokeswoman Laura Dillingham told New Times on May 26.

Dillingham refused to respond to questions regarding whether the incident was possibly a suicide. She said department policy calls for welfare checks every 15 minutes through the night and said the checks were, in fact, completed in this situation. She said the children's faces cannot be kept covered, raising questions about whether the checks were done correctly.

Several days before the boy's death, a youth corrections officer at Adobe Mountain School took his own life. Staff report that the agency tried to keep the news "hush, hush" and did not offer counseling to the kids, who ultimately heard through the grapevine what had happened. It's unknown whether the officer's death had anything to do with the boy's death.

Following the boy's death, Dillingham said, counseling was provided to staff and inmates at Adobe Mountain.

Bullying and suicide: The damage sticks and stones can do.

May 2010 at Adobe Mountain: PHX New Times

Sorry folks: this is from almost two weeks ago. I've been caught up in my own personal and family crises since the night of the 19th; unless someone was covering this for me, we didn't post this from the New Times - Amy Silverman does pretty good work. 

I'll look for follow-up, and post updated info on the ADJC as soon as I can. I probably won't come in for a landing myself until sometime next week. Once I'm settled, I'll be more on top of things again.

 Folks particularly interested in Juvenile Corrections should check out Juvenile Prison Watch - it's new, can use some more research and development; we'd love to have a few family members work collectively on maintaining it. Contact myself or the International Prison Watch staff listed on their websites for more info.

- Peg

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Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections Death Was Suicide, Inside Sources Say

By Amy Silverman,

Wednesday, May. 26 2010 @ 12:19PM

Staff at Adobe Mountain School in Phoenix are reporting that the death of a youth yesterday was a suicide.


And they wonder if the incident is tied to the "hush, hush" suicide earlier this month of a corrections officer from the same facility.


The boy was found in his cell at the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections' Adobe Mountain at 6:30 am May 25, according to Laura Dillingham, spokeswoman for the department.



She would not reveal any other details. Next of kin has not been contacted yet, she said, adding that an investigation is under way by the Department of Public Safety, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office and the Department of Juvenile Corrections.

Dillingham refused to respond to questions regarding whether the incident was possibly a suicide.

Two current employees of Adobe Mountain and one former employee of ADJC have contacted New Times to say the boy likely took his own life.

According to the employees, one of whom works on the unit Crossroads, where the boy was living at the time, the boy was found with a plastic bag tied over his head and a blanket over that. He was reportedly dead for quite some time when the morning shift staff found him.

Dillingham said department policy calls for welfare checks every 15 minutes through the night, and said the checks were, in fact, done in this situation. She said the childrens' faces cannot be kept covered, raising questions about whether the checks were done correctly.

She also said that Adobe Mountain School is fully staffed. Employees strongly disagreed.
Until very recently, the employees said, the boy had been placed at Triumph, the mental-health unit at Adobe Mountain, where he'd been for at least a year. The Crossroads employee said the boy was moved to Crossroads -- Adobe's unit reserved for violent kids -- after he was involved in an assault.

The employee said it was well known that the boy had "suicidal ideations" and added that the boy reportedly told the school superintendent recently that he wanted to be moved from Crossroads and would "do something" if he was not. The employee said that Crossroads staff wasn't informed of that conversation until after the boy had died.

Within the last several days, a youth corrections officer at Adobe Mountain took his own life.

Dillingham confirmed this but refused to release details. She said the staff and kids have been receiving counseling since the officer's suicide, but employees said the event has been kept "hush, hush" and there has been no counseling, though word has gotten out. They also say that ADJC director Michael Branham came to the facility and told them not to fly the flags at half-staff, saying the man did not die honorably.

It is unknown whether that suicide led to the possible suicide yesterday, but experts stress the importance of providing immediate counseling in such situations. ADJC's statements emphasize the counseling they are providing in the wake of yesterday's youth death. The statements do not mention the older man's death.

In 2002 and 2003, there were three suicides at Adobe Mountain School. The suicides, along with an investigative series by Phoenix New Times, led to a federal investigation into conditions at the agency's facilities, including Adobe Mountain. Last year, New Times published a story about continuing problems -- including mental health issues -- at ADJC.

Contact info: AZ Adobe Mountain School

the only real news from another story by fox news:
Adobe Mountain School
2800 W. Pinnacle Peak Road
Phoenix, Arizona 85085
www.juvenile.state.az.us
 
school's hotline: 623-869-9050 with concerns if you have a family member there.

Youth Dies at State Adobe Mountain juvenile facility.

ADDENDUM: Some troubling comments about Adobe Mountain School were left at the end of this Fox News article about the young boy's death...

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If there are folks out there who have information to share about their kids' experiences in the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, now would be a good time to share, and I think this is a good place to share it. Let other families know they aren't alone, let your kids know they've got someone watching their back out here, and let the state know you expect every single child home safe someday.

If this is a place you can feel safe doing that- anonymously or otherwise let me know (Peggy: prisonabolitionist@gmail.com ). In the meantime, as devastating as this news is, I have no information other than this. Try Middle Ground mid-day; I'm sure that if they don't demand an investigation by then they'll know who will.

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Teenager found dead at Phoenix juvenile facility

May. 25, 2010 10:37 AM

Associated Press

via Azcentral.com

Police are investigating a teen's death at the Adobe Mountain juvenile correctional facility.

Police and fire crews responded to the north Phoenix school near Interstate 17 and Pinnacle Peak Road Tuesday morning for a report of a male teenager who was unresponsive.

Phoenix Fire Department spokesman Jonathan Jacobs told KNXV-TV the teen died in his sleep and had been there for a while.

Jacobs said he was discovered while people were waking up Tuesday.

A call into the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections School District has not been returned.

Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/05/25/20100525phoenix-teen-found-dead-at-juvenile-facility.html#ixzz0p1GVh8Xa