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December 06, 2004

Florida's juvenile justice system: Revolving door for fired workers

Jimmy Haynes lost his job as a "behavioral specialist" at a juvenile drug treatment center for punching a 15-year-old in the face.

Nine days after Haynes was fired from the privately operated center in Orlando, he was hired by a state-run juvenile detention center less than 15 miles away. Haynes worked there for seven weeks before supervisors at his new job realized their mistake.

He wasn't the only one.

A Palm Beach Post review of records from the state and 40 of its private contractors uncovered at least 200 employees hired at juvenile justice centers in recent years after they were fired from similar jobs for violence, misconduct or incompetence.

The taxpayer-funded privately operated companies that run the bulk of Florida's juvenile justice system hired workers who had sexual relationships with teenagers they were supposed to protect. They hired workers who kicked, punched, choked, tackled and head-butted teens in their care.

Supervisors across the state repeatedly checked "do not rehire" and "not eligible for rehire" in the files of employees fired for such offenses. But managers at other centers never knew of those histories.

Some never bothered to check with past employers; others were stymied by companies that refused to blow the whistle on even the very worst workers. Many companies simply broke the law by withholding or losing personnel files that are part of the public record.

And a few companies knew about their workers' histories but were so desperate to find people willing to work for $8 to $9 an hour that they looked the other way.

The result, critics say, is a culture of violence and neglect that undermines the juvenile system's essential mission: preventing today's teen offenders from becoming adult felons.

Here's how the state and its private contractors enable bad employees to get juvenile justice jobs again and again:

• Even though state laws require them to open their employees' files, some contractors cling to a corporate culture of secrecy, giving neutral references.

• State investigations of employee misconduct can drag on for three months or more, allowing bad workers to find new jobs while their cases sit unresolved.

• Each of the state's numerous private contractors operates in isolation, without access to a central database of juvenile justice workers' job histories.

Officials from Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice say that the more than 200 fired-and-rehired employees are a small percentage of the thousands who work in the system, but it has tightened its screening standards anyway in an effort to weed out bad employees.

Contractors run about nine in 10 centers

The state's sprawling juvenile justice system includes 26 detention centers that house young offenders shortly after they are arrested. The teens are then sentenced by a judge to one of 154 longer-term programs, ranging from wilderness camps to maximum security facilities that look like prisons.

After the youth crime rate soared in the early 1990s, Florida built new facilities, lengthened teens' sentences and expanded treatment options.

To cut costs, Florida outsourced nearly all of its residential programs. The state now has one of the highest rates of privatization in the country — about nine in 10 centers are managed by contractors.

Some are run by county sheriff's offices, others by large nonprofit foundations. And some are managed by publicly traded corporations that answer not just to the state but to shareholders who expect them to wring profits from the tough business of treating troubled kids.

Last year, a series of very public failures in Florida's programs for young offenders led to the dismissal of top state officials and calls for reform.

A grand jury investigated abuses at the Florida Institute for Girls, a maximum-security prison for teenage offenders in suburban West Palm Beach. One worker was criminally charged for having sex with two teen inmates, and another was arrested for assault. In four separate incidents, workers broke girls' arms in violent restraints.

Two of the abusive employees already had been fired from previous juvenile justice jobs.

The system's new leaders promised reform, saying they will not tolerate such incidents. But personnel files obtained by The Post show that for years, private contractors have hired employees with records of serious misconduct.

Securicor New Century hired Marvin Thomas at a facility outside Okeechobee 53 days after he was fired from another center for lying about abuse.

Investigators said Thomas attempted to cover up an incident in which a co-worker threw a boy to the ground and beat him. Thomas lied to his bosses, according to the previous company's records, and tried to intimidate several boys into not telling anyone what happened. Thomas did not return phone calls from The Post.

Securicor President and CEO Gail Browne said her company hired Thomas just as it was taking over from a previous contractor and that his reference checks may have been lost in the transition. Thomas did not have any problems while working with Securicor and left to serve in the military.

But had the company known his history, Browne said, it's unlikely it would have hired Thomas.

Outsourcing a site can lower costs up to 10%

To state officials, the arithmetic of privatizing juvenile justice is irresistibly simple. Contractors compete to offer the lowest price, and a treatment center can be outsourced for as much as 10 percent less than when it was government-operated.

In nearly every case, the cuts are shouldered by rank-and-file workers, who have lost pension plans and thousands of dollars in wages under privatization.

Workers who do the same job at the few state-run residential juvenile programs start at $22,571 a year — about $1,000 more in South Florida.

By contrast, the Florida Juvenile Justice Association, a trade group of state contractors, says the typical starting pay for workers at private centers is $17,500 to $18,000 a year.

For those wages, staff members are expected to be both role models and disciplinarians. They break up fights, prevent suicides, confiscate weapons and foil escapes, all while being disobeyed, threatened and cursed at by teen offenders.

Usually they work eight-hour shifts. But because contractors can be fined if they don't have enough workers on duty, some employees work 16 hours straight if their replacements don't show up.

Everyone agrees that it takes a special type of person to handle the job. But most companies either can't afford or aren't willing to pay for such people.

The Post found that contractors hired people whose recent work experience included stints at a doughnut shop, a turnpike tollbooth and a grocery store. Some got jobs fresh off being fired by private security firms, while other new youth care workers were still teenagers themselves.

At Sarasota-based Correctional Services Corp.'s rural JoAnn Bridges Academy, youth care workers start at $7.21 an hour, or $15,000 a year. The highest paid workers at any Correctional Services Corp. program, Broward County's Thompson Academy, start at $8.89 an hour. That's $18,500 a year in a county where the median annual rent tops $10,000.

Juvenile justice workers with families live below or just above federal poverty thresholds. One personnel file from the Florida Institute for Girls contains an employee's 2003 application for public housing.

References often don't reveal whole story

Because the companies perform a state function with public money, they are required to make records public, including personnel files. But most are accustomed to conducting their business in private and don't make records public. Instead, they give neutral references to anyone seeking information on a former worker.

Left unmentioned are violent rages, suspicions of sex with teens and reports of gross incompetence. Companies worry that if they break their silence, they could be sued for giving a negative reference.

As a result, supervisors at other juvenile facilities did not know that:

• One employee deliberately instigated a fight between teens, and another was fired after he took kids from a drug treatment program to his home to smoke.

• A youth care worker was fired from a Broward County facility for threatening a fellow employee with a handgun; he was hired a month later at a center in Daytona Beach.

• Another missed a mandatory drug test because he was in jail for violating his probation.

• Several others were fired for allowing juvenile offenders to escape, and one for not even noticing a teen was gone.

• One fell asleep while guarding a girl on suicide watch.

Because many private companies have either ignored or were ignorant of the public records law, some have been forced to rely on personal references from people such as pastors, even when the person admitted to knowing little about a potential employee.

Some fired employees got new juvenile justice jobs with recommendations from friends or co-workers who didn't know or wouldn't say what really happened at a previous company.

One was Wilmer Milton, hired in May 2003 by Three Springs Inc. in Daytona Beach. Milton was dismissed from a job at the Stewart-Marchman drug treatment center in Daytona two months before. Supervisors there said he sold illegally copied CDs to the teens in exchange for money they stole from a charity carwash.

Milton got positive references from two employees at Stewart-Marchman, including his immediate supervisor, according to Matt Lockard, the human resources manager for Three Springs.

That same supervisor, according to records, approved Milton's termination less than two months before. Milton did not return phone calls from The Post.

Worker may be hired elsewhere during probe

When a juvenile worker is accused of serious misconduct, the state Inspector General's Office conducts a review and determines whether the staff member was at fault.

Companies then can check with the Inspector General's Office to make sure a potential employee hasn't been the subject of any verified complaints. But even routine investigations can take several months.

State officials say a thorough investigation is necessary to ensure they do not wrongly malign an innocent employee. But by the time a report is complete, an employee fired for misconduct is sometimes already working elsewhere with kids again.

That's what happened in the case of 35-year-old Ronald Lillard, who was fired in October 2000 from the Southwest Florida Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Fort Myers.

The incident began when a teenage boy barricaded himself in his room. Lillard and other staff members tried to force him out by pouring bleach under the door and spraying cans of disinfectant into the room, according to state records. When that failed, they pulled off the window and poked him with broken broom handles.

When Lillard finally got into the room, he pushed the boy against the wall and beat him, ignoring a supervisor's order to leave him alone.

Two days after the state fired Lillard, he was hired at the Crossroads Wilderness camp in Punta Gorda, operated by Associated Marine Institutes.

The company sent a letter to the detention center that fired Lillard but didn't receive a response, said Josie Cruz, a company vice president. When they followed up with a phone call, nobody at the detention center gave any hint of what happened, Cruz said.

The company did not find out that Lillard was under investigation until Jan. 22, Cruz said, nearly three months after he started working with teens again. The company suspended Lillard immediately, Cruz said, and fired him days later.

Questionable role models for troubled teens

Florida's juvenile justice centers are prohibited from hiring felons within seven years of their convictions, and most companies appear to comply. Yet the state and its contractors have hired people with histories of criminal activity that, at the very least, call into the question their credibility as mentors to troubled teens.

At least 138 juvenile justice workers listed as active when their records were obtained by The Post previously had been arrested and punished for felony charges ranging from credit card and check fraud to cocaine trafficking and burglary.

Many of them entered pretrial diversion programs that allowed them to avoid a judgment of guilt. Others had their charges reduced to misdemeanors or were convicted of their crimes more than seven years before being hired.

Youth counselor Wendell Campbell was found guilty of battery by an Okeechobee County circuit judge in October 2000, five months after he attacked a 19-year-old offender at the Eckerd Youth Development Center.

Witnesses told a sheriff's deputy that Campbell, 22 at the time, was upset because the young man told Campbell to go to hell.

Campbell, 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds, grabbed the 5-foot-6, 136-pound offender by the throat and pushed him against a wall. The teen's face turned blue, a co-worker said, as Campbell choked him for almost 40 seconds.

The teen spit in Campbell's face, according to the police report, so Campbell slammed him to the ground and kicked him until a co-worker shielded him from Campbell.

Eckerd fired Campbell for child abuse, and a judge sentenced him to a year of probation and an anger management class.

The case was documented in court, state and Eckerd's own records. But two years later, Campbell was hired at the Okeechobee Redirection Camp, managed by the California-based company Owl Global.

Supervisors found the charge of battery during background checks and received permission from the state to hire Campbell, said Geff Stinson, the company's human resources director. But they may not have known that the battery was on a teen offender.

"Would we hire him today knowing what we know now? The answer would be no," Stinson said.

Campbell was not violent in his new job but was fired again in October because he was not up to the company's standards, Stinson said. Campbell could not be reached for comment.

State officials say they have improved their background screening practices since The Post began investigating the juvenile system's hiring practices. When a center requests an applicant's criminal record, state officials now automatically return a list of all other companies that have checked the same name.

Because juvenile justice contractors are required to submit names of all applicants to the state before hiring them, that list represents every place that person has applied. The practice, started in July, can help supervisors turn up work histories that applicants left off their rsums.

But contractors still are not required to notify the state when they fire an employee. That means that the state's juvenile justice agency, the only official watchdog of dozens of separate taxpayer-funded contractors, doesn't know when or why former employees left each company.

Without that basic information, state officials cannot tell their contractors whether an applicant has been fired elsewhere.

Typical worker lasts less than eight months

Exacerbating those problems is that many companies must hire new employees often — and quickly.

In several cases, employees were hired and trained before the positive results of their drug tests or background checks arrived.

"There's tremendous pressure to fill vacant positions," said Mark Fontaine, who represents private contractors as head of the Florida Juvenile Justice Association.

The typical youth care worker at a private company lasts less than eight months, according to an analysis of employment data by The Post, and 62.5 percent will quit or be fired in any given year. Some of the worst churn has been at the Florida Institute for Girls in suburban West Palm Beach. Since the facility opened in 2000, 82.1 percent of its workers have left before working a full year.

Fontaine said he is not surprised that the annual turnover rate is just 19.4 percent in Florida's government-run detention centers, where employees can qualify for state pension plans and earn a yearly wage as much as $6,000 higher than at a private facility.

"I don't care who you work for," Fontaine said, "if you pay your people $6,000 more, you're going to get more people working that you want working for you and fewer that you don't. That's just a fact."

Legislators this year allotted a modest budget increase for residential programs, but there is no getting around the fact that privatization itself is a guaranteed budget cut.

A halfway house for teen offenders in Alachua County, for example, once cost the state nearly $767,000 a year. Florida now pays a private contractor about $682,000, 11 percent less, to operate the same program.

Lobbyists for Florida's private juvenile treatment contractors have asked legislators for more money, saying they can barely get by. But it is clear some of the companies don't always choose to spend every available dollar on improving their centers.

From 1999 to 2003, for example, the top three executives at Correctional Services Corp. took home nearly $4.5 million in total combined compensation, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company's founder, President and CEO James F. Slattery, collected more than $2.2 million in salary, bonuses and other compensation in that time, an average of $442,000 a year.

Florida's top juvenile justice official, charged with overseeing the entire system of public and private facilities, gets $115,000 a year.

Correctional Services Corp. also spends generously when it comes to making friends in Tallahassee. The company spent at least $270,000 on state campaign contributions during the past decade, with company executives personally donating thousands more.

From 1999 to 2003, the company generated revenue of $882 million from the prison and youth programs it runs in Florida and other states but reported a net income of just $77,000.

State officials say it isn't any of their business what its taxpayer-funded contractors pay its workers or how much they spend on kids.

"One of the reasons we privatize is the theory that private corporations can do it better and cheaper than we may be able to," said Steve Casey, the Juvenile Justice Department's deputy secretary. "So to a degree, we try to stay out of that."

The state's role is simply to ensure the programs meet state standards, Casey said, and then "let the free market do what it does, which is drive the price down."

Problems at state-run centers, too

Although high staff turnover and public records violations are more common at private providers, state-run juvenile centers are not immune. The state's juvenile justice agency sometimes fails in its own background checks.

Jimmy Haynes, the employee who punched a 15-year-old at a privately operated drug treatment center in Orlando, was hired again by the state at a detention center just a 20-minute drive away.

It is not clear why the state supervisors who hired Haynes did not request his personnel file from his former employer, The Center for Drug-Free Living, or how they failed to discover that he was under state investigation for child abuse.

Records show that a secretary working for the state contacted a human resources assistant at The Center for Drug-Free Living the day after Haynes punched the teen, whose name is Manuel Marrero. She confirmed the dates Haynes worked and his job duties.

Under the question of whether Haynes had ever been disciplined, the secretary marked "no."

Officials at The Center for Drug-Free Living say their human resources assistant may not have known, at that time, about the incident.

Gustavo Marrero, who lives with Manuel in Belle Glade, knows better than anyone how difficult his son can be. By the time Manuel was sent to the program following an arrest for grand theft, he was regularly smoking marijuana, skipping school and defying his father.

But the programs did not help his son, they only made him worse, Marrero said. And he had to pay them to do it. The state requires parents of teens sentenced to juvenile programs to pay part of the cost, up to $1,825 a year.

Haynes said he agreed the program was not working for Manuel. The boy was consistently violent, Haynes said, threatening and attacking staff members. Manuel should have been transferred to a more suitable program long before their fight, Haynes said.

"I just feel like he had gotten out of their reach.... And they never did anything about it until I got fired," Haynes said.

Manuel Marrero, now 18, denies touching Haynes before he was punched. But Haynes said he felt threatened as Manuel pushed him four or five times, showing off in front of the other residents.

Haynes said he misses working with troubled kids, a career he felt was his calling after surviving a rough childhood.

But The Center for Drug-Free Living only paid him $8.15 an hour in a job he sometimes worked for 16 hours a day. His new job driving a recycling truck for the city of Orlando pays $13 an hour and is much easier, he said.

"My truck doesn't argue with me," he said. "I know my truck won't hit me."

Gustavo Marrero said he isn't angry with Haynes. Marrero, too, has lost his temper with his son.

But he is angry at a state that promised to help. He is disappointed that the workers' failings were worse than his own.

The confrontation with Haynes only made him act out more, Manuel said. After being punched in front of the other teens, he had to show he was tough. So he became more violent, starting fights and threatening the center's superintendent.

Officials at the drug treatment program decided Manuel needed to be transferred. He said it was because he had an anger problem.

Soon after Haynes was fired for punching him, Manuel moved to the Orange County Regional Juvenile Detention Center.

Among that facility's employees was a recent hire who had already shown an inability to control his temper around antagonistic teens.

It was Jimmy Haynes.

Posted by Nealus at December 6, 2004 11:33 AM

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