Youths could
come home
By
Mary Garrigan, Journal Staff Writer
October 8, 2006
A watchdog for juvenile corrections
said plans to reopen youth residential services at the former State
Training School at Plankinton will be a positive step for troubled
youths and their families if a Wisconsin-based company has a better
track record in incarcerating juveniles than its most recent
predecessor there did.
“Do I want these kids back in the
state? You bet I do,” said Deb Phillips of Whitewood, who founded
the Parents Who Care Coalition after the heat-exhaustion death of
14-year-old Gina Score at the Plankinton facility in 1999.
South Dakota will contract with two new intensive residential
programs for youths in 2007 that will allow state agencies to bring
home some of the 130 young South Dakotans who are currently placed
in out-of-state facilities and to keep more kids in state in the
future.
Clinicare, headquartered in West Allis, Wis., will offer intensive
residential services to 66 youths, male and female, at Plankinton
beginning in January. Clinicare follows in the wake of the failed
Cornell Companies contract. Houston-based Cornell pulled out of
Plankinton after only a few months of operation in 2004 in a rate
reimbursement dispute with the state of South Dakota.
A second state contract will go to Lutheran Social Services of Sioux
Falls, which will house 18 youths with severe and chronic
mental-health disorders in a program to begin in the spring of 2007
at a facility in Sioux Falls.
Currently, 130 youths are placed in out-of-state facilities through
the state Department of Corrections or Department of Social
Services, according to a DSS news release. Thirty-seven of those
youths are in the care of DSS, which has a total of about 1,200
children in its care on any given day.
The Department of Corrections, which has about 950 youths in custody
and in after-care services each month, has 93 youths placed out of
state.
All of those youths will be assessed and considered for return to
the state, but most will remain where they are if they are making
good progress in treatment, according to Doug Herrmann, juvenile
services director for DOC. “Those doing well out of state will
complete their placements,” he said.
The new programs likely will house youths who are placed in the
system in the future, he said.
Phillips said she is unfamiliar with Clinicare, which operates in
nine states and has provided out-patient and residential treatment
to youths since 1967.
“I just found out their name,” she said of the contract with
Clinicare. “I want to make it explicit that I’m not saying Clinicare
has the same problems that Cornell had.”
Phillips criticized Cornell’s track record of lawsuits and
complaints about abuse and mistreatment of juveniles at some of its
79 facilities in 18 states.
“I had serious questions about Cornell after I found out how they
operated,” she said.
Phillips said the public deserves more information about potential
service providers, especially for-profit companies, before the
contracts are awarded. “The process is so quiet. I would have wanted
more notice.”
Phillips got involved with juvenile corrections because of her
now-grown daughter who was in the custody of DOC from the ages of 14
to 18 for truancy and other noncriminal behaviors. The girl was
placed in a variety of residential settings but never out of state.
Although Phillips said reopening Plankinton could be a positive
step, South Dakotans should be asking whether children are safer and
better treated in state or out of state.
“Would you rather have them out of state where they are getting good
programming or back here where they may be mistreated?” she asked.
Helen Long of Parent Alliance Concerning Teen Support, or PACTS, a
Rapid City group that supports families struggling with challenging
behaviors, said bringing children in residential care closer to
home, friends and family should improve treatment outcomes.
“I think it’s a great thing. The whole purpose of treatment is to
get better . . . and to heal the family,” Long said. “But when you
send kids out of state and families don’t see each other, then they
can’t communicate, they can’t make the relationship between parent
and child stronger, and they can’t heal.”
Several area providers of mental-health services to youth praised
the new programs as good for at-risk children and their families in
South Dakota.
“We’re lucky that these two new facilities will be available so we
can keep some of our children at home, and they won’t have to go out
of state,” said Bill Colson, chief operating officer of Children’s
Home Society and Black Hills Children’s Home near Rockerville.
BHCH treats children ages 4-13, so it would not compete with the two
new programs, which probably will house older youths with more
intensive needs, Colson said. “We’d see them as partners, not
competitors,” he said.
“It’s good for kids,” Jim Kinyon, director of Catholic Social
Services, said. “When you send a kid to Missouri or some other
state, you pretty much eliminate the chance for his or her family to
be involved in their treatment.”
Long said families of the kids in custody often are poor and find
travel expenses to be insurmountable obstacles to regular visits.
Barb Fierro, development director at Wellspring, Inc. in Rapid City,
said the new programs in Plankinton and Sioux Falls will treat a
“different kind of kid” than Wellspring typically sees. Wellspring
provides residential and outpatient mental-health and
chemical-dependency treatment to youths.
“These kids would probably be more severely emotionally disturbed
kids,” Fierro said, but it remains to be seen if any of Wellspring’s
court-ordered clients would be placed at one of the new sites
instead.
“But Wellspring always has a waiting list of 30-35 kids .. so
freeing up some slots here would not be a bad thing,” Fierro said.
Contact Mary Garrigan at 394-8410 or mary.garrigan@rapidcityjournal.com
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