Discipline problems put juvenile hall under scrutiny
Sunday, December 21, 2008 12:41 PM PST
By Tony Lystra
Printable version
E-mail this articleIn February of 2007 Valerie Johnson, an officer at the Cowlitz County Juvenile Detention Center, was arrested while she was on duty for trying to buy morphine in the lockup’s parking lot. She was later fired, convicted of drug possession and sentenced to two months in jail.
In 2006, six juvenile detention officers were suspended for falsifying cell check logs.
Earlier this year, an officer was reprimanded for sending text messages to the mobile phone of a former female inmate.
Documents acquired by The Daily News through the state open records law show that juvenile center employees have come to work with alcohol on their breath, failed to get timely medical care for inmates and possibly fallen asleep in the center’s control room during their shifts.
Some employees have threatened to leave or walked off their shifts in protest because they had been forced to work extra hours.
County officials have been concerned for years about the conduct of employees at the juvenile detention center. Since 2005, they’ve been working to reform the agency, which houses roughly 30 offenders on a given day.
This week, representatives of the county commissioners, corrections department and Superior Court all said they believe the agency has improved markedly. Commissioner George Raiter said he couldn’t guarantee that there wouldn’t be further problems. But, he said, “I think that department is on par with our other departments now. I think we’re very comfortable that we’ve put together our best shot at a good organization.”
Nevertheless, an investigation was launched in October into the conduct of Joe Hennessey, the juvenile center’s director, raising questions about whether the department is really improving. A memo to Hennessey says he has been accused of “serious allegations.” He remains on paid administrative leave.
County officials have declined to disclose the allegations against Hennessey, citing confidentiality laws. But Raiter said the Hennessey investigation has nothing to do with the juvenile center’s previous troubles.
“I don’t think there’s any correlation,” he said. “The manager’s had a personal situation that I’m not allowed to discuss by federal law.”
Hennessey, who became the juvenile corrections center’s manager in May 2006 and earns $60,400 each year, declined to comment on the situation.
The county’s Superior Court has traditionally controlled the juvenile center, which is located on First Street in Longview. But in 2005, nearly a year after the death of Richard Wilson, the department’s manager of more than 20 years, the commissioners handed control of the center to the county corrections department. (The juvenile probation office, which also operates out of the center, remained under the control of the Superior Court.)
Raiter said many of the processes at the juvenile center, including filing time cards and checking cells, was noticeably informal.
“There was just a total vacuum there,” he said. “You know things may not be as strong as they should be. That’s kind of how we got involved in it.”
Marin Fox Hight, who was placed in charge of juvenile detention in 2005 and now runs the entire corrections department, said officials made a number of changes at the agency, including requiring employees to wear uniforms, installing a surveillance camera system and requiring officers to check cells every 15 minutes instead of every half hour.
“I think our intent when we went there was to look at the whole operation and make changes as we saw appropriate, which is what we did,” she said.
County officials now say the juvenile detention center is ready to move back under the control of the Superior Court judges. The court is expected to take over again on Jan. 1.
“There were problems. That’s why corrections was tapped to work with detention. They’ve corrected those problems, and now we’re taking it back,” said Superior Court Judge Jill Johanson, the judge in charge of the juvenile center. “I think it’s functioning very well.”
Besides the fact that the detention manager has been put on leave, Johanson said, “I don’t have any reason to think that something’s going amiss over there.”
In May of 2007, as plans began to unfold to hand the center back to the court, the county’s four Superior Court judges said in a memo to the commissioners that “the transfer of Juvenile Detention is in no way based on any concern regarding their performance abilities, but rather the opposite. The Corrections Department has taken a program with obvious deficits and has worked aggressively and assiduously to correct those problems.”
The corrections officers’ union declined to comment on the troubles this week. Juvenile detention employees also declined requests for comment that were placed through the union.
Records show that many of the policy violations occurred in 2006. Fox Hight said she doesn’t believe any of the violations put youth at serious risk.
Timothy South, a Longview attorney who has contracted as a juvenile public defender since 2005, said he hadn’t heard much about the problems, which he noted have been largely kept under wraps inside the center. But South, who handles about 300 juvenile cases each year, also said he doesn’t believe his clients have been in danger.
“I think the kids would certainly bring something up if they were being mistreated or something back there,” South said. “And I deal with enough kids, I would have heard it.”
In October of 2006, six corrections officers were suspended for between five and 10 days and placed on employment probation after they failed to check up on inmates, then falsified the logs to show that they’d done so.
The checks are essential, disciplinary memos noted, to make sure inmates are safe. “Falsifying pod check logs puts residents’ lives in danger and exposes both yourself and the county significant liability,” one memo said.
The documents also noted that inmates are more likely to commit suicide in the middle of the night.
Three other employees were reprimanded in 2006 after juvenile inmates became sick but didn’t receive medical care right away. In one case, an inmate was referred to a doctor on March 13, 2006, but waited four days before an appointment was made, the records said. The inmate turned out to have mononucleosis and pneumonia.
Fox Hight said she doesn’t believe any of the delays in care caused significant medical problems for the youth involved.
In June of this year, a corrections officer was verbally reprimanded after he acknowledged he had sent text messages to a former female inmate’s cell phone. The girl, according to the documents, was friends with the corrections officer’s daughter and had been in his home on one occasion, according to the records. The messages were said to be “religious in nature.” Some, the records said, were intended for the girls’ father.
The officer was told that it would be inappropriate to invite kids who had been incarcerated at the center into his home. “Contact with youth of this nature must not happen again,” Fox Hight wrote in a memo to the officer.
In July 2006, Fox Hight reprimanded an employee who was found in the detention center’s control room with his head down and eyes closed. But he said he was unsure whether he was actually asleep, the records show. In another case, also in July 2006, an employee was discovered in the control room, “leaned back in the chair” with her eyes closed, according to a memo. She also was reprimanded.
As of Jan. 1, the department will be managed by Chad Connors, who had previously overseen the probation side of the operation and reports to the Superior Court judges. (Hennessey, if he returns to work, would work under Connors.)
Connors, who also declined to comment on the disciplinary troubles, said it will be good to have both the probation and detention once again reporting to the same master -- the Superior Court.
He said he wants to lead a department that “holistically addresses the issues (kids) have in their lives.” Eventually, Connors said, he wants the juvenile center to offer “one stop shopping” for detained youth and their families, including drug and alcohol evaluations, access to transportation, mental health screening and other services.
“That’s the big-picture vision,” he said.
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