Community Connections for Youth

Reminder: J4F

2012-07-26T14:40:00.001-07:00

Justice for Families Support Group meeting is tonight!

If you have been impacted by the juvenile justice system, join us to discuss issues that affect our youth and our communities.

199 Lincoln Avenue, Bronx, NY 10454
Third floor conference room
6pm-8pm

Dinner will be provided!

CCFY in the news!

2012-07-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

Last month the Mott Haven Herald covered our June 21st Night Under the Stars graduation ceremony for SBCC youth who have completed their mandates. It was a positive, fun, emotional night for families, youth, Community Coaches, Site Coordinators, and representatives of the Bronx Department of Probation and Corporation Counsel offices.
Read the full story here: Mott Haven group helps teens stay out of jail.

This week, CCFY was featured in the New York Daily News after reporter Corinne Letsch spoke to parents, families, mentors, and juvenile justice experts during a presentation of SBCC community projects. Youth in the program have started a Youth Leadership Academy based at Betances Community Center, cultivated plants in Brook Park's Urban Youth Farm, and are in the process of painting a mural dedicated to late community activist Joe Perez in the Mott Haven Community Garden.
Read the full article here: South Bronx nonprofit offers ideas for the community to support youth returning from upstate detention.

Building Community Capacity for Juvenile Justice Reform: A community-centered approach to bringing New York City’s children Close to Home

2012-02-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

Introduction

New York is in period of unprecedented juvenile justice reform, moving away from an incarceration-first correctional response to youth crime and delinquency in favor of community-based alternatives, therapeutic placements, and evidence-based interventions. “Community partnerships”, “Community Engagement”, and “Community Reinvestment” are phrases that increasingly appear in the conversation on juvenile justice reform. This brief paper seeks to define and operationalize what constitutes genuine community participation in juvenile reform, and to propose strategies that can achieve the goal of authentic community-system partnerships that keep communities safe and develop youth into pro-social community members.

The Centrality of the Community in Juvenile Justice Reform

The community is central to the work of juvenile justice reform. The term “community” in this paper refers to the diverse and interconnected stakeholders in the neighborhoods that make up a young person’s ecological environment, including family members, neighbors, faith-based organizations, schools, businesses, health services, and community-based organizations. “Community” stakeholders are defined here as distinct from “system” stakeholders in that juvenile justice interventions in the life of a young person are by nature coercive, interruptive, time-limited, and usually undesirable. The community, on the other hand, is always there. For better or for worse, it the natural environment of young people which produced them prior to their justice system involvement, where they spend the majority of their time when in community-based interventions, and to which they will return if and when they are placed out of home. Young people are attached to their communities, identify with their communities, and are usually far more responsive to community members then they are to system personnel. The failed correctional model of juvenile justice assumed that communities were either too weak to assist young people, or were criminogenic in and of themselves. This necessitated either the removal of youth from the community, or establishing juvenile justice and law enforcement personnel as the central figures in combatting youth crime and delinquency. Efforts to reform the juvenile justice system have correctly brought system stakeholders together to examine best practices, review data, and develop collaborations and coordinated approaches. But for the most part, these reform practices have happened separate and apart from the community. When community is invited to the table, it is often for a peripheral role in system-driven efforts. But the community is not peripheral to juvenile justice reform efforts – it is central – and without genuine community participation, juvenile justice reform efforts will always fall short of the ultimate goal of creating safe and healthy communities for youth.

The Community’s Loss

Several decades of failed juvenile justice policy have separated young people from their families and communities. In New York, sending young people away to remote parts of the state hoping they will come back reformed has been an absolute failure. We spend nearly $270,000 per youth to incarcerate children in a system where 89% of boys and 81% of girls are re-arrested, and 71% of boys and 32% of girls go on to spend time in adult prison. The children we send away come back in worse state than they were before they were placed in facilities. For too long, this practice has continued primarily for the benefit of communities that have become economically dependent on youth incarceration. While these communities benefit, the neighborhoods from which young people originate suffer loss in several ways:

· The Loss of Youth: when youth are incarcerated hundreds of miles from home, the community loses its young people. Children with the potential to be assets of the community are physically absent from their families and communities. The limited ability to visit young people and monitor the conditions of their placement leaves them vulnerable to abuse. The disconnection from local neighborhood organizations, schools, and faith-based organizations makes community reintegration exceptionally difficult.

· The Loss of Resources: the cost of incarcerating a young person – almost $270,000 annually for one youth – represents dollars that could be spent on community programs that are effective in rehabilitating youth (proven community-based alternatives to incarceration), or even creating opportunities that prevent juvenile crime to begin with (job opportunities, youth development programs). A community that sends 10 youth to placement uses nearly $2.7 million in resources. Imagine what could be put in place in that neighborhood if that money were reinvested in resources to support youth and families in crisis.

· The Loss of Skill: when young people are placed far from home, and the dollars that pay for their incarceration follow them, communities also lose something else – the knowledge, experience, and expertise in supervising and supporting young people in trouble with the law. Neighborhoods that once had more robust networks of informal social control have forgotten how to hold young people accountable to community norms, as the responsibility for rehabilitation has been outsourced to the juvenile justice system.

The Opportunity

New York’s Close to Home legislation intentionally seeks to rectify some of the damaging practices that have been so detrimental to our young people and our communities. The legislation would allow New York City to keep young people it its own non-secure and limited secure placement facilities within the five boroughs, instead of sending them to state-run facilities far from home. Clearly this plan is a step in the right direction. When young people must be placed, keeping them close to home should increase family connectedness, make it easier to monitor their safety and the quality of their treatment, and to facilitate community reintegration. A good Close to Home plan could radically improve young people’s experience in the juvenile justice system and reduce many of the damages that youth, families, and communities experience under the current system of youth incarceration.

Yet for this plan to truly benefit New York City’s young people, their families, and their communities, several components must be present to restore to the community what the current system has taken away. Reversing the damage must address the losses that the community has experienced in the following ways:

· The Return of Youth: the Close to Home plan should clearly demonstrate ways that even further reduce the need to place youth outside the home. New York City has taken great steps to develop viable alternatives to placement for youth in the juvenile justice system – yet there are still too many youth who are placed because less restrictive options are not available. We should not settle for a plan centered around local facilities, but should demand a plan that puts a primacy on community alternatives and only uses placement as a last resort. Furthermore, we should expect that local facilities will provide an opportunity for an unprecedented level of access for the community.

· The Return of Resources: the Close to Home plan will bring dollars that previously flowed to rural counties back to New York City. Approximately $40 million in funding each year will underwrite the costs of creating this new locally run juvenile justice system. Over the long run, New York City and New York State will save money by creating a more cost-efficient system. These cost savings should be seen not only as an opportunity to close budget gaps, but to reinvest resources in the communities where most youth are arrested and prosecuted. A shift of this magnitude is an opportunity for New York City to re-invest dollars in resources that will help keep youth from juvenile justice involvement in the first place. The community should not settle solely for investments in facilities and formal programs, but should expect that a percentage of the cost savings are returned for community-driven programs.

· The Return of Skill: the Close to Home legislation provides an opportunity for an unprecedented level of community involvement in the juvenile justice system and the possibility of genuine community-system partnerships. The old paradigm assumed entire communities were at worst criminal or at best incompetent, and therefore irrelevant to the planning and administration of juvenile justice. The new paradigm must recognize the primacy of community involvement in addressing youth crime and delinquency. However, any attempts to effectively operationalize community involvement, must include a plan to build the capacity of directly affected communities. The disinvestment in community in favor of incarceration has also left a void in the specific technical knowledge and skills needed to effectively develop alternatives to juvenile justice processing. Communities are full of people and organizations that have deep commitment to youth and amazing ways of engaging young people, but often don’t speak the same language as juvenile justice stakeholders, or translate their work into paradigms that the system understands. The Close to Home plan should invest not only in programs in neighborhoods, but in developing the skill sets that local community members need to be viable partners for juvenile justice reform.

Sharing Information, Power, and Resources

Real community involvement should be front and center in the plan to bring youth Close to Home. But real community involvement is exceptionally rare and hard to come by. Community Advisory Boards that are thrown together after the real planning and implementation of juvenile justice initiatives are a poor excuse for community involvement. Community outreach presentations do little more than make community members aware of what is happening, but fail to create a vested interested in making system-community partnerships work. Funding a non-profit organization that works in a particular neighborhood is not the same as investing in community involvement, as many non-profits struggle to engage the very communities they serve. What then is real community involvement? What constitutes legitimate system-community partnerships?

· Sharing Information: the best initiatives are always data-driven, drawing on what is actually happening. Real system-community partnerships are those in which system stakeholders and community members share information and evaluate and analyze data together for the purpose of identifying the best ways to solve problems. Sharing data means that system stakeholders make quantitative data available to community members, and community members share the qualitative data they accumulate from living and working in neighborhoods with system stakeholders. Ultimately system and community partners should sit around the same table sharing, analyzing, arguing, debating, and discussing the data that drives decisions.

· Sharing Power: real system-community partnerships are those where there is shared decision-making power. As community and system stakeholders draw conclusions about data, there must be shared authority to define what strategies and responses are chosen as interventions. Data revealing a sudden rash of juvenile assaults at a particular school could result in a strategy of assigning extra police officers to a school, or sending out conflict resolution specialists. The best decisions are made when community members have equal power to choose which strategies are employed to respond to these issues.

· Sharing Resources: these strategies can only work when there is financial support for the ideas generated from information sharing and joint decision making. System-community partnerships are meaninglessness until the analysis of data and the planning of responses lead to funded interventions. Innovative approaches to the problems of juvenile crime and delinquency can never bear fruit if there are no dollars available to underwrite the implementation of fresh new ideas.

The Implementation Question

Even when all these factors are present – the sharing of information, power, and resources – a very practical question remains: can communities actually pull off the implementation of the programs they propose? The high-profile failures of some community-driven initiatives have produced lingering questions about the viability of community-based organizations, their ability to handle funding, to collect data and track results, and to produce the results that system stakeholders and community members demand. The gamble of investing in community-driven initiatives is often too risky for traditionalists who are afraid of dramatic failure. Investing in more established approaches is a safer bet – one that might not produce amazing results, but will likely also not produce catastrophic failure. But choosing the safe route also guarantees that some of the underlying problems that keep communities stuck in the cycle of incarceration will remain unaddressed – and that too is a catastrophic failure. Community-driven initiatives can work, but require a deep commitment to the process of building community capacity, sharing information, power, and resources, and staying invested in the work of non-traditional partnerships between system stakeholders and community members.

For the last 18 months, CCFY has embarked on a quest to operationalize community-driven juvenile justice reform in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, involving community members in the process of developing and operating alternatives to formal juvenile justice system processing. The South Bronx Community Connections initiative (SBCC) is a community-driven project evaluated by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice that seeks to discover what it takes to develop community capacity to serve youth in the juvenile justice system.[1] The goal is to demonstrate the efficacy of community-driven initiatives that divert youth from deeper system involvement in partnership with system stakeholders, with a primary focus on building the capacity of local faith and neighborhood organizations to develop effective programming for youth. CCFY serves as the lead agency in carrying out this work, using a process has involved requesting and analyzing data on juvenile crime trends from multiple juvenile justice agencies, subcontracting local faith and neighborhood organizations to serve as sites throughout the neighborhood, recruiting community members who “live, work, or worship” in the target neighborhood as volunteer mentors (“community coaches”), and developing and refining partnerships with the local police precinct, the Department of Probation and the Family Court prosecutors to manage youth referrals. The program is currently serving youth, ages 13 to 15 years of age who have been arrested but can be diverted from formal court processing via referral by either Bronx Probation or Corporation Counsel. The process has resulted in as many setbacks as successes, but is slowly but surely producing promising results. We are learning as much from our mistakes and our wrong assumptions as we are from what is working. The process of working with a hands-on evaluator is rigorous and demanding, but we are developing a base of knowledge, wisdom, and expertise providing lessons for “what works” when it comes to locally driven initiatives.

What follows are several practical suggestions for building community capacity for juvenile justice reform.

Five Practical Ways to Build Community Capacity

to Serve Youth in the Juvenile Justice System

1. Identify, Invest in, and Share Power With the Right Local Leaders: the key to building community capacity to serve youth in the juvenile justice system is to invest in local leaders who have the ability to mobilize community members and manage effective programs. Too often these skill sets are separate, but there are grassroots leaders who can balance these dual responsibilities. Bringing these leaders to the decision-making table with system stakeholders is the key to producing the best locally driven initiatives.

2. Develop Learning Communities that Bring Together System and Community Stakeholders around Quantitative Data and Qualitative Knowledge: the gap between the performance-based, numbers-driven approach increasingly adopted by system stakeholders, and the “in the trenches” knowledge of what is happening with youth at the street level can be bridged by creating learning communities where both forms of knowledge are valued and shared. Facilitated learning communities where stakeholders from public agencies and grassroots organizations use data to inform decision-making can produce effective programs.

3. Embrace Evidence-Informed Interventions and Local Wisdom: community-based organizations that are strong in social capital and effective in connecting relationally with young people, have a wisdom and a knowledge of the local context that cannot be ignored. They can also benefit from exposure to and training in evidence-informed interventions that provide the type of structure and quality control system stakeholders expect. Too often, the conversation about evidence-based practices stops with concerns over whether grassroots organizations can implement the most expensive and clinical interventions like MST. But there are plenty of other evidence-based programs that are appropriate for local community organizations to implement.

4. Increase the Administrative Capacity of Neighborhood Organizations: in order to execute effective programs for youth, local organizations need more than dedicated leaders. They need the administrative support that will enable those leaders to be effective. Providing the financial resources necessary to build up the operational capacity of community organizations is key. Funding formulas that allow grassroots organizations to develop a small stream of unrestricted revenue to hire an administrative assistant or a bookkeeper have a better chance at producing successful programs.

5. Start Small, Grow What Works: starting with small manageable projects that are relatively low-risk but provide rich learning experiences for the implementers, is the key to developing sustainable programming. In large cities, efforts to launch large-scale system-community partnerships often fall apart because of a lack of follow-through on the local level. Starting local and building on the lessons learned from what actually works produces the most sustainable, replicable results.

[1] The South Bronx Community Connections initiative is funded by a JJDPA grant from the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) and several private foundations in New York.

Spofford is Closed! CCFY celebrates the closure of notorious Bronx juvenile detention center

2011-03-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, March 30th, NYC Officials announced their plans to close the Spofford Juvenile Detention center for good. For years, community activists and advocates have fought to close down the notorious juvenile detention center. Two years ago, a diverse coalition of youth, parents, clergy, advocates, activists and community organizations began organizing under the United to Stop Spofford Campaign to push for its closure. Today, we celebrate its closure and promise to remain vigilant to ensure that it is never again used to incarcerate children. You can watch video coverage of the closing ceremony on NY1 and read about the closure in the NY Daily News.

CCFY is awarding $7,500 to faith and community organizations in Mott Haven!

2011-03-01T09:18:00.002-08:00

Community Connections for Youth (CCFY), a Bronx-based non-profit organization that works with youth in the juvenile justice system is making small grants to faith and community organizations in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. Selected partners will receive up to $7,500 a year to work with CCFY to divert youth from justice system involvement by matching them with adult mentors and engaging them in community building projects. In addition to grant money, CCFY will work closely with the selected partners to provide training and on-going support for youth and mentors, along with additional funds to support youth-initiated community-building projects.

To request a copy of the RFP, fill out the following form: SBCC RFP Request.

Please email info@cc-fy.org or call Rosanne Placencia at 347.590.0940 with any questions. Applications are due March 15th. (Toda esta información, incluyendo el RFP, está disponible en español, favor de solicitarla si la necesita).

CCFY Board Member Rachel Carrion Testifies Before Congress

2010-03-28T17:35:00.004-07:00

On March 11, 2010, CCFY Board Member Rachel Carrion testified before a congressional subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities concerning her experience in New York's Juvenile Justice system. Watch her testimony here:

New York Finds Extreme Crisis in Youth Prisons

2009-12-14T13:30:00.004-08:00

New York Times (Read the original article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/nyregion/14juvenile.html)

December 14, 2009

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

ALBANY — New York’s system of juvenile prisons is broken, with young people battling mental illness or addiction held alongside violent offenders in abysmal facilities where they receive little counseling, can be physically abused and rarely get even a basic education, according to a report by a state panel.

The problems are so acute that the state agency overseeing the prisons has asked New York’s Family Court judges not to send youths to any of them unless they are a significant risk to public safety, recommending alternatives, like therapeutic foster care.

“New York State’s current approach fails the young people who are drawn into the system, the public whose safety it is intended to protect, and the principles of good governance that demand effective use of scarce state resources,” said the confidential draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The report, prepared by a task force appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and led by Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, comes three months after a federal investigation found that excessive force was routinely used at four prisons, resulting in injuries as severe as broken bones and shattered teeth.

The situation was so serious the Department of Justice, which made the investigation, threatened to take over the system.

But according to the task force, the problems uncovered at the four prisons are endemic to the entire system, which houses about 900 young people at 28 facilities around the state.

While some prisons for violent and dangerous offenders should be preserved, the report calls for most to be replaced with a system of smaller centers closer to the communities where most of the families of the youths in custody live.

The task force was convened in 2008 after years of complaints about the prisons, punctuated by the death in 2006 of an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old boy at one center after two workers pinned him to the ground. The task force’s recommendations are likely to help shape the state’s response to the federal findings.

“I was not proud of my state when I saw some of these facilities,” Mr. Travis said in an interview on Friday. “New York is no longer the leader it once was in the juvenile justice field.”

New York’s juvenile prisons are both extremely expensive and extraordinarily ineffective, according to the report, which will be given to Mr. Paterson on Monday. The state spends roughly $210,000 per youth annually, but three-quarters of those released from detention are arrested again within three years. And though the median age of those admitted to juvenile facilities is almost 16, one-third of those held read at a third-grade level.

The prisons are meant to house youths considered dangerous to themselves or others, but there is no standardized statewide system for assessing such risks, the report found.

In 2007, more than half of the youths who entered detention centers were sent there for the equivalent of misdemeanor offenses, in many cases theft, drug possession or even truancy. More than 80 percent were black or Latino, even though blacks and Latinos make up less than half the state’s total youth population — a racial disparity that has never been explained, the report said.

Many of those detained have addictions or psychological illnesses for which less restrictive treatment programs were not available. Three-quarters of children entering the juvenile justice system have drug or alcohol problems, more than half have had a diagnosis of mental health problems and one-third have developmental disabilities.

Yet there are only 55 psychologists and clinical social workers assigned to the prisons, according to the task force. And none of the facilities employ psychiatrists, who have the authority to prescribe the drugs many mentally ill teenagers require.

While 76 percent of youths in custody are from the New York City area, nearly all the prisons are upstate, and the youths’ relatives, many of them poor, cannot afford frequent visits, cutting them off from support networks.

“These institutions are often sorely underresourced, and some fail to keep their young people safe and secure, let alone meet their myriad service and treatment needs,” according to the report, which was based on interviews with workers and youths in custody, visits to prisons and advice from experts. “In some facilities, youth are subjected to shocking violence and abuse.”

Even before the task force’s report is released, the Paterson administration is moving to reduce the number of youths held in juvenile prisons.

Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, the agency that oversees the juvenile justice system, has recommended that judges find alternative placements for most young offenders, according to an internal memorandum issued Oct. 28 by the state’s deputy chief administrative judge.

Ms. Carrión also advised court officials that New York would not contest the Justice Department findings, according to the memo, and that officials were negotiating a settlement agreement to remedy the system.

Peter E. Kauffmann, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said the governor “looks forward to receiving the recommendations of the task force as we continue our efforts to transform the state’s juvenile justice system from a correctional-punitive model to a therapeutic model.”

The report contends that smaller facilities would place less strain on workers, helping reduce the use of physical force, and would be better able to tailor rehabilitation programs.

New York is not unique in using its juvenile prisons to house mentally ill teenagers, particularly as many states confront huge budget shortfalls that have resulted in significant cuts to mental health programs. Still, some states are trying to shift to smaller, community-based programs.

The report by New York’s task force does not say how much money would be needed to overhaul the system, but as Mr. Paterson and state lawmakers try to close a $3.2 billion deficit, cost could become a major hurdle.

Ms. Carrión has faced resistance from some prison workers, who accuse her of making them scapegoats for the system’s problems and minimizing the dangerous conditions they face. State records show a significant spike in on-the-job injuries, for which some workers blame Ms. Carrión’s efforts to limit the use of force.

“We embrace the idea of moving towards a more therapeutic model of care, but you can’t do that without more training and more staff,” said Stephen A. Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, the union that represents prison workers. “You’re not dealing with wayward youth. In the more secure facilities, you’re dealing with individuals who have been involved in pretty serious crimes.”

Advocates have credited Ms. Carrión, who was appointed in 2007 by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with instituting significant reforms, including installing cameras in some of the more troubled prisons and providing more counseling.

But the state has a long way to go, many advocates say.

“Even the kids that are not considered dangerous are shackled when they are being transferred from their homes to the centers upstate — hands and feet, sometimes even belly chains,” said Clara Hemphill, a researcher and author of a report on the state’s youth prisons published in October by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

CCFY Members Call for Changes in NY State Youth Prisons

2009-09-19T11:29:00.004-07:00

Listen to CCFY members discuss abuses in New York State youth prisons. Rachel Carrion talks about her experiences in a youth facility. Mishi Faruqee talks about the failure of youth prisons to rehabilitate, and Ruben Austria talks about the need for community-based alternatives to incarceration for youth. Listen to the audio clip here: WAMC: Move To Overhaul NY's Juvenile Prisons (2009-09-18)

CCFY Leaders Decry Abuses in the Juvenile Justice System

2009-09-17T16:11:00.004-07:00

CCFY Board Members Mishi Faruqee and Rachel Carrion speak out against abuses in upstate youth prisons in this video. A Department of Justice report found that youth were routinely abused in OCFS facilities, including excessive use of force by staff, failure to hold staff accountable for misconduct, and inadequate mental health treatment. There have even been cases of staff sexually abusing female youth in facilities and supplying youth with drugs.

Federal Investigation of New York State Youth Prisons finds Rampant Abuses of Youth

2009-08-25T04:39:00.004-07:00

A two year Department of Justice investigation of four youth facilities found that staff routinely used excessive force against youth residents. Furthermore, administrators failed to investigate reports of abuse committed by staff or discipline those who abused youth. The report concluded that children were so severely abused it constituted a violation of their civil rights. The NY Times reports: "In one case described in the report, a youth was forcibly restrained and handcuffed after refusing to stop laughing when ordered to; the youth sustained a cut lip and injuries to the wrists and elbows. One boy, after glaring at a staff member, was forced into a sitting position and his arms were secured behind his back with such force that his collarbone was broken." Read the full text of the article here: NY Times Article

SIGN THE PETITION TO CLOSE THESE ABUSIVE FACILITIES NOW!!!

2009-08-25T03:37:00.004-07:00

Please take 10 seconds to sign the petition to close these abusive facilities and bring our children - and the resources they need to thrive - back to the communities where they live. http://www.petitiononline.com/200k4bed/ We pay up to $200,000 annually per kid to send them far from home to places where facility workers despise and fear them. We should be keeping them at home!!

Tuesday: NYCLU, Al Sharpton and Children’s Defense Fund-NY to Hold Press Conference about Abuse in NY’s Juvenile Detention Centers

2009-08-24T13:38:00.004-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Aug. 24, 2009 – At a press conference tomorrow on the steps of City Hall, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, and the Children’s Defense Fund-NY will demand reforms to end the culture of neglect and abuse pervading four of New York State’s juvenile detention centers.

In findings recently made public after a nearly two-year investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that staff at four juvenile detention centers consistently used excessive force and violent physical restraint techniques that often resulted in serious injuries, including concussions and broken bones.

The DOJ report examines conditions at four facilities operated by the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). Federal investigators concluded that administrators failed to effectively investigate excessive force incidents or punish staff members guilty of abusing residents, who are all younger than 16 at the time of arrest. They also found that the centers fail to provide adequate mental health care to residents.

In a Sept. 2006 report, the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch released a report documenting alarming abuse and neglect of girls at Tryon and Lansing. Later that year, a teenager died at the Tryon facility after two workers pinned him to the ground.

What:

Press conference to demand reform at state’s juvenile detention facilities

When:

Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 11 a.m.

Where:

City Hall, Manhattan

Who:

Donna Lieberman, NYCLU

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the National Action Network

Mishi Faruqee, Children’s Defense Fund-NY

Mie Lewis, ACLU

New York Rethinks Juvenile Justice

2009-05-23T03:05:00.004-07:00

Listen to Public Radio's coverage of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice's Symposium on Racial Disparities, including statements from members of the NYC Task Force on Racial Disparity. Featured on this interview are Mishi Faruqee of the Children's Defense Fund, Tamara Steckler of the Legal Aid Society, and Tshaka Barrows of the W. Haywood Burns Institute. Listen to the audio file here.

Officials, advocates look to reform juvenile justice

2009-05-23T02:59:00.004-07:00

May 22, 2009

By Cara Matthews
Albany Bureau

ALBANY - Advocates for improving juvenile justice in New York claimed Thursday that the state is not fully complying with a federal law that requires it to address the disproportionate number of minority youth in the system.

The Children's Defense Fund of New York, the Legal Aid Society and other organizations said that to help turn that around, state and local agencies need to do a better job of reporting information on the racial and ethnic makeup of children who are arrested, placed in detention or incarcerated.

Armed with all the data, communities could tailor specific programs and strategies to reduce the disparity, members of the groups said. They want the state to crack down on non-compliant agencies, require that all the information be made public, and work with communities on solutions.

"It's really only by reporting that data that we get a clear picture of what's going on and can actually pinpoint where racial disparity is happening," said Ruben Austria, director of Community Connections for Youth in New York City.

New York's system serves nearly 1,900 children at an annual cost of about $200,000 per child, and more than 75 percent of the youth are black or Hispanic, according to Gov. David Paterson's administration, which formed a task force last fall to look at possible improvements.

State Office of Children and Family Services statistics show that minority youth are arrested 1.76 times more than white youth, detained at a rate of 6.31 compared with whites and placed in confinement 4.62 times more often than whites.

Federal law passed in 1988 says states can jeopardize a portion of their funding if they don't address racial disparities in their juvenile-justice systems.

The state Department of Criminal Justice Services, which collects data from police, courts and other agencies involved with juvenile justice, recognized that some of the information reported to the department appeared inconsistent or incomplete and has been reviewing all the data and working with agencies to improve reporting, department spokesman John Caher said.

Racial disparity in juvenile justice was one of the topics addressed in a seminar Thursday that was sponsored by the Division of Criminal Justice Services, other state agencies and lawmakers. The department created the position of juvenile- justice director about a year ago, and Thursday's event was part of a series of forums the director organized on reforming the system, Caher said.

Youth of color are over- represented in juvenile-justice systems nationwide, Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, said at the symposium. They are more likely to be arrested, detained and committed; more likely to receive harsher sentences; and disparity worsens at deeper levels of the system. Some of the reasons are cultural, and a lot of it comes down to who has better legal representation.

In New York City, there is a "crisis of racial disparity," with black children and teens 31.8 times more likely to be incarcerated then their white peers, Austria said. Hispanic youth are 16.4 times more likely.

"For many years, a lot of folks who run agencies and make decisions just look at it as this is just sort of the way things are, this is just an intractable problem," Austria said.

Young people of color in cities commit the same types of offenses that all youth do, but for them the "response tends to be punitive and tends to be criminalization" rather than alternatives to being in the system, he said.

The top nine charges for children who are clients of the Legal Aid Society in New York City and go through the Family Court system are misdemeanors, said Tamara Steckler, attorney-in-charge for the society's Juvenile Rights Practice in New York City. The charges are for offenses like shoplifting, graffiti, having a school fight and trespassing by visiting a friend in a housing project, she said. Almost all the clients are minorities.

Kids take risks, they don't often see consequences and they get in trouble, Steckler said. "As adults, we are here to teach them and help them grow and be productive adults, and that's in their communities, with their families' support, not incarcerated. It's our responsibility," she said.

In wealthier, white communities, children are much more likely to be released to their families, and parents are expected to discipline them, she said.

The New York City groups have organized a task force on racial disparity in the system.

NY's School to Prison Pipeline (NYCLU Video)

2009-03-31T04:34:00.004-07:00

This is a short clip on New York's School to Prison Pipeline that disproportionately targets youth of color in large urban areas. Weighing in on the topic are Charisa Smith, Director of the NY Juvenile Justice Coalition, Eddie Borges of the Office of Children and Famiy Services, and Ruben Austria of Community Connections for Youth during a recent trip to Western New York to visit empty youth prisons.

Closing of Juvenile Centers Sparks Debate Over Treating Troubled Kids (WBFO 88.7)

2009-03-30T08:17:00.004-07:00

Eddie Borges (OCFS), Charisa Smith (Correctional Association of New York) and Ruben Austria (CCFY) weigh in on the effort to close empty upstate youth prisons, as does Darcy Well of the Public Employees Federation. Listen to the audio here:

WBFO 88.7 Closing of Juvenile Centers

Despite Red Flags About Judges, a Kickback Scheme Flourished

2009-03-28T02:56:00.004-07:00

By IAN URBINA

New York Times, March 28, 2009

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day — even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt. Lawyers told families not to bother hiring them. They would not be allowed to speak anyway.

“The judge’s whim is all that mattered in that courtroom,” said Marsha Levick, the legal director of the Juvenile Law Center, a child advocacy organization in Philadelphia, which began raising concerns about the court to state authorities in 1999. “The law was basically irrelevant.”

Last month, the law caught up with Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, who ran that juvenile court for 12 years, and Judge Michael T. Conahan, 56, a colleague on the county’s Court of Common Pleas.

In what authorities are calling the biggest legal scandal in state history, the two judges pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud in a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks.

On Thursday, the State Supreme Court ordered that the records be cleaned for hundreds of the 2,500 or so juveniles sentenced by Judge Ciavarella, and in the coming weeks, the two judges will be sentenced, under a plea agreement, to more than seven years in prison.

While the scandal continues to ripple nationally as legal experts debate whether juvenile courts have sufficient oversight, here in Luzerne County people are grappling with more immediate questions: How did two native sons, elected twice to the bench to protect children and serve justice, decide to do the opposite? And why did no one stop them?

Old Friends Hatch a Plan

It all started in June 2000 with a simple business proposition, according to the judges’ indictment and more than 40 interviews with courtroom workers, authorities and others.

Robert J. Powell, a wealthy personal-injury lawyer from Hazleton and longtime friend of Judge Conahan, wanted to know how he might get a contract to build a private detention center. Judge Ciavarella thought he could help.

The two men agreed to meet and, according to prosecutors, somewhere in that conversation a plan was hatched that courthouse workers and county officials would later describe as a “freight train without brakes.”

First, Judge Ciavarella put Mr. Powell in touch with a developer who also happened to be an old friend, Robert K. Mericle, to start work on finding a site. Then, in January 2002 — the month Judge Conahan became president judge, giving him control of the courthouse budget — he signed a secret deal with Mr. Powell, agreeing that the court would pay $1.3 million in annual rent, on top of the tens of millions of dollars that the county and the state would pay to house the delinquent juveniles. And by the end of that year, Judge Conahan had gotten rid of the competition by eliminating financing for the county detention center.

“They were unstoppable,” said Judge Chester B. Muroski, who sent a letter to county commissioners raising concerns about detention costs, only to be transferred days later to another court by Judge Conahan. “I knew something was wrong, but they silenced all dissent.”

Other dissenters were also steamrolled.

When the county controller, Steve Flood, leaked a state audit that described the state’s lease of the center as a “bad deal,” the center’s owner filed a “trade secrets” lawsuit against Mr. Flood, and Judge Conahan sealed the suit to limit other documents’ getting out. His decision was later overturned.

“Everyone began to assume that the judges had some vested interest in the private center because they were pushing it so doggedly,” one courthouse worker said. Virtually all former colleagues and courthouse workers would not allow themselves to be identified because the federal investigation into the kickback scheme was continuing and they feared for their jobs if they alienated former allies of the judges.

Mr. Powell has not been charged. His lawyer said that the judges had coerced him into paying the kickbacks and that he was cooperating with investigators.

The few officials who had concerns at the time say their hands were tied. Probation officers say they suspected that something was amiss but were overruled every time they requested lighter sentences or for sentences to be served at home. County commissioners were the only ones authorized to sign contracts for detention centers. But by eliminating money for the county center, Judge Conahan left them little alternative but to sign on to the deal for the private facility.

Prosecutors say that by sentencing juveniles to detention at twice the state average, Judge Ciavarella was holding up his end of the bargain. And by late 2003, so much money was rolling in that the two judges were struggling to hide it all. So in 2004, they bought a $785,000 condominium together in Florida to help conceal the payments, and they began disguising transactions as rent and other related fees.

“We did what we could to stop it,” said Commissioner Stephen A. Urban, who repeatedly argued that the county should build its own center rather than lease the private one. “There were so many red flags that no one could mistake them as any other color.”

Disparate Upbringings

One red flag was the 56-foot yacht in front of the judges’ Florida condo, where they and Mr. Powell started spending much of their time. Owned by Mr. Powell, the $1.5 million boat was named the Reel Justice.

The conspicuous wealth Judge Ciavarella enjoyed in Florida was a far cry from the rough East End neighborhood in Wilkes-Barre where he grew up and is still known as “the local kid who made it big.”

A stellar athlete and student, Judge Ciavarella was the son of a brewery worker and a phone company operator. Nicknamed Scooch, like his father, he drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle for years, and even after moving away, he visited his aging mother daily until she died in 2007.

After law school at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Mr. Ciavarella ran for a seat on the county’s Court of Common Pleas in August 1994. On the bench, he became known for a stern hand in sentencing and a sharp wit in making sure everyone knew who was boss.

By contrast, Judge Conahan was known for being quiet, even secretive, on and off the bench. His neighbors observed that in a community known for holiday parties and open houses, no one they knew had ever seen the inside of Judge Conahan’s house.

Raised in Hazleton, on the other side of the county from Wilkes Barre, Judge Conahan came from money and had a political pedigree.

His father, who owned a funeral home, was Hazleton’s mayor from 1962 to 1974. Judge Conahan attended Villanova University and went to law school atTemple University.

Despite their differences, the two men became close friends on the bench, connected, former colleagues say, by a similarly stern view of justice.

In 2004, Judge Conahan bought the house next to Judge Ciavarella’s in Mountain Top, a wealthy suburb of Wilkes-Barre, where Mr. Powell also lives. The judges and their wives began sharing a recreational vehicle to tailgate at Penn State football games and vacationing together in Florida.

“They were pretty average guys,” Frank Monaco, the superintendent of the Florida condominium building, said of the judges and Mr. Powell. “Average for people with lots of money.”

Though the judges and Mr. Powell generally kept to themselves, Mr. Monaco said, they lost that low profile in 2004 after Mr. Powell got into a dispute with marina officials who wanted to end his slip lease. Mr. Powell went to court to force the marina to let him keep his boat there, but he filed his motion in Luzerne County, not Florida.

A colleague of Judge Conahan and Judge Ciavarella ruled in favor of Mr. Powell, despite a protest from the marina’s lawyer that the case should have been heard in Florida and that he could not attend the hearing because he had been given only one day’s notice.

“People at the marina thought that seemed like a real abuse of power,” Mr. Monaco said. The lawsuit was dropped after Mr. Powell moved his boat to another marina.

“You get enough power and you’re bound to start abusing it, I suppose,” Mr. Monaco said.

Troubling Trends

There was never doubt about who had the power in Courtroom 4 in the Luzerne County Courthouse. Though courteous, even jocular, Judge Ciavarella ran hearings with breakneck efficiency, cutting lawyers off when they rambled, scolding them when they arrived unprepared.

Sometimes, he helped his friends, too.

One courthouse worker recounted seeing a high school friend appear before Judge Ciavarella on a speeding charge. When the state trooper testified that he had clocked the man going 80 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, the judge interrupted. “No, I think he was just going 60. Matter closed,” the worker recalled the judge saying. Shocked, the trooper turned to face the judge. “You’re dismissed,” the judge said.

But the juveniles being sentenced in that dim oak-paneled courtroom tended to be less lucky. Parents who arrived with their children typically left without them.

“Your arguments in sentencing weren’t persuasive,” said Basil G. Russin, the Luzerne County public defender, who represented many juveniles in Judge Ciavarella’s court. “You expected your kid to go away.”

While judges elsewhere in the state were shifting away from incarcerating juveniles for delinquency, Luzerne County was becoming infamous for imposing heavy sentences for minor infractions.

Kurt Kruger, for example, was 17 when he was sent to a boot camp for five months in 2004 for being a lookout for a friend who was stealing DVDs from a Wal-Mart. DayQuawn Johnson was 13 when he was sent to a detention center for several days in 2006 for failing to appear at a hearing as a witness to a fight, even though his family had never been notified about the hearing and he had already told school officials that he had not seen anything. Both juveniles were first-time offenders.

Judge Ciavarella had never made a secret about liking his justice swift and firm. Nicknamed Mr. Zero Tolerance in the courthouse, he once put a father in jail after he could not pay court-imposed fees for his daughter, whom the judge had previously locked up.

Asked last year why he did not make a habit of telling juveniles of their right to a lawyer before hearings, Judge Ciavarella said, “I just don’t believe I have to spoon-feed people to do things in their life.”

But as he pleaded guilty last month and admitted having “disgraced” the bench, Judge Ciavarella denied that payments had influenced his sentencing decisions.

State data, however, give a different picture. The number of juveniles he sent to secure facilities outside the home more than doubled from 2001 to 2002, around the time that the authorities say he and Judge Conahan hatched their kickback plan. And that sentencing trend — more than double the state average — continued through 2007, according to data analyzed by The New York Times. (No data was available for 2008.)

After the Juvenile Law Center appealed a case involving a child who was sentenced without a lawyer, Judge Ciavarella told reporters in 2000 that he would avoid letting juveniles appear without counsel in the future. But state data indicate that the problem only worsened. From 1997 to 2003, juveniles appeared before Judge Ciavarella without counsel at more than five times the state average, and from 2003 through 2007, that rate was around 10 times the state average.

Federal authorities have declined to say when they began investigating the judges. But these trends started worrying State Department of Public Welfare auditors in 2003, when they noticed that the county was billing the state for the same amount every month for detention services. In most other counties, the bill fluctuates based on the changing numbers of juvenile offenders each month.

In a separate review, state auditors found that the detention centers were systematically overbilling the county and that the centers had fallen behind in their bills and begun receiving shut-off notices from utility companies.

“Those were all red flags to us,” said Ted Dallas, executive deputy secretary for the Department of Public Welfare, adding that his office tried to work with the county to lower its use of detention because the state pays partial reimbursement for those costs.

But, like so many others, Mr. Dallas said there was little he could do. Since the centers were privately owned, state auditors had limited authority. And since the judges were on the side of the centers, the auditors had little recourse in the event of a conflict.

“In the end,” Mr. Dallas said, “it all came down to what the judge decided.”

Sean D. Hamill contributed reporting.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the town of Hazleton, Pa., as Hazelton.

Empty Beds Cost Millions

2009-03-08T12:12:00.004-07:00

The Post-Journal

March 8, 2009

by Patrick Fanelli

GREAT VALLEY - A few miles south of Ellicottville lies the empty corridors, classrooms and dormitories of Great Valley Residential Center, which hasn't been home to a single child in more than five months. The empty 25-bed facility for troubled youths must be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it costs approximately $1.7 million a year to maintain regardless of how many children are present. That amounts to $68,000 a year for each bed. The Great Valley Residential Center and a similar 25-bed facility in Cattaraugus are scheduled to be closed later this year under a plan put forward by Gov. David Paterson and Gladys Carrion, state Office of Children and Family Services commissioner, as the state faces an unprecedented fiscal crisis that threatens all New Yorkers with significant tax and fee hikes. Closing the two facilities and several others in Upstate New York will save $16.4 million this year alone, and the savings could be substantially higher in years to come since many, if not all, of those facilities won't be closed until later this year, according to OCFS officials. Keeping Great Valley open, says Ed Borges, OCFS communication director, is a waste of taxpayer money since it is so costly to maintain, isn't being utilized and doesn't need to be kept open. ''In good times, that's unreasonable and ridiculous,'' said Borges, who has been providing tours of the underutilized facilities for reporters to underscore the need to restructure OCFS operations. ''In bad times, that's absurd.'' Great Valley Residential Facility is located on a winding road that cuts through the picturesque forests and hillsides of Cattaraugus County a few miles northwest of Great Valley, a tiny hamlet south of the bustling village of Ellicottville. Nestled on a quiet hillside covered with pines, the facility is made up of two long, one-story buildings painted green that resemble a motel complex. One building is home to the administrative offices and classrooms. The other, which is attached to a red barn complete with horse stables, is home to the dormitories, dining facilities, library and gymnasium. On the side of the road approaching the facility, hand-written signs on poster board object to plans to close the facility. The employees inside, some of whom have worked there for more than three decades and are still some time away from retirement, are afraid for their jobs. The last time a child walked the corridors of Great Valley Residential Center was Oct. 2. The reason for that, says Borges, is that judges are sending far fewer children to these facilities than before. As of Oct. 27, judges in both Chautauqua and Cattaraugus County only sent one child to OCFS for placement in a non-secure facility like Great Valley in 2008, according to Borges. The vast majority of offenders are sent to private facilities or other programs for troubled youths, he says. And the vast majority of children being sent to OCFS facilities come from the downstate area, according to Borges. That's why it makes sense to close the underutilized residential centers like Great Valley in favor of local programs while maintaining other, better-utilized facilities, the nearest of which is in Rochester, he says. ''Investment-wise, it's better for taxpayers because it's more efficient and effective,'' he said. Ruben Austria, founder and executive director of Community Connection, a youth program in the Bronx, favors at least some of the money OCFS is going to save to bolster youth programs and services across the state. According to Austria, that's not expected to happen. ''Right now, all the money that will be saved will go to closing the budget deficit,'' said Austria, who accompanied Borges to Great Valley on Friday. Opposing the restructuring initiative is the New York State Public Employees Federation, the union that represents many of the workers who could lose their jobs under the plan. According to union officials, the restructuring plan isn't in New Yorkers' best interest because treatment provided for troubled youths at public residential centers is much better than services provided by the private sector. At private facilities, says Kevin Hintz, the union's Western New York region coordinator, children have a much easier job going absent without leave, and the recidivism rate is higher. ''After a kid flunks out of a private facility two or three times, they finally get the clue that it's better to put him in a good facility, i.e. an OCFS facility,'' Hintz said. According to Darcy Wells, the union's public relations director, the teenager who shot a Rochester police officer recently was AWOL from a private youth facility. And at the private facility closest to Jamestown, the Randolph Children's Home, as many as 20 children have been AWOL at a single time, according to Ms. Wells. OCFS officials point to the fact that judges are sending children to private facilities more than public facilities as evidence that places like Great Valley aren't needed anymore. At the same time, union officials say OCFS isn't actively promoting their services the way private providers do. ''We feel strongly that OCFS deliberately emptied the facilities now proposed to close in order to point at them, empty, and declare that it's a waste of taxpayer dollars,'' Ms. Wells said. Borges is dismissive of the union's claims, especially since union officials represent those with the most to lose from the restructuring plan - the workers at the public facilities scheduled to be closed. ''People here are trying to protect their jobs, which I can understand,'' Borges said. ''(But) we can't continue to support this.''

Video Shows King Co. Deputy Kicking Teen Girl

2009-02-27T21:56:00.004-08:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 28 at 5:31 a.m. ET

SEATTLE (AP) -- A King County sheriff's deputy kicks a 15-year-old girl, slams her to the floor of a jail cell, strikes her and pulls her hair in violence captured on videotape.

Prosecutors released the surveillance video in Friday in the assault case against Deputy Paul Schene, who is accused of using excessive force on the girl.

The footage shows the attack beginning after the girl enters the cell at suburban SeaTac City Hall and kicks off one of her shoes toward the deputy.

Schene, 31, pleaded not guilty to fourth-degree assault in Superior Court on Thursday.

The incident last November began after the girl was brought in for an auto theft investigation, according to court documents.

''We believe this case is beyond just police misconduct, it's criminal misconduct,'' King County Prosecutor Daniel Satterberg said. ''This is clearly excessive force.''

Satterberg added the case is uncommon because cameras captured the entire incident.

Schene was investigated previously for shooting two people -- killing one -- in the line of duty in 2002 and 2006. Both times his actions were found to be justified, said Ian Goodhew, prosecutor's deputy chief of staff.

Calls by The Associated Press to Schene's lawyer Anne Bremner were not immediately returned Friday. Bremner, however, released a statement to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in which she said the video does not tell the whole story. Bremner had asked Judge Catherine Shaffer to not release the video to the media.

''As we argued to the judge, it will inflame public opinion and will severely impact the deputy's right to a fair trial,'' Bremner said.

In the video, a deputy kicks the girl, pushing her back toward the wall. The deputy then strongly backs the girl against the wall, and slams her to the floor by grabbing her hair. A second deputy enters the holding cell, while the first deputy holds the girl face down to the floor. The first deputy appears to hit the girl with his hands. The girl is then lifted up and led out of the cell while the first deputy holds her hair.

The second officer shown in the video was a trainee at the time and is not under investigation, Goodhew said.

According to court documents, the girl complained of breathing problems after the incident and medics were called to check her. A short time later, she was taken to a youth detention center and booked for investigation of auto theft and third-degree assault, the latter accusation dealing with her conduct toward the deputy. The girl has pleaded not guilty to taking a motor vehicle without permission, Goodhew said Friday, adding she was never formally charged with assault.

Schene told investigators through an e-mail conversation with his lawyer that once he was assaulted by the girl kicking her shoe at him, he entered the cell to ''prevent another assault,'' according to court documents. Schene also said that the girl failed to comply with instructions in the holding area.

Prosecutors said Schene did not explain why he struck the girl after he had her in a holding position on the floor.

Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case (NY Times)

2009-02-14T01:47:00.004-08:00

February 14, 2009

By IAN URBINA

Several hundred families filed a class-action suit Friday against two Pennsylvania judges who pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending juveniles to private detention facilities.

“At the hands of two grossly corrupt judges and several conspirators, hundreds of Pennsylvania children, their families and loved ones, were victimized and their civil rights were violated,” said Michael J. Cefalo, one of the lawyers representing the families. “It’s our intent to make sure that the system rights this terrible injustice and holds those responsible accountable.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers called on Friday for hearings into the state’s juvenile justice system. And the Juvenile Justice Law Center in Philadelphia, which blew the whistle on the judges, said it had sworn affidavits from families who said they had sought court-appointed counsel but were told that their children would have to wait weeks, sometimes months, for a lawyer. During that time, the children would have to remain in detention, the families said.

The two judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Scranton, Pa., to wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the United States for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years in prison.

As many as 5,000 juveniles are believed to have appeared before Judge Ciavarella while the kickback scheme was going on. The judges are currently free on an unsecured $1 million bond, and they have surrendered their passports and a condominium in Florida. Neither is allowed out of the state without permission.

State Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf, a Republican from Montgomery County who is the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intended to hold a hearing to find ways to help the children and their families once the federal investigation was done. A spokesman in Mr. Greenleaf’s office said one option was to provide money from the crime victims compensation fund.

“Money is important, but my son’s life has already been completely destroyed,” said Ruby Cherise Uca, whose son, Chad, 18, was sentenced to three months of detention by Judge Ciavarella in 2005, when Chad was in eighth grade.

Chad, who had no prior offenses, was charged with simple assault after shoving a boy at school and causing him to cut his head on a locker. Chad returned to school his freshman year, but he was so far behind in classes and so stigmatized by his teachers and peers, his mother said, that he soon dropped out.

Federal investigators remained silent Friday about whether they would file charges against the operators of the detention centers or who else they were considering as possible conspirators.

But a law enforcement official confirmed Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited a transitional housing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where Judge Ciavarella furloughed inmates who had been sentenced by other judges, as federal authorities continue to scrutinize actions by Judge Ciavarella and Judge Conahan.

Lawyers for Robert J. Powell, the owner of one of the detention centers, released a letter saying Mr. Powell was not complicit in the kickback scheme but was a victim of demands from the judges for payment.

Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Center in Philadelphia, said that juveniles should not be allowed to waive their right to counsel, as is permitted in Pennsylvania, and that if families wanted a lawyer but could not afford one, they should get representation.

Mr. Schwartz added that Luzerne County, where the judges handled cases, had only one public defender on staff for juveniles. The juvenile court processes about 1,200 juvenile defendants a year.

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit (NYTimes)

2009-02-14T01:45:00.004-08:00

New York Times

February 13, 2009

By IAN URBINA and SEAN D. HAMILL

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.

The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.

And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.

But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to charge a quid pro quo.

“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Mr. Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”

No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

Last year, the Juvenile Law Center, which had raised concerns about Judge Ciavarella in the past, filed a motion to the State Supreme Court about more than 500 juveniles who had appeared before the judge without representation. The court originally rejected the petition, but recently reversed that decision.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that children have a constitutional right to counsel. But in Pennsylvania, as in at least 20 other states, children can waive counsel, and about half of the children that Judge Ciavarella sentenced had chosen to do so. Only Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina require juveniles to have representation when they appear before judges.

Clay Yeager, the former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Pennsylvania, said typical juvenile proceedings are kept closed to the public to protect the privacy of children.

“But they are kept open to probation officers, district attorneys, and public defenders, all of whom are sworn to protect the interests of children,” he said. “It’s pretty clear those people didn’t do their jobs.”

On Thursday in Federal District Court in Scranton, more than 80 people packed every available seat in the courtroom. At one point, as Assistant United States Attorney William S. Houser explained to Judge Edwin M. Kosik that the government was willing to reach a plea agreement with the men because the case involved “complex charges that could have resulted in years of litigation,” one man sitting in the audience said “bull” loud enough to be heard in the courtroom.

One of the parents at the hearing was Susan Mishanski of Hanover Township.

Her son, Kevin, now 18, was sentenced to 90 days in a detention facility last year in a simple assault case that everyone had told her would result in probation, since Kevin had never been in trouble and the boy he hit had only a black eye.

“It’s horrible to have your child taken away in shackles right in front of you when you think you’re going home with him,” she said. “It was nice to see them sitting on the other side of the bench.”

Read the original article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

Indictments Are Expected in Killing of Inmate, 18

2009-01-22T05:39:00.004-08:00

January 22, 2009

By AL BAKER

Prosecutors are expected to announce criminal charges on Thursday against three city correction officers suspected of deliberately looking the other way as several inmates on Rikers Island beat another inmate to death in the jail in October, people briefed on the case said on Wednesday.

The battered body of the victim, Christopher Robinson, 18, was found in his cell on Oct. 18.

The medical examiner’s office ruled his death a homicide, officials said.

No motive for the fatal attack has been divulged. Within days of Mr. Robinson’s death, two correction officers, Michael McKie and Khalid Nelson, were placed on modified assignment as an investigation into the death at the Robert N. Davoren Center of the jail complex began, law enforcement officials said.

Those two officers, as well as a third, a woman whose name has not been released, and several inmates accused of being the assailants are believed to have been named in the indictment, which is expected to be unsealed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx on Thursday, said one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the charges have not been resolved.

The indictment is expected to allege that the correction officers “were purposefully not paying attention,” the official said. “My understanding is they have been arrested and are in custody.”

Sanford A. Rubenstein, a lawyer for the victim’s family, said officials from the office of the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, notified the teenager’s mother, Charnel Robinson, 34, about the pending charges but did not provide her with the names of the defendants or the specific charges they are facing.

He added: “This indictment will send a message to those charged with the responsibility of safeguarding inmates from harm that if you do not do your duty, you will be charged criminally, and a message to inmates that if you commit a horrible crime while incarcerated you will be held accountable.”

Mr. Rubenstein said that Ms. Robinson told him that her son was arrested in August on a parole violation stemming from a 2007 burglary charge. He said she said the violation involved her son’s “working late.”

A Job or a Gang (NY Times Editorial)

2008-12-30T00:09:00.004-08:00

December 30, 2008

EDITORIAL

If the country has learned anything about street gangs, it is that police dragnets — hauling large numbers of nonviolent young people off to jail, along with the troublemakers — tend to make the problem worse, not better. Public policy should discourage young people from joining gangs in the first place by keeping them in school, getting them jobs and giving them community-based counseling and social service programs.

Federal and state programs that are supposed to provide jobs, services and counseling have been poorly financed for years. They are likely to suffer further as cash-strapped states look for ways to save money. The timing couldn’t be worse.

A new study by James Alan Fox and Marc Swatt of Northeastern University suggests that violent crime among young people may be rising, that the much-talked-about reduction in the crime rate in the 1990s may be over, and that much more must be done to prevent young people from succumbing to the gang culture.

The study also shows that the murder rate for black teenagers has climbed noticeably since 2000 while the rate for young whites has scarcely changed on the whole and, in some places, has actually declined. While more financing for local police would be useful, programs aimed at providing jobs and social services are far more important.

It is too early to say whether the numbers represent a long-term trend. But the economic crisis has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs — among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities. Once these young men become entangled in the criminal justice system, they are typically marginalized and shut out of the job market for life.

President-elect Barack Obama’s administration and Congress will need to address the youth crisis as part of the country’s deep economic crisis. That means reviving the federal summer jobs programs that ran successfully for more than 30 years. It also means directing more federal money at proven programs that keep young people in school and out of the clutches of the gangs.

Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend (NY Times Article)

2008-12-30T00:06:00.004-08:00

December 29, 2008

By ERIK ECKHOLM

The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report.

The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

The increase coincided with a rise in the number of murders involving guns, Dr. Fox said. The number of young blacks who were victims of murder also rose in this period.

Murder rates around the country are far below the record highs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a crack epidemic spawned violent turf battles.

“Regrettably, as the nation celebrated the successful fight against violent crime in the 1990s, we grew complacent and eased up on our crime-fighting efforts,” the authors said.

The report primarily blames cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs, and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity in violent crime, Dr. Fox said.

But Bruce Western, a sociologist at Harvard, cautioned that the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Dr. Western also said that the impact of the reduction in government spending on crime control would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

Conservative criminologists place greater emphasis on the breakdown of black families, rather than cuts in government programs, in explaining the travails of black youths.

Much of the increase, experts say, is a product of gang activity, in midsize and large cities.

“The aggregate national murder rate since 2000 has been impressively flat — not to say there haven’t been fluctuations in individual cities,” said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. “But when you see a spike in a city,” he said, as in Chicago recently, “it very often involves young black males shooting other young black males.”

Dr. Blumstein said that while federal cuts might have contributed to the rise in murders by black teenagers, “I think there are much more endemic problems going on.”

“In the inner city, you have large numbers of kids with no future, hanging out together with a great emphasis on their street credibility,” he said. “They’ll go to great lengths to avenge an insult.” Many of these teenagers do not stay in school, let alone join the Boys Clubs or other after-school programs.

The heightened attention to security after the 9/11 attacks might, paradoxically, have contributed to a decline in crime-fighting.

“One problem we faced was a disinvestment in policing in the post-2001 environment,” said Chief Edward A. Flynn of the Milwaukee police, who served from 2003 to 2006 as secretary of public safety in Massachusetts. “I witnessed homeland security become the monster that ate criminal justice,” Chief Flynn said, as money went to security equipment and communications and the number of police officers fell.

To fight violent crime, Chief Flynn said, the police must be a visible presence in neighborhoods with high crime rates.

From 2000 to 2007, according to the report, murders in Milwaukee by whites ages 14 to 24 rose by 4 percent, while those by blacks rose by 62 percent.

This year, Chief Flynn’s first leading the department, he deployed new teams of officers to the most violent neighborhoods, having them patrol on foot and bicycles, while federal agencies helped bring down some large gangs. The number of murders this year — 70 as of last Friday — is down one-third from last year and is the lowest since 1985.

Still, Chief Flynn said, “any improvements will be temporary unless there’s more investment in the futures of our young people.”

Teen Murder at Rikers Jail (Village Voice)

2008-11-23T14:41:00.004-08:00

New details about the slow and painful death of a Brooklyn kid. Did guards turn a blind eye?

By Graham Rayman

published: November 19, 2008

Illustration by Ward Harkavy

The fatal beating last month of a teenager on Rikers Island has sparked new fury about how the huge jail complex is operated.The teen, Christopher Robinson, is believed to have bled to death over a period perhaps stretching to 12 hours, theVoice has learned.

Investigators are probing whether guards caused a lapse in security that let the inmates get to Robinson or even turned a blind eye to the beating, sources say. The incident has sparked a broader probe of whether jail staff are condoning inmate-on-inmate violence in the jail where the teen was killed.

City Correction Commissioner Martin Horn is facing a major test in how he handles the fallout. At the meeting of a jail oversight board last week, Horn provided no details on the incident. However, behind the scenes, jail sources say, the teen's murder has the top brass scrambling.

Robinson, an 18-year-old Brooklyn resident being held on a minor parole violation for missing curfew, was punched, kicked, and stomped to death on October 17 by three other inmates — Bloods gang members — in a wing at the Robert N. Davoren Center (RNDC), the jail where adolescent male offenders are housed, officials and law enforcement sources said.

Some jail officials had urged that, after Robinson had allegedly been involved in an altercation with another inmate, he be placed in a more secure area of the jail, but that request was turned down, allegedly because of a lack of bed space.

Robinson's mother has raised questions about the medical care that her son received — or perhaps more accurately, did not receive — after the beating.

Her threatened lawsuit — which at this early stage is still just a $20 million "notice of claim" against the city — alleges that he sought medical care at the jail infirmary but was turned away because he did not have a pass.

The teen is believed to have bled to death internally after the beating caused one of his ribs to puncture a lung, sources tell the Voice.

The murder has drawn more public attention than any other jail homicide in recent memory — a series of investigations, more than the usual smattering of newspaper articles, a lawsuit, the transfer of three jail bosses, desk duty for several officers, an upcoming city council hearing, and a protest.

While Charnel Robinson denies that her son had any gang affiliation, the Correction Department had him listed as a member of the Crips gang, records indicate.

"Whether he was or wasn't, it bears no relevance to the fact he was a teenager beaten to death under the supervision of the Department of Correction," says Robinson family lawyer Sanford Rubenstein. "He's still the victim."

Bishop Wilbur Jones, the Robinson family pastor, adds, "There had to be officers who heard his cries from his cell and if it happened in the cell, somebody had to let these inmates in. The Department of Correction failed this man."

The complicity of guards in inmate assaults has been a recurring problem at RNDC and other city jails, as the Voice has reported ("Rikers Island Fight Club). And other violent incidents have sparked continual criticism. (See "A Short Life Ends on Rikers Island, in a Place Where Suicide Isn't Supposed to Happen," May 27, and "Woman-on-Woman Rape Claim at Rikers," August 5.)

Correction records indicate that two days before the fatal assault, a Blood alleged that five inmates, including Robinson attacked him in another housing area at RNDC.

It is unclear what, if any, role Robinson had in that attack, because correction staff did not witness it, the records show. The alleged victim sustained a minor injury — sore ribs.

The victim in the prior assault was transferred to close custody, where inmates are held in 23-hour lockdown ostensibly for their own protection.

But Robinson was transferred to a less secure unit, one for inmates with behavioral problems.

Publicly, the Correction Department has proclaimed faith in its gang-intelligence division's ability to separate inmates who might have a beef with each other.

Robinson was seen alive in his cell at 11:40 a.m. by a guard, records show. Robinson told the guard, according to records compiled by guards, that he wanted to stay in the cell. When the guard returned, Robinson was unconscious on the bed. A review of a Correction Department document obtained by the Voice indicates that there was a gap between the beating and Robinson's treatment, but the precise duration remains unclear.

If Robinson was involved in an altercation with Bloods before he was murdered,it's curious that he was transferred into a housing area dominated by Bloods.

There are only two ways in which Robinson's attackers could have entered his cell without his consent: Either the guards opened the door on purpose, or they left it open long after it should have been closed. The location of guards during the assault remains unclear.

Sidney Schwartzbaum, president of the Assistant Deputy Wardens/Deputy Wardens Association, says that after the earlier incident that may have involved Robinson, a deputy warden at RNDC tried to have Robinson placed in punitive segregation, where no one could have entered his cell.

But the division chief's office denied the request. "He was told there was no room in punitive segregation," Schwartzbaum tells the Voice. "Inmates have been placed in punitive segregation for a lot less. The sad part is that had he been placed in segregation, he probably would be alive today."

Schwartzbaum says he has complained for years that transfers of inmates facing disciplinary charges to punitive segregation have been delayed because of a lack of bed space.

In connection with the subsequent beating death of Robinson, several guards were transferred, and at least two others have been placed on modified assignment.

Officials with Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson have scheduled a meeting with Robinson's family for Thursday, a family lawyer said. A spokesman for that office says no arrests have been made, but an investigation is ongoing.

Jones, 65, says the case is particularly tragic because Robinson was trying to turn his life around. "He was only in jail because he had to work overtime and missed curfew, violating his parole," Jones says. "He was a fine young man and he had a future in front of him."

Robinson was initially picked up on a shoplifting charge for allegedly stealing a cell phone from a store. He served a few months, and was released on probation.

He found temporary work at Staples. One night, he was asked to work late, and wound up breaking his curfew, Jones says. Robinson was sent back to Rikers on the violation.

The teen's mother says that he told her only two days before the fatal assault that he had had an argument with someone. Mother and son last spoke by phone on the day of the assault and were scheduled to see other that Sunday. Robinson is now buried in a cemetery in New Jersey.

"I could tell in his voice that something was wrong," says Charnel Robinson, who works as a store manager. "He should be here with me. The only thing I can do is bring these people to justice."

She says she's also upset that Correction officials have not reached out to her. "It just really troubles me that to this day I haven't heard anything from the DOC, not even a simple condolence," she says.

Investigators are surveying inmates at RNDC in an unusual effort to determine to what extent officers are working in collusion with prisoners — "letting them run the show," as one source put it.As the Voice has previously reported, the Bloods have come to dominate many jail housing areas, at times controlling other inmates' access to phones, recreation time and the commissary.

In some cases, they are tapped to staff the "cleaning crew" which gives them extra time outside their cells and access to brooms, and other equipment that have been used as weapons.

Even before the investigation is completed, Horn has transferred RNDC warden Gregory McLaughlin and two deputy wardens, in addition to the officers placed on modified assignment and desk duty.

"Commissioner Horn felt that the jail was in need of stronger leadership and management," says DOC spokesman Stephen Morello.

But the two deputy wardens—Mark Scott, a 23-year veteran, and Artemio Colon, a 28-year veteran—had previously initiated investigations of staff who condoned inmate on inmate violence at RNDC.

Their efforts last year and this year led to at least one indictment of an officer, and several firings.

Schwartzbaum says the transfers were an effort to "point fingers" at middle management without addressing the underlying problem or holding the executive staff accountable.

"Accountability in this department stops at the warden's level," he says. "Although I think Commissioner Horn has done an excellent job on many things, the one criticism I have is that he doesn't hold his chiefs accountable."

Two weeks before Robinson's murder, the chief's office applauded the work of the RNDC bosses, Schwartzbaum notes.

"It's ironic that they moved this staff down, because two weeks prior they were told what a great job they were doing," he says. "To me this [series of transfers] is merely an attempt to say they took some sort of action."

And, according to one correction source, the transfers don't really address the problem. "The extortion of inmates by other inmates has to be stopped, and the staff has to be in control," the source says.

Correction spokesman Morello declined to comment on details of the investigation. "Maintaining staff integrity and providing for safety and security of all in our custody is paramount," he said in a statement. "That is why we immediately asked the NYPD, District Attorney and Department of Investigation to look into not only who may have attacked inmate Robinson but also staff behavior." The city council hearing prompted by the Robinson murder is scheduled for Nov. 24.

Correction officials have publicly downplayed the severity of the problem of inmate-on-inmate violence at Rikers, but the incidents — particularly ones in which guards are involved — just keep taking place.The Voice was the first media outlet to report extensively on the phenomenon of guard involvement in such violence.

Consider the following:

• In February, Correction Officer Lloyd Nicholson was charged with ordering teenage inmates to beat other teen inmates at RNDC. As the Voice reported, Nicholson used a select group of teen enforcers under a regimen he called "the program."

"Basically, it was like the movie A Few Good Men," a source told the Voice in April. "Either you were in the program or not. He thought the ones who weren't abiding with the program were misbehaving, and he used other inmates to discipline them."

• Ex-inmates Camillo Douglas and Luis Soriano are suing the city, claiming that Bloods assaulted them last year at RNDC after guards purposely opened their cell doorsafter bedtime to allow the beatings to take place, their lawyer, Julia Kuan, says.

When Douglas alleged to the Voice that the Bloods controlled the housing unit, Correction officials pooh-poohed it, and he was ignored.

But in September, the Voice obtained internal Correction Department documents showing that top officials at RNDC were aware that Bloods indeed controlled the housing area.

"Gang members known as Bloods are in fact giving orders to other inmates," wrote Captain Belinda Nicks. "They conspired to attack and assault Douglas and Soriano."

Assistant Deputy Warden Zina McLean wrote in her report, "Bloods were trying to manipulate the feeding with distribution of the portions."

And a May 2007 report written by the RNDC warden, Gregory McLaughlin, says the same thing in more muted tones: "It is evident that this incident was a result of Bloods attempting to influence the feeding and telephone use with other inmates."

• Back in 2000, Bloods got into the cell of Bronx teen Matthew Velez and fatally beat him. Correction officers broke policy in opening his cell door and then either ignored his cries for help or failed to do the required security checks.

During a 2002 trial, one of Velez's killers testified the unit was a "Blood house" and that an accomplice actually asked an officer for permission to "make it hot" — or beat up Velez.

"In the house I was in," he testified, "it's very common. You go to [certain] officers. Every day, there's a fight."

Little seems to have changed since then. Within the past several weeks, correction sources say, inmates in one RNDC housing area were obliged to ask permission from another inmate to enter and leave the dayroom.

"We do get complaints about gang violence and collusion with officers in distributing contraband and quote, enforcing discipline, close quote, by inmates at RNDC," says Jonathan Chasen, a lawyer with Legal Aid's Prisoners Rights Project.

RNDC may be more vulnerable to that kind of behavior, jail observers tell the Voice, because youthful inmates are more vulnerable than adult inmates, they don't speak up as often, and they are seen as easier to coerce by the staff.

• RNDC has been the site of three suicides in the past two years, including two in the highly secure close-custody wing, where inmates are locked in their cells for 23 hours. One of the suicides was 18-year-old Steven Morales, who hanged himself with a towel after his girlfriend dropped him. The incidents have raised obvious questions about the quality of supervision in the jail.

Guard involvement in inmate assaults has been reported at other Rikers jails as well.

In March, 2007, the city agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit involving a near-fatal assault by the leader of a house gang.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Donald Jackson, was punched once in the head by inmate Kirk Fisher in an AMKC mental observation ward in May 2003.

Jackson's head struck a piece of protruding metal on the floor so hard that he developed a blood clot in his brain and almost died if not for an operation at Elmhurst Hospital, records show.

"The inmates tell us it's a really common set-up," said Andrew Stoll, a Brooklyn lawyer who specializes in police and Correction Department cases, at the time. "In a lot of the houses, the correction officers use the house gang as enforcers, and pay them with cigarettes and extra commissary."

Fisher testified that, indeed, he had been "deputized" by correction officers to run the unit — a violation of DOC rules.

"I was the house captain, and it was my job to enforce certain rules," he testified. "Anybody that acted up in the house, it was my job to put them in line."

A deposition given by former correction officer Roger Cullen was even more dismaying.

Cullen, the officer who witnessed the assault on Jackson, testified in the deposition that Fisher told other inmates when to shower, when to lock-in, and when to clean their cells.

"It was like he was in charge," Cullen said, adding, "Any officer knows you're not supposed to do that — it's wrong."

Meanwhile, the mayhem continues. Earlier this month, the Daily News reported that a former inmate named Jeffrey Treffy, of Queens, claimed he was forced to fight another inmate in December 2007 for the amusement of correction officers. Treffy claims that officers allowed him to get medical care only if he told doctors that he hurt himself in a fall.