The Tennessee department of children’s services is supporting the transfer of 12 youths out of state after two major breakouts earlier this year at a juvenile detention facility already beset by a string of abuse allegations and a wrongful death lawsuit.
A judge has approved the transfer of three youths and is considering the cases of nine others. The group was to be moved from the Woodland Hills Development Center in Nashville to a facility in Texas more than 800 miles away.
“The purpose for this is to make sure these kids are in a secure setting,” said Rob Johnson, a spokesman for the children’s services department, which administers the Woodland Hills facility. “It just hasn’t worked for them in Tennessee.”
The Woodland Hills center houses violent and criminal youths, most of whom have at least three felonies. The 12 youths up for relocation were involved in a mass escape in September, in which 32 juveniles – half the population – escaped. Later that month, 13 teenage boys broke out of their dorms.
An attorney for the youths warned that their families would be “distraught” if the teens were moved out of state and said that such a move would do nothing to fix egregious problems at the Nashville facility.
“What is distinctive about [the 12 teens] that their treatment failed, so that another state must come in and provide better treatment?” the attorney, Everette Parrish, told the Guardian on Wednesday. “Does that mean that every child left behind in Tennessee in a youth development center is now receiving substandard care?”
Johnson said the teens facing transfer have not been allowed to return to Woodland Hills because they pose a security risk. The youths have been held in temporary detention facilities in Tennessee since the September escapes. In the first breakout, it took police two months to catch the final escapee, who was apprehended on Halloween after he allegedly shot a university student.
Johnson said the Texas facility, Oaks Brownwood in the central part of the state, had special educational and therapeutic treatment programs. Children’s services is still working out logistical details, including making arrangements for the family and caseworkers to visit the teens in the Texas center. He said Woodland Hills is working to improve its treatment programs for youths, but that they wouldn’t be running in time to help these 12 boys.
Parrish, who has met with several of the boys being considered for transfer and plans to meet with them all, said they are scared to leave Tennessee.
All transfers must first be approved by the home-county juvenile court that ordered the youths into state custody. Thus far, at least three transfers have been approved and could begin within the next two weeks.
In the past decade, Woodland Hills has been plagued by a series of incidents with breakouts, allegations of sexual assault and a wrongful death lawsuit.
In May, the state agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the father of Kendall Oates, an 18-year-old who died at Woodland Hills in May 2012. Oates suffered from a seizure disorder that may have resulted in him having “lain sick or dead in his room for hours” before he was noticed, according to an investigation into the facility by The Tennessean. The autopsy found that Oates hadn’t received his medication that department officials were supposed to administer on the day of his death.
A 2010 investigation by the paper showed that sex abuse allegations have plagued the facility, which had some of the highest rates of sexual victimization of any US juvenile center, according to a 2010 Department of Justice report. And in 2004, at least 16 staffers were injured by teens brandishing broomsticks and hurling bricks before police in riot gear broke up the disturbance, the Associated Press reported.
Parrish said he is in the process of helping some of the boys file civil rights cases against the department, alleging physical abuse by certain guards. The Tennessee attorney said he initially believed the boys had not been mistreated inside the facility, but said his views have evolved as more boys came forward with similar accounts of physical abuse by a handful of guards.
“The harsh truth,” Parrish said, “is if the Texas place really is a wonderful, super-duper place to go to, then that means Tennessee is a failed and miserable, ineffective place that everybody who remains behind needs to not be a part of.”
Amanda Holpuch contributed reporting.
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