In 1891, George Breckonridge was the first juvenile to be placed into custody at the reform school for boys in Woodburn, Ore. His crime was stealing a newspaper off his neighbor’s porch. Fast-forward 124 years, and the population within the walls of what is known today as MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility is markedly more troubled.
Dan Berger is one year into his tenure as MacLaren’s superintendent. In 2015, he’s faced with trying to implement newer, proactive approaches to youth detention in a de facto mental hospital that’s sprawled across a 180-acre campus covered with an aging infrastructure. As MacLaren and the other six Oregon Youth Authority (OYA) detention facilities expand their vocational and treatment programs in an effort to better serve their youth, ages 12 to 24, they’re still employing an antiquated practice that many are saying should be scaled back, if not abolished entirely.
Solitary confinement is not a term OYA staff likes to use, but the rows of bare, concrete rooms in the north and south blocks of MacLaren’s Intervention Unit building are just that. The 8-by-9-foot cells contain a metal toilet and slab of concrete with a thin, padded mat intended to serve as a bed, and nothing more.
Mental health experts at the ACLU, Cascadia, Mental Health Association of Portland and Multnomah County all told Street Roots that any amount of time in solitary confinement is harmful to youth and exacerbates any symptoms of trauma and mental illness that are present. The effects are also well documented and include hallucinations, revenge fantasies, increased anxiety, severe chronic depression, self-mutilation and suicide among other psychological, physical and developmental problems.
A snapshot released by OYA in July showed 89 percent of females and 70 percent of males among the 639 youth within the state’s custody had at least one mental disorder. These percentages are higher than national averages for both incarcerated juveniles and incarcerated adults with a mental disorder. The percentage of females with disorders fluctuates often because they only comprise 8 percent of the population. Mental disorders among inmates range from trauma-related and anxiety disorders to schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. In addition, many inmates have experienced sexual abuse, neglect and other forms of childhood trauma.
Over the past decade, OYA detention facilities have seen a 38 percent decline in their populations, but at the same time, says OYA Chief of Facility Operations Erin Fultz, inmates have become “more and more acute on every level.” The seriousness of criminality, mental health and substance abuse issues are increasingly elevated among students at the facility, she says. At the same time, the staff-to-inmate ratio has remained the same.
Fultz says “in the old days” at MacLaren, two to three staff members in each 25-person living unit, or cottage, would oversee 15 or 20 youth who were relatively stable and five or six who were “highly acute,” meaning they needed closer supervision. Now, the same two to three staff members are responsible for a living unit that houses 25 highly acute kids.
Fultz says that while the rate of mental health disorders among OYA students system-wide has increased, it may only be on paper. “It’s always felt like it was high,” she says. “The way we collect data has evolved and we’re better at diagnosing mood disorders now.”
How those youths are treated while incarcerated, particularly with regard to solitary confinement, has attracted the legal concerns of prisoner and youth rights advocates.
They say OYA should not be allowed to house youth as young as 12 in isolation for up to five days – the current limit in Oregon. Also of concern are the institution’s “special programs,” which allow the use of isolation rooms for up to 60 days, and the many exemptions to the five-day limit.
Across the country, states are changing their approaches to solitary confinement in lawsuit settlements. In 2014, Ohio agreed to eliminate the use of solitary confinement in youth detention centers completely and just this month, Pennsylvania agreed to stop housing mentally ill inmates in isolation.
State Rep. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, is introducing House Bill 2706 on Jan. 19, which seeks to limit isolation in juvenile detention centers to 60 consecutive hours and no more than 60 hours in one week.
“What I’m concerned about is how (isolation) is being used right now, and I’ve talked with some folks in OYA who are also concerned about how it’s being used – how it is evaluated, when it is used — and that is one of the concerns that they have as well,” says Frederick. “The idea that it is being used at all is a concern. The idea that it is used for long periods of time especially for young people is extremely concerning to me, and so how do we handle that? That is what this bill is attempting to address.”
The bill was brought to Frederick by the Center for Intercultural Organizing. The organization claims that not enough has changed in OYA facilities since a 1985 judgment found the agency had violated the constitutional rights of its inmates by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment in the form of solitary confinement, and that it had violated inmates’ rights to due process. The judge decreed that youth could only be confined in solitary when “that student has engaged in conduct that creates and imminent danger of physical harm to himself or others.” In other words, not simply as punishment. Rules were also put in place requiring documentation and mandatory, continual evaluations by staff.
“Our youth need to be reminded that there are people who care, that the community is looking out for their rights and well being, and most importantly that they are not alone,” said CIO spokesperson Salome Chimuku. “It is important that we are giving youth the services and education they need and not setting them back with trauma and excessive isolation.”
According to rates compiled for Street Roots by OYA and Performance Based Standards — an organization that compares data voluntarily shared by different juvenile justice facilities — the average duration of isolation among OYA youth has ranged from 28 to 40 hours over the past three years, with nine to 11 youth sitting in isolation across all OYA correctional facilities on any given day. The number of youth in isolation is lower than PBS’s participant average, but the average duration is more than twice as long. OYA spokesperson C. J. Drake says this is because OYA only uses isolation in the most extreme cases, whereas other facilities might use it more often, and for shorter periods of time. An average of 35 percent of in-custody OYA youth have spent time in isolation rooms during each quarter of 2014.
“The goal is to minimize time spent in isolation,” says Berger. He explains that youth are placed in the intervention unit when they pose a safety threat to themselves or others and when dangerous contraband is found in their possession – including weapons, drugs and electronic devices. Reasons may vary, but he says it’s used as a last resort, and that each child undergoes an evaluation beforehand, and is monitored by a qualified mental health professional during their stay.
According to Oregon law, youth are to be removed from isolation as soon as they regain self-control. However, in the event of an investigation, this rule does not apply. An investigation may take place when contraband is found, says Berger. Staff needs time to determine who else has contraband and where it came from before letting the youth out of isolation. He says the hold can last up to three days, but usually only takes a few hours.
But when OYA inmate Thomas, 20, was put in isolation during an investigation three years ago, it was for 14 days. Thomas says he’s been sent to isolation three times since he was incarcerated at age 16 for robbery. The first time, he says, was because he and his roommates were being “rowdy.” For that, he says he spent six consecutive days in one of MacLaren’s tiny concrete isolation rooms, leaving only to shower. He says he slept through the early morning opportunities to come out for an hour of recreation. He slept a lot during his time in isolation, he says, to pass the time.
The second time, when he spent two weeks inside the isolation cell, he says it was during an investigation and the circumstances were similar, with the only time outside his cell spent in the shower. The third time was for one day after he says some photos from inside his living unit made it on to social media. While Street Roots was not allowed access to his file, OYA confirmed that the records in his file were consistent with what he told Street Roots about the amount of time he spent in isolation, however they indicated slightly different reasons. According to his file, says Drake, the “rowdy” incident was a planned group fight, the investigation was into drug use in his living unit and the third time was due to possession of “dangerous contraband.” Electronic devices that can be used to post pictures to social media are among items considered to be dangerous contraband.
The duration of Thomas' isolation exceeded the mandatory 5-day limit in two of the three cases, which occurred when he was ages 17 and 18. But because the consecutive two weeks he spent in lockdown was during an investigation, it was exempt from the rule. OYA files indicated that Thomas was allowed access to recreation outside his cell during the two-week period in isolation, says OYA spokesperson. While in some states kids are locked up in isolation for up to 23 hours a day, at MacLaren, they are allowed out for recreation in the common room for up to four hours a day, as long as circumstances allow for it, says Berger. There’s also an hour of exercise each morning.
Despite each having at least 10 years experience within OYA, neither Berger, Fultz nor a third official leading Street Roots’ tour of MacLaren’s campus say they know anything about what MacLaren’s isolation practices were just three years ago when Thomas was first sent to the intervention unit. They do say, however, that under Berger’s management there’s been a shift in many approaches and an effort to minimize the use of isolation. Prior to running MacLaren, Berger was the superintendent at another OYA facility.
Many human rights advocacy groups say isolation needs to be eliminated completely in youth correctional facilities.
“It’s the ACLU’s recommendation that solitary confinement be outright prohibited for youth under the age of 18. Many think it’s concerning enough to see anyone in a corrections facility put in solitary confinement, but all of the issues that exist in that context, whether it be mental health issues or psychological effects of isolation, are exacerbated when we’re talking about youth,” says Oregon ACLU Legislative Director Becky Straus.
“The objective of our corrections system is to promote public safety, and what we know now is that putting adults in solitary confinement could actually increase their chances of recidivism once those people are released from prison. So we’re not serving our public safety goal, we are likely causing psychological, or physical or social and developmental harm to those inmates and it’s a practice that really needs to be changed,” she says.
Straus says isolation contributes to the antisocial behavior and development in inmates in the same way the growing trend of replacing in-person visits with video visiting does. “Putting someone in a situation where they’re forced to continue on that path of anti-social behavior, feeling isolated, not feeling like there’s connection with other humans in their lives, just is simply the wrong track, and then so when someone is released from prison, they’re set up to fail,” says Straus.
Deena Corso, a senior manager in the Juvenile Services Division of Multnomah County’s Department of Community Justice, says when a youth with anxiety or paranoia disorder is placed in isolation, “it could actually make it worse.”
She says the county doesn’t track how many kids with mental disorders come through Multnomah County’s juvenile justice system, or how many of those kids end up in OYA facilities, but the county’s juvenile justice system does handle kids with mental illnesses differently, practicing early intervention and offering residential and outpatient programs aimed at keeping them out of correctional facilities.
“In general I can say we are very attuned that kids get their mental health needs met in the community, and that they don’t end up in a correctional facility or even in residential treatment if they don’t need to, if they can be effectively served in the community,” Corso says.
Corso says she thinks OYA’s rates of mental illness are high because “there is a very high correlation between trauma and how that manifests itself – and youth end up in a juvenile justice system and then eventually in a correctional setting. For boys in particular, they tend to externalize trauma, by that I mean act out in ways that are aggressive, and they join gangs. Girls tend to be more internally self-destructive as a reaction to trauma but then at some point that just sort of switches to coping.”
For youth across Oregon, the path to becoming incarcerated at an OYA facility varies. Each county has its own juvenile judiciary system and unique ways of dealing with mentally ill and traumatized youth, if it has the resources to deal with them at all.
Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Balmer established a task force in September to examine how the juvenile justice system in Oregon is dealing with mental illness. The task force includes court personnel, prosecutors, mental health providers, defense lawyers and other stakeholders looking into providing the mental health services currently not available to youths.
Megan Hassen, a law and policy analyst for the Oregon Judicial Department, is a professional consultant with Balmer’s task force. She says the group is seeking to understand what’s happening across the state in terms of how mental illness is being handled in each county. She says that while some counties, like Multnomah are large and have resources to initiate early intervention with at-risk youth, many smaller counties do not. She says the task force hopes to establish a template for screening that all counties can use when evaluating youths coming into the justice system. She says they hope to issue their recommendations by the end of the year. The task force’s next meeting will be at the Multnomah County Courthouse on Jan. 16.
While the state looks at ways of expanding early intervention practices, OYA is looking at ways to make its facilities “softer” and less “correctional” in nature, says Berger. At the request of lawmakers, OYA hired a consultant to draft a 10-year facilities infrastructure plan, which was introduced in September and is awaiting approval.
In the plan, OYA proposed $97 million in improvements to six of its facilities and the closure of a seventh, Hillcrest in Salem, over the next 10 years. Renovation plans at MacLaren include the demolition of the Intervention Unit, and the addition of rooms adjacent to living units where kids can go to be alone and decompress when they want to get away from the group. The rooms will also be used for isolation when needed.
The new rooms would have a less correctional feel, says Berger. “It’s all about changing the outdated infrastructure to align with OYA’s mission of achieving “positive human development,” he says.
Dr. Maggie Bennington-Davis is the chief medical and operations officer at Cascadia and co-author of the book, “Restraint and Seclusion: The Model for Eliminating Their Use in Healthcare.” She says approaching situations differently can be key in avoiding the need for solitary confinement.
“What we know is that people with serious mental illness who are in places like jails and prisons, and even mental health hospitals, already have a pretty profound history of dealing with violence and trauma and neglect,” she says. “People’s brains actually develop in such a way as to be uniquely sensitive to threat, and understanding that helps to approach people with that kind of history in ways that don’t trigger their flight, fight or freeze response as readily,” says Bennington-Davis.
“What I’m suggesting takes a lot of staff, and it takes a lot of highly trained staff, and I think that the public funding that Oregon has allotted is probably insufficient to do those things,” says Bennington-Davis.
What Bennington-Davis is describing is known as trauma-informed care, which was introduced to the system by Dr. Whitney Vail, OYA’s treatment director.
“Historically, there hasn’t been a huge focus on mental health needs because that’s not what we’re designed to do,” Vail says. “Trauma-informed care is near and dear to my heart.”
Despite his bouts with isolation, Thomas, the OYA inmate, says MacLaren has helped him become a better person. “I have personally taken a lot from this place,” he says. “I’ve seen a drastic change in my life.” He’s graduated from alcohol and drug treatment there, participated in leadership training, and he plans to earn a bachelor’s degree in communications online before he’s released in 2018.