by Beam, Cris
In 1996, Pius XII had contracted with the state agency, the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), as opposed to ACS in New York City, to operate two campuses for delinquent boys: Holy Cross and another called Chester, in nearby Orange County. When the state caught wind of the allegations against Holy Cross in June of 1999, it conducted site visits at both facilities. By August, the state required Holy Cross to come up with a “corrective action plan” to improve safety.
Despite all this, resident allegations of abuse and neglect surged during Holy Cross’s corrective period—perhaps because residents sensed that finally they’d get some response. Also, while under official scrutiny, Holy Cross fired a staff member for bringing a gun to work, and authorities arrested another for marijuana possession. And one more counselor was convicted of sexual abuse. In March of 2000, the Office of Children and Family Services gave Holy Cross sixty days to improve conditions. They didn’t make it. Holy Cross closed its doors in May of 2000. By June, Pius XII shuttered the Chester facility of its own accord.
Jonathan was delivered from his “hell” when Holy Cross closed—and was sent to another residential treatment center. “I did five years there,” he said of his transfer to Graham Windham at Hastings-on-Hudson, as though it were a prison. A lot of foster kids talk about their placements as “doing time.” But Graham Windham was, for Jonathan, comparatively tranquil. “I saw pools, I saw trees, I saw girls, and there were these college-looking houses. And the staff people said, ‘Welcome.’”
Because I could no longer visit Holy Cross, I took a trip to Graham Windham. I tried to imagine being a thirteen-year-old kid like Jonathan, arriving for the first time—with no family or adult allies on the outside (his social worker, after all, had been the one who drove him to Holy Cross). About an hour outside of New York, Graham Windham sits on a forty-acre bluff, overlooking the Hudson River. Two schools, high school and elementary, are nestled at the bottom of a large hill, along with a gym. Little brick cottages with columns and names like Percy, Rogers, and Morris face a paved path that dips and circles around a grassy knoll, some boulders, and a scrappy basketball court. The numerous garbage cans scattered about are painted with the slogan “Show Your Tiger Pride!” for the school team. Jonathan was right; the place was pretty, and it did feel a bit collegiate.
But it was also an RTC—this one, an uneasy alliance of roughly 150 kids with very mixed backgrounds. About 35 percent were regular foster kids, 60 percent were kids who had committed crimes but were sent to Graham Windham as an alternative to juvenile hall, and the remaining 5 percent were a mix of special-ed kids and kids whose parents just sent them there for the restrictive environment. All of the residents attended the schools at the bottom of the hill, joined by another 135 day students who were bused in—all for special ed.
This educational model isn’t unique to Graham Windham. Many RTCs have to tailor their schools to the lowest common denominator, or special education. And because kids generally can’t leave the campus, special ed is all they get. If they stay for years, the way Jonathan did, they’re in no way prepared for college.
Jonathan arrived at Graham Windham not knowing a soul, and I imagined him trying to make friends. As I sat on a boulder in the center of campus, four girls with West Indian accents walked by carrying volleyball netting and shouting, inexplicably, “Lisa, Lisa, Lisa!” Five minutes later, they were back, still carrying the net, still calling for Lisa. They were circling the cottages. Some boys appeared and played a halfhearted game of basketball. One of the girls paused to single one out.
“What’s your name, boy?”
The boy, tall and gangly, jogged up to her. “RudeBoy.”
The girl turned up her nose and went back to her friends. The boys, around sixteen or so, chatted as they took turns shooting the ball.
“I saw your girl; she went down on my nut.”
Shoot, dribble, shoot.
“Like some bitch-ass nigger!”
Shoot, basket. Shoot again.
I went up to talk to RudeBoy; he seemed approachable. Turned out, he’d been at Graham Windham only five days, which was why the Lisa girl asked for his name. When I asked him how he liked it, he shrugged.
“It’s a facility, you know,” he said, his expression purposefully weary, as though he’d been asked the question a thousand times before, and he was tired of the paparazzi. “It’s better than LaSalle School, because it’s less restrictive, but you still gotta get a pass if you want to leave your house.”
The two other boys, who had wandered up to join our conversation, had also bounced around between facilities and agreed that Graham Windham wasn’t as bad as some of the places they’d stayed. That didn’t mean it was good, they stressed; it just wasn’t as violent as other RTCs they’d known.
I spoke with one of the directors at Graham Windham, who said the campus didn’t have any riots (unlike, say, the Randolph Children’s Home, about fifty miles from Buffalo, where a dozen kids staged a riot in 2009 ). The director also said that if a staff member was even accused of hitting a child at Graham Windham, he’d be removed right away.
The biggest complaint RudeBoy’s companions had about Graham Windham was that it was isolating. “It’s kind of lonely,” one of the kids, a light-skinned boy with pimples, admitted. “Especially because sometimes you get your own room. I guess the worst thing is, you’ve gotta stay here.”
“I’ve been here six months, and there’s nothing really bad about it,” said his friend, a short Latino kid with disturbingly yellow teeth. “Except if you get modified [for bad behavior]. This means you get sent back before another judge and sent to another facility.”
Jonathan was never modified, and he grew to adulthood in the little brick cottages at Graham Windham. He told me he experienced the full range of emotions on the campus—“happy, sad, mad”—but at the end of five years, he didn’t feel as if he had any truly close bonds with any of the counselors or staff—and he certainly didn’t consider them family. His final assessment of Graham Windham was that it was “just a place to rest your head.”
What Jonathan didn’t know was the cost of his headrest: in 2009, each child in an institutionalized placement facility cost taxpayers an estimated $210,000 per year. This was about $156,000 more than a year of room, board, and tuition at Columbia University—the place where I teach, and one of the most expensive schools in the country. And after his five-year tenure at Graham Windham, Jonathan hadn’t even graduated from high school. If Jonathan had been placed with a therapeutic foster parent, one who had been trained to work with psychiatrically troubled children, the cost to the state would have been half of what was paid out to Graham Windham.
Ten years after a surgeon general’s report that showed kids in therapeutic foster care are less likely to run away or become incarcerated than those in residential treatment centers, the state of New York began to scrutinize its residential treatment facilities for both their effectiveness and their safety. The first decade of the new millennium had been a troubled one for OCFS, which contracts with both residential treatment facilities like Graham Windham and juvenile detention facilities, which are exclusively for young criminal offenders. A teenager died at the hands of two adult aides at the Tryon School for Boys, leading to a Department of Justice investigation of Tryon and three other facilities. The investigators discovered extensive abuse; for instance, the forty residents at an all-girls facility were restrained an average of fifty-eight times per month, resulting in 123 injuries like concussions, knocked-out teeth, fractures, and shoulder separations and displacements.
The governor convened a Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice to probe more deeply, and to propose improvements. Composed of local and national nonprofit directors, commissioners, judges, and professors, the task force made a clear recommendation: Stop sending so many kids to institutions. They called institutionalization a “choice of absolute last resort.”
But the group homes, which are the next rung down in t
erms of restriction and are run by the city, have come under fire too. In 2003, investigators from three major advocacy and legal organizations launched a study of New York City’s group homes and found that kids needed, but were not receiving, “family-like settings.” Instead they were living with poorly trained staff, in subpar facilities. Mental health services were lacking, as were the systems to help kids stay connected with their biological families. The report’s authors were blunt. They recommended that ACS stop sending so many children into group homes and instead find them families. If group homes were to remain open, they said, they would have to turn them on their heads, demanding that “the current group residence model with its focus on behavior control must be replaced with a service-based, family-like model.”
By 2005, ACS had closed more than fifty group homes with close to six hundred beds. And in 2010, ACS announced a further reduction in group home beds—by about 25 percent—by April of 2011.
I thought that both of these trends—closing the RTCs and the group homes—were undoubtedly good signs. But it would have to mean more than shuttering buildings. ACS would also have to find enough new good foster parents. And they’d have to train the parents to weather the children’s inevitable storms. It would mean viewing the kids as traumatized, rather than oppositionally defiant; seeing coping strategies rather than delinquency. And it would mean changing the entire culture of child welfare, so kids no longer tumbled down the ladder of more and more punitive placements. As Jonathan said, and all system kids know: “When you’re a foster kid, an RTC or a group home is the last stop for you before jail.”
I had hoped, when the first group homes began to close, that the link between child welfare and criminality, both perceived and actual, would begin to fade. But then the mayor made a big announcement in 2010, which collapsed this hope. In New York City, juvenile justice would be merged with foster care, under ACS.
City officials said the reason behind the move was to provide better services: so many of the kids were dual-involved. They were juvenile offenders who were also foster children, and if their needs were met by one big umbrella agency, they could have one case manager, one lawyer, one judge, and one goal: to clear up the troublemaking and get integrated back into a family and community. The big idea was to reduce recidivism and close more juvenile jails, reserving the locked facilities for only the most serious or violent offenders.
At the state level, a merger like this had already happened twelve years prior, with the creation of New York State’s Office of Children and Family Services. Progressives generally applauded the move because it meant the judges who sentenced adolescents had more options. Rather than facing a short list of locked facilities or detention centers, these judges could now rely on the services of foster care too; they could send a kid back home with extra monitoring or counseling; they could send him to a foster or boarding home; they could bring in social workers and shift the general approach from one of punishment to one of support. And fiscal conservatives liked the fusion as well, since one agency was cheaper to run than two.
When the mayor made his announcement, there was almost no negative response from the press. The numbers were clear: abused or neglected children were more likely to be arrested, so providing them one large pool of services made some kind of intuitive sense. But I felt the low hum of dread beneath all the logic and evidence-based practice; there was nothing visionary in this move. It was entirely reactive, predicated on the belief that many foster kids would, by necessity or design, become criminals.
I met with the new ACS commissioner a few years after the merger had been announced, and he had inherited this combined agency—as well as a radical, and exciting, new plan. All of the juvenile delinquents from the city who had been housed in RTCs upstate (save for the more serious criminal offenders) would be handed back to ACS. Whether or not they were foster kids when they committed their crimes, they would become foster kids now. When we spoke, Commissioner Richter was just about to move the first wave of 250 kids into brand-new urban facilities.
“They’ll be residences with six to twelve kids each. The largest will be twenty-four,” Commissioner Richter said. “All of the residences are required to have a strong program model, like the Missouri Model.” The Missouri Model is an approach to juvenile justice that favors a high staff-to-child ratio, therapeutic group treatment, individualized attention, and supportive peer relationships rather than harsh and punitive coercive techniques. The main thing, the commissioner said, was that the kids would be closer to their families, who could be newly involved in their lives. And they could take regular classes in accredited schools, earning crucial credits toward a high school diploma.
But the foster kids at places like Graham Windham wouldn’t be coming home, wouldn’t be getting new programming or higher-level education. The “last stop” foster kids would still be going into the RTCs that contracted with the state and housed their own mix of kids with records and substance problems and mental health needs.
So in these early stages, it looked as if the delinquent kids would get more perks from the agency merger than the foster kids. I know it’s not a competition between the groups, but I worry about the philosophical implications of foster care sharing its administrative home with juvenile justice. Without the managerial and cultural divisions between the two, will a new foster kid envision jail, even more, as the next logical link in the chain? So many feel already imprisoned by their status as wards of the state and shackled by the stigma of being wild, unlovable foster kids; an expanded ACS mission expressly contrived for delinquents may only deepen this notion—for the kids, the workers, and the foster parents too.
8
Arrested in Development
WHEN I MET KECIA PITTMAN, she was serving a twelve-year prison sentence for burglary. She had a BA in sociology, which she earned while she was locked up, and her thesis was on the connection between child welfare and criminal justice. Her teachers brought her books about discrimination in foster care, books like The Lost Children of Wilder, and Shattered Bonds, and Nobody’s Children—the same ones I’d read over the years—but the links Kecia made to the justice system were her own.
When we talked at Bayview, the medium-security prison where I teach writing, Kecia had just turned forty. She was long and lean, with clearly defined muscles roping around her arms and shoulders, evidence of her daily workouts in the prison gym. She kept her dreadlocks tied in a loose knot behind her head. Kecia explained that the first of her theories was the most basic and obvious: group homes led to jail because of the connections that you made in care. The kids you met could lure you into trouble, and the adults were strangers you couldn’t trust. One thing led to another.
“It’s much easier to deviate in a group home,” Kecia said, blandly. “You’re not held to anybody’s standard. I mean, there’s not enough love in a group home to keep a kid loyal to any particular person.” Even with adolescent rebellion, depression, experimentation, and all the rest, a teenager in a family can be bound enough to another’s affirmative view of herself to pull through the tough years. Sometimes friends provide the positive mirror. But in a group home, that all goes awry. A teenager makes herself anew, in anyone’s image.
“There’s a lot of movement, they pull you out of school all the time, and you never feel stable. It’s easy to jump into anything because group homes promote that kind of lifestyle,” Kecia said. “You’re always free to do mischief. You don’t owe anyone anything anymore—that’s really the connection to the criminal justice system.”
Kecia and I were alone in Bayview’s conference room, though the door was open and a guard was stationed right outside, listening to gospel music on a hand-held radio. Like most of Bayview, the room was depressing: scuffed beige walls and floors tiled in a sickly green linoleum, sealed and barred windows, an old wooden table, and then, randomly, some stuffed floral chairs in the corners. We sat as far from the guard as we could as Kecia described the way her mother dropped her
off at the child welfare offices when Kecia had just turned fourteen. By Kecia’s telling, she was going through ordinary teenage rebellion, but her mom couldn’t handle the challenge and filed a petition in family court to have Kecia declared a Person in Need of Supervision, or a PINS kid. Her mother was free of all responsibility; the city would take over from there.
Kecia sat back and started counting off the group homes she’d lived in: Edwin Gould, Hegeman Diagnostic Center, Graham Windham, “a house on Park Avenue and 21st,” Saint Barnabas, Ashford, Mount Hope, Euphrasian, and then, for a stint, Bellevue’s psychiatric unit. She said there were others, but she couldn’t remember all the names. At first, Kecia said, she cried and cried for her mother. Then she got angry at what she felt was abandonment; she refused to even look at her mom when she came for visits. “I felt like she didn’t love me enough to hold on to me, and then I felt like nobody could love me enough. Now I got twelve to life, and it all started from the group homes.”
There’s one commonly cited statistic—that 80 percent of all inmates have spent time in foster care—but when you look more closely at the data, you see that it’s limited, and that little analysis has been conducted on the causal relationship between the two institutions. The 80 percent figure actually comes from a study on a single state (Illinois), though reputable sources have extrapolated the figure to represent the entire country. A California State Assemblymember, pushing through new legislation, claimed that 70 percent of the state’s adult inmates came from child welfare, and Connecticut officials determined that 75 percent of the youth in the state’s criminal justice system were former foster kids. Nobody has really conducted a full national count, so some people guess more conservatively; ABC News, for instance, ran a series on foster care and put the number at a careful 25 percent.
