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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 9, 2015)
S tre e t R oots • January 9-15, 2015 News Page 4 lie kids from the num ber o f youths in the custody o f the Oregon Youth Authority are living with a m ental does the OYA still employ such a controversial measure like solitary confinement on the 1M state a n d advocates are each seeking to change how it manages troubled youths. Each ofM acLaren Youth Correctional Facility s 3 5 isolation rooms looks like this. I ts an 8-by-9-foot room with a metal toilet and concreté bed adorned with a padded mat. These rooms are a reminder o f how the correctional facility was modeled after adult prisons. OYA staff hope that with the implementation o f its 10-year plan, these rooms will be replaced with solitary rooms that are much “softer” in nature. BY EMILY GREEN as a bed, and nothing more. Mental health experts at the ACLU, Cascadia, Mental Health Association of n 1891, George Breckonridge was the Portland and Multnomah County all told first juvenile to be placed into custody at Street Roots that any amount of time in the reform school for boys in Woodburn, Ore. His crime was stealing a newspaper off solitary confinement is harmful to youth and exacerbates any symptoms of trauma and Jhis neighbor’s porch. Fast-forward 124 years, and the population within the walls of mental illness that are present. The effects are also well documented and include what is known today as MacLaren Youth hallucinations, revenge fantasies, increased Correctional Facility is markedly more anxiety, severe chronic depression, self- troubled. mutilation and suicide among other Dan Berger is one year into his tenure as psychological, physical and developmental MacLaren’s superintendent In 2015, he’s problems. faced with trying to implement newer, A snapshot released by OYA in July proactive approaches to youth detention in a showed 89 percent of females and 70 de facto mental hospital that’s sprawled percent of males among the 639 youth across a 180-acre campus covered with an within the state’s custody had at least one aging infrastructure. As MacLaren and the mental disorder. These percentages are other six Oregon Youth Authority (OYA) higher than national averages for both detention facilities expand their vocational incarcerated juveniles and incarcerated and treatment programs in an effort to adults with a mental disorder. The better serve their youth, ages 12 to 24, percentage of females with disorders they’re still employing an antiquated fluctuates often because they only comprise practice that many are saying should be 8 percent of the population. Mental scaled back; if not abolished entirely, disorders among inmates range from Solitary confinement is not a term OYA trauma-related and anxiety disorders to staff likes to use, but the rows of bare, schizophrenia and autism spectrum concrete rooms in the north and south disorders. In addition, many inmates have * blocks of MacLaren’s Intervention Unit experienced sexual abuse, neglect and other building are just that. The 8-by-9-foot cells forms of childhood trauma. contain a metal toilet and slab of concrete Over the past decade, OYA detention with a thin, padded mat intended to serve facilities have seen a 38 percent decline in STA FF W R IT E R I 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 See KIDS, page 5 On the cover: The North Block o f M acLaren’s Intervention Unit, which houses 35 isolation rooms. S taff told Street Roots that only two o f the isolation rooms were occupied. On an average day, about nine kids in OYA facilities are in isolation rooms.
