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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 15, 2017)
News Page 4 Street Roots • Dec ‘Heart-wrenching’ ‘I ’ve never seen kids in a setting or environment like this, ’ Disability Rights Oregon’s Sarah Radcliffe says of youth detention conditions at NORCOR BY THACHER SCHMID T.S.: Tell us about a case study from your investigation. STAFF WRITER S.R.: There was one girl, we actually ids disciplined for leaving an orange interviewed her on three occasions, because pip on the floor, falling asleep, using she was there on each of our visits. She a tissue as a bookmark or “being struck me as a really sweet kid, and in her needy.” N O RCOR records, staff noted all over the Kids locked up for more than a year while place that she was respectful, helpful, polite, awaiting trial. Native American youths doing excellent work in school, and yet she detained at almost twice the rate of white was disciplined for multiple weeks for things youths, and kept much longer. like falling asleep, even after spending hours Kids for whom a caseworker is the “only in her room with no entertainment other adult in my life that I trust,” yet can’t than the Bible, for using a piece of clean remember her name so they have no one to tissue as a bookmark, for talk to. leaving an orange seed on the Kids who aren’t allowed floor, for “being needy.” That’s to touch a doorknob. a category that we saw written This might sound like in multiple records for “One Flew Over the multiple kids, no explanation, Cuckoo’s Nest” or the just “needy.” Or things like Indian boarding schools of * . ♦ doing the minimum, doing just the late 1800s. But this is OK, flirting, hands above state’s sanctuary law are The Dalles today, waist, not saying excuse me. according to the findings So her story really illustrated o f an in v e s tig a tio n by over the Northern Oregon a kid who was really desperate Disability Rights Oregon. Regional Corrections to find some human Street Roots spoke to connection, a positive path Disability Rights Oregon Roots’ previous coverage forward, and yet she was attorney Sarah Radcliffe being subjected to such harsh about the advocacy conditions. organization’s recently There’s also another girl - released investigation and we spoke to her right when its new report describing she had only arrived a day and a half before. “inhumane” conditions for youths She was still kind of reeling, just the incarcerated at the Northern Oregon experience of being in jail for the first time, Regional Correctional Facilities’s juvenile and the stuff at home that had led up to the detention. Radcliffe hopes Oregonians incarceration, and she hadn’t been removed support the creation of a Children’s Cabinet yet from the kind of post-booking lockdown. described in a task force’s So you have to take this test, and then you recommendations, an interagency umbrella have to have people approved on your call that “would make sure that all child-serving list by your probation officer, and she didn’t services commit to a core set of principles.” have anyone approved on her list. She was T hacher Schmid: N O R C O R has been like, “I wish I could just call my making headlines for its holding of federal (Department of Human Services) Immigration and Customs Enforcement caseworker, because I really like her and I detainees. Your report notes Disability Rights wish I had someone to talk to.” And I said, Oregon made a “spontaneous” decision to “Well, can you tell me her name? I’ll ask the investigate it. What inspired that? administration if they could let you make a Sarah Radcliffe: Over the past 2 1/2 phone call.” And she was like, “You know, I years, we’ve been conducting monitoring don’t even remember her name. That’s the visits to jails around the state, and we create saddest thing. She’s the only adult in my life that itinerary partly based on covering the that I trust, and I don’t even know her geographic areas, making sure we visit name.” That, for me, just really illustrated places that we haven’t been to in a while, how desperate these kids are for a positive, and partly based on complaints we receive trusted adult figure in their lives. or coverage that we see in the news. T.S.: Why is Oregon's youth incarceration NORCOR rose to the top of that list not for rate the second highest in the nation? any particular concern, and when I was out S.R.: I do think that when you go into there to see the adult side, I just thought, jails, adult’s or children’s jails, I think what well, there’s an adjacent juvenile program; you see points to failures in our social safety let’s have a look over there. And when we net. So when you look at kids who are in jail, went into the juvenile program, it was you see a lot of crossover between the immediately apparent that conditions in that population of kids in the child welfare facility were just not right, and potentially system and those in the juvenile justice detrimental for kids. K ONUNE P H O T O BY D IE G O D IA Z Sarah Radcliffe is an attorney with Disability Rights Oregon. system. So my sense of it is that Oregon’s child incarceration rate reflects failures in our child welfare system, our behavioral health system, and those kind of social safety net programs. T.S.: Can you give us a few highlights of the report? S.R.: There are two basic concerns. The first is a statewide concern: Oregon incarcerates way too many kids. We’ve got the second-highest rate of child incarceration in the country. And that’s an issue that’s reflected statewide, but especially at NORCOR, the lengths of stay are shockingly long. Kids are spending on average 29 days in jail for a technical probation violation. Nobody would argue that that’s an appropriate sanction for a technical probation violation, and that’s clearly pointing to failures in how our juvenile justice system is working. We know that incarceration for kids is hugely disruptive to their education and to their home life, and we also know that jail for kids is not an effective crime deterrent, the experience of being in jail is actually linked to future, deeper involvement in the criminal justice system. So it has the opposite of the desired effect. But not only do we incarcerate too many kids; we confine them in facilities that lack oversight and accountability. That means that at N O RCO R a program has been allowed to continue for decades that is really psychologically harmful to kids. There are 62 rules that prohibit normal and inevitable human behavior: things like looking around, looking out of a window, asking what time it is, talking, putting your hands above your waist. And then when kids violate those rules, which inevitably they do, they’re subjected to conditions that we believe amount to solitary confinement. They’re locked in their cells with nothing but the Bible for hours on end, they’re denied visits and phone calls to family, they’re required to eat their meals alone in their cells, and they exercise and receive education on a solitary basis. T.S.: You're an attorney, so your focus and experience presumably tend toward the legal and logical. D id this investigation and report hit you hard emotionally? S.R.: I haven’t spent time in a juvenile See NORCOR, page 5
