The Providence Journal - Activists make case for Training School
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 12, 2007
By Elizabeth Gudrais
Journal State House Bureau
CRANSTON — From the front entrance of the state prison’s high-security center, you can see the Rhode Island Training School.
The first facility is home to 17-year-olds who are accused of crimes. The second facility is where those same youths would have gone, had the General Assembly not lowered the age of majority to 17, from 18, on July 1.
“Young people do not belong here,” Rhode Island Kids Count executive director Elizabeth Burke Bryant said yesterday, during a news conference outside the high-security center. “The most serious criminals in the state are housed here.”
Though this year’s legislative session is over, advocates haven’t given up on the idea of getting lawmakers to change their minds. “We believe there is still time to turn this around,” Burke Bryant said.
General Assembly leaders have not said yet whether they will return before January to override any vetoes by Governor Carcieri. But the list of vetoes includes some major leadership-backed bills, and if lawmakers do come back, advocates are going to be pressing them to take up the 17-year-old issue, too.
“This absolutely stands out as the top bad policy for this legislative session,” Teny O. Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, said yesterday.
When lawmakers passed the new law as a cost-cutting measure, Rhode Island joined nine other states that try youths as adults on all criminal charges starting at age 17. Three more states try youths as adults starting at age 16. The advocates noted yesterday that one of those states, Connecticut, reversed that policy and moved the age of majority back up to 18 last week, although the law change does not take effect until 2010.
Some states have put in place protections for those youths, such as shielding their criminal records from public disclosure. Rhode Island’s law has no such protections. Minors at the Adult Correctional Institutions are housed in protective custody, which offers the prison’s highest level of security and supervision, but that policy decision is not mandated by law and could change at any time.
The advocates say the 17-year-olds belong at the Training School, where they have access to a broader menu of programs and services designed specifically for youths.
Department of Corrections spokesman Kenneth Findlay said the ACI has provided services for youths for years because, even prior to July 1, the prison was home to a handful of youths who had been waived out of the juvenile justice system because of the seriousness of their crimes. The department employs a child psychologist, a dietitian who specializes in youths’ nutritional needs, and a school social worker. The department provides education for young inmates — as well as high-school equivalency classes for older inmates who choose to enroll. And it provides special-education services through age 21 to youths who need those services, as state law requires.
But Burke Bryant pointed out that the Training School had a full high-school program, including courses in health, art and physical education and vocational programs in culinary arts and computer applications.
“In no way could anything in the way of a GED program compare to the full-fledged education program at the Training School,” she said.
Two new Training School buildings are under construction, scheduled to open this year. The advocates said yesterday that it defied common sense to spend a projected $73 million in taxpayer money on the facility while removing a significant portion of the population it will serve.
But Tom Bohan, executive director of the state Department of Children, Youth and Families, said the Training School population was not expected to dip far below capacity because of the new law. The new law will simply ease the space crunch, Bohan said yesterday.
There are currently 205 youths at the Training School. The two new buildings together will be able to hold just 148 youths, so DCYF had decided to allow two of the old buildings, which together house up to 59 people, to remain open.
The department is projecting that the Training School population will decrease by 30 to 50 youths by the end of this year as a result of the new law, which also prevents Family Court judges from sentencing youths to the Training School past age 19. (Before July 1, the law allowed sentences to extend through age 21.)
“I think it will allow us to move from what has been a chronically overcrowded situation in the Training School into one in which we don’t have that kind of a condition,” Bohan said.
egudrais@projo.com
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