The best for 'bad boys'

For nearly 100 years, Missouri was among the states that warehoused trouble-making youths in so-called "training schools" that were essentially gulags for children.

The state founded a boys reformatory in 1889 at the eastern edge of a small town on the Missouri River. From a distance, the Boonville Training School for Boys resembled a small college campus with red brick dormitories. A closer look revealed barred windows and barbed wire.

Over the decades, whispers of beatings, rapes, murders and suicides slipped through the chain-link fence that surrounded as many as 650 boys at a time. Runaways, petty thieves and the mentally retarded were among the discarded youths being punished as "bad boys."

The training school is part of a shameful history that Missouri's Division of Youth Services has worked to dramatically reverse over the last two decades, said director Mark Steward.

Today, the state is considered a national model for juvenile corrections because of its emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The recent success has caught the attention of other states that want to mimic its methods. Over the last six months, state workers from Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and South Carolina have traveled here to see the difference. This week, an Illinois group will tour facilities in St. Louis.

The Missouri Division of Youth Services, or DYS, is charged with the care and treatment of about 1,300 youths currently committed to its custody by the state's 45 juvenile courts. From one central office in Jefferson City and five regional offices, the division operates programs ranging from outpatient treatment centers, secure residential institutions and an accredited school program. Residential programs cost the state about $40,000 to $53,000 per bed annually.

'Different in Missouri'

Mark Soler, president of the Youth Law Center, toured some Kansas City facilities in June and has high praise for the state's efforts.

The Youth Law Center is a nonprofit, public interest law office working to protect abused and at-risk children since 1978. The center, with offices in Washington and San Francisco, works nationally, focusing particularly upon the problems of children living in child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

"I've spent 25 years in this line of work, and I've gone into several hundred facilities in this country," Soler said. "But I could tell within five minutes of walking in that something was different in Missouri."

He saw children leading tours, talking and asking questions of visitors and being spoken to by their support staff like they were people of value. The result: He tells people who call his organization for advice to "go and see Missouri."

"They hold the children accountable for their crimes, but they don't focus on putting children behind bars, which is the case in other states," Soler said. "They keep the kids busy, show them how to respect and how to address their underlying problems."

In 2002, only 8 percent of Missouri's juveniles previously placed in state custody found themselves in an adult prison within three years of release. Other states have rates as high as 30 percent or more.

Missouri uses individual and group therapy to teach offenders to examine their troubled pasts and why they carry around so much anger, said Steward, the DYS director.

In 1970, DYS began to experiment with smaller, less prison-like programs. The first was the Sears Youth Center in Poplar Bluff, where Steward was its first counselor.

"We took the toughest kids out of Boonville and put them in an unsecured and unlocked-down facility -- and it worked very well," he said. It was designed as a place to live rather than just be confined.

The state was divided into five regions, so offenders could be housed within a relatively short distance of their families. That's less of a burden for visiting relatives. And DYS continued acquiring small sites, including school buildings and large houses, and turned them into group homes staffed by trained youth specialists.

In Cape Girardeau, the state purchased two houses in 1973 and 1974 to operate as group homes. In 1991, the boys and employees at those two homes were moved to the newly built Girardot Center for Youth and Families at 609 N. Middle.

Switching to smaller facilities was the state's turning point, Steward said. Staff members could better know each child's needs and background and provide individual attention.

Since becoming director in 1988, Steward has built support for DYS on both sides of the political table. Over several years of state budget cuts, DYS was less influenced than other departments because the Republican-dominated legislature and Gov. Bob Holden both support it, Steward said.

Missouri Supreme Court Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., a Cape Girardeau native, is also a strong supporter. At a recent DYS dinner and reception held in Cape Girardeau for visiting delegates from the Mississippi Division of Youth Services and juvenile court system, Limbaugh advised the group to never let party-line politics cloud their goal of helping children.

Mississippi's shame

The history of Boonville's facility is echoed by a June U.S. Department of Justice report on the Mississippi Division of Youth Services' current training schools at Raymond and Columbia. In the report, youths reported being punched, slapped, hogtied and shackled to poles in public as punishment by guards. Girls at the Columbia school said they were put naked for days at a time inside "the dark room" -- a locked, windowless isolation cell stripped of everything but a drain in the floor that served as a toilet.

Soler said he had read the report and agrees that Mississippi ranks among the worst in the nation for how it deals with juvenile corrections.

"Hawaii is having similar problems too," he said. "In Florida, there were three deaths of children inside a state facility within three months. Now there's a grand jury investigation. What Missouri shows the rest of the country is you don't have to treat children that way to get results. And you don't have to have a lot of high-priced, highly educated professionals staffing the facilities. Most of Missouri's staff only have bachelor's degrees. It's the training and attitude that make the difference."

Eighteen delegates from Mississippi's DYS and juvenile court system visited Southeast Missouri's youth correction facilities Tuesday, including the Girardot Center for Youth and Families in Cape Girardeau and Sears Youth Center in Poplar Bluff.

Willie Blackmon, director of Mississippi DYS, said his state has stumbling blocks to overcome.

"Funding is a primary issue," he said. "We've got to find ways to provide necessary services to children. Another of our challenges is dealing with staffing. We've got a 35 percent vacancy."

Mississippi wants to move in the direction Missouri took with juvenile corrections, said Thelma Brittain, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Involving families more is a goal, she said.

Cape Girardeau County juvenile officer Randall Rhodes worries that Missouri's recent budget cuts to juvenile court diversion funds, which paid for special education and therapy for offenders, could result in more children being placed in DYS custody. Over the last few years, juvenile courts lost hundreds of thousands of dollars for preventative programs.

Of the 1,200 juveniles referred to the Cape Girardeau County Detention Center so far in 2003, only 11 were committed to DYS custody -- the rest were released back to their parents, Rhodes said. Of those, most committed crimes against persons. In 51 drug court cases in 2002, only two children were placed in DYS.

There are waiting lists for places like the Girardot Center, so if the state wants to avoid building more group homes it needs to pay for that prevention, Rhodes said.

The 10-bed detention center in Cape Girardeau only houses boys between 12 and 16 years of age. A typical stay lasts less than seven days. But a criminal court process can lengthen a stay to about 35 to 45 days, Rhodes said.

The juvenile court practices of the past often failed to meet the humane standards of today, Rhodes said. Two years ago, a fellow juvenile office staff member found a court order from the 1940s in which a 9-year-old boy from Cape Girardeau was sentenced to the Boonville facility until he reached 21 years of age, Rhodes said. The child's crime: throwing a rock through a theater window.

"We would have never seen that boy inside these walls," Rhodes said inside the county's detention center. "He would have been referred back to his parents."

The Boonville Training School for Boys closed in 1983 and later was converted to an adult prison.

mwells@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 160