The anguished cries of isolated children

She was already in trouble and had run out of chances. Juvenile court sent her to a residential facility, which her mother thought would be good for her.

Beatriz Jimenez, 16, testified this week at a hearing before Philadelphia City Council about her experience at the institution where she was meant to get her life on track. But there was no formal school, nor were there teachers or even books. But she did find worms in her food.

And, like so many of her cohort, she found violence.

Beatriz, called Lilly by her friends, recalled being thrown on the ground, body-slammed, and intentionally burned with a flatiron, all at the hands of facility staff. She was just thirteen.

“[My mother] thought I would be safe,” Lilly recalled. “She didn’t realize I would be abused, strip-searched, mistreated, or that I wouldn’t be able to continue my education.”

Hid Mayes told council his program had a classroom, but one day he was caught using social media and called out into the hallway by guards, one of whom restrained him as another punched him to punish him.

A separate assault from a guard left Hid with a split lip and broken ribs, and he spent a week in solitary confinement. He never told anyone about these assaults because he didn’t think he would be believed and guards bribed him with snacks to keep quiet.

Shocking footage played at the hearing shows the horrifying abuse. [WARNING: The footage is deeply disturbing]

Not that this should come as a great surprise, considering what we already knew about the deeply flawed system that killed David Hess, who was 17, at the now shuttered Wordsworth Academy.

Hess was choked to death by staff in a struggle over an iPod in October 2016. His death was followed by reports of the arrest of a former staffer charged with sexually assaulting three girls who were in the same program. 

The spring following Hess’s death, as the media exposed more details about the harrowing conditions at Wordsworth, PCCY called for hearings to ensure the safety of children placed in residential treatment centers.

At any given time, about 900 of Philadelphia’s most vulnerable children and youth live in distant institutional facilities outside of city limits, at an approximate cost of $119,000 a year per child.

At best, distant residential institutions can stabilize youth temporarily within the confines of the placement, but do not adequately prepare youth for return to their communities, or to any community, setting them up to fail upon return. At their worst, they do life-altering harm to youth who are already vulnerable and at-risk.

PCCY is advocating for a new set of principles to drive the City’s approach to placement of any youth in a residential facility including:

• A high-quality, local continuum of care to support our youth in the least restrictive settings and closer to their communities;
  
• A theory of practice that includes trauma-informed models of care; and
  
• Preparation for return to the community from placement, including permanent connections to supportive adults, meaningful educational programming, and individualized treatment.

PCCY is a leading member of a growing coalition of children’s advocates that is pushing for more progressive strategies that enable children to remain connected to their families and receive the education, health care, and healing supports they need to return home ready for a lifetime of success.  

To be sure, the Department of Human Services has reduced the number of youth who are placed in large facilities and group homes, from 20% of foster youth in 2013 to 12.4% of foster youth in 2017. Through pretrial diversion programs, the District Attorney’s Office, working with the Defender Association, Juvenile Probation, and the School District, has cut in half the number of youth brought to court for criminal acts since 2012, shrinking from 5,770 to 2,737 in 2016.

“Fewer kids are in placement than once was,” said Councilwoman Helen Gym, who convened the hearing. “That decline was not good enough for David Hess, who was murdered at Wordsworth. That decline was not good enough for the dozens of young women sexually assaulted by staff at Wordsworth.”

These reductions, however, do demonstrate that our city agencies have the capacity to improve the outcomes of the youth under its care. But the experiences of our youth in residential placements show us that there is much more to be done.