Shift of Teen Inmates A Concept Doomed to Fail? (Free Article)

Ed Gavin, yet another of the veteran correction-system professionals to see major problems with the de Blasio administration’s plan to transfer 140 16- and 17-year-old inmates from city jails to a pair of juvenile centers in The Bronx and Brooklyn, is methodically going through the logistical and personnel problems it would present if implemented.

“First of all, the facilities are not fortified,” he said between courses at Forlini’s, the venerable restaurant behind the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, during a June 12 interview. “They don’t have steel sinks, cell doors that lock in, concrete walls,” as do the jails at Rikers Island.

Why does this matter? Porcelain sinks of the kind used in the two juvenile centers, Horizon in The Bronx and Crossroads in Brooklyn, could wind up inadvertently arming the often-resourceful and violent teens now being held at Rikers, he explained.

“They break the porcelain and use it as a weapon,” Mr. Gavin said. “They have sheetrock that they can break through into the next cell.”

‘No Probe Teams or Staging Areas’

Then there are the personnel issues and the facilities that allow correction officers to quickly respond when significant disturbances erupt in the jails. “We also don’t have what in the Department of Correction they call a probe team,” said Mr. Gavin, who during his quarter century in the Correction Department served as the commanding officer of its equivalent of COMPSTAT, and was inclined to wander the jails to see how units and officers were actually functioning rather than being guided purely by statistics. “And they don’t have a staging area where you could go to get everything you need for an emergency response.”

He continued, “The other thing they don’t have [in the juvenile centers] is an effective classification system. The inmates have to be classified by the severity of their charges, past and present gang affiliations, behavior while in custody.”

And, he said, the juvenile centers under the control of the Administration for Children’s Services may find themselves in for rude awakenings when those younger detainees are transferred, which is scheduled to occur by Oct. 1. The youthful offenders now housed at Horizon and Crossroads are referred to as residents; Mr. Gavin contended, “The people that have graduated to gladiator school, that have committed heinous crimes, they should be called inmates.”

He is seated alongside Sidney Schwartzbaum, a longtime friend and colleague who until his retirement in 2016 spent nearly two decades as president of the Assistant Deputy Wardens/Deputy Wardens Association. Under Mr. Schwartzbaum’s successor, Faisal Zouhbi, the union has joined with the Correction Officers Benevolent Association and the Correction Captains Association in suing to block the transfer, and early this month got a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice to grant a temporary restraining order.

The lawsuit contends that the change would amount to “union-busting,” with correction officers being asked to assume roles now handled by Juvenile Counselors while doing out-of-title work for which they are not suited by either training or temperament.

City officials counter that no one’s job will be usurped; in fact ACS Commissioner David Hansell has said that the hiring of 600 people for a new job of Youth Development Specialist was an acknowledgement that the work performed by Juvenile Counselors did not reflect “the fact that the juvenile-justice system has changed dramatically” over the past half-century.

The Youth Development Specialists, 200 of whom will be brought on by the fall, will be better paid than the Juvenile Counselors, with a starting salary of $45,000 that’s an improvement of more than $7,500, and maximum pay set at $59,000. That top salary is a long way from the $80,788 Correction Officers reach after 5 ½ years; among the problems cited by Mr. Gavin is that ACS has yet to delineate what role COs would be playing at the juvenile facilities if the suit by the correction unions was unsuccessful.

Contracts Specific on Duties

And he wouldn’t bet on that, he said, given that there is a written description of the job of Correction Officer in union contracts that does not contemplate employees working in the different sort of environment found in the juvenile centers. The city nearly a quarter-century ago was able to require Firefighters to take on medical duties—with a relatively small salary bump and a large amount of grumbling in the ranks—because Uniformed Firefighters Association delegates in 1989 rejected a tentative contract reached by their leadership, not realizing that forcing the stalemate into arbitration would put at risk several key non-wage portions of their contract, including the written description of the duties they could be asked to perform.

Having retained that protection, the correction unions were able to stand on the prescribed duties in their court brief, while noting the difficulty of various employee groups being asked to adapt to duties for which they hadn’t been trained.

“You can’t create a hybrid correction officer—a juvenile counselor and a correction officer,” Mr. Gavin said. “It’s two different philosophies, and they’re so far opposed. The Juvenile Counselor is like a social worker, the Correction Officer is a law-enforcement officer who carries a weapon and has the power of arrest.”

Unlike Mr. Schwartzbaum and his fellow jail-union leaders, Elias Husamudeen of COBA and Patrick Ferraiuolo of the Captains union, Mr. Gavin has seen both sides of the issue over his career. After he retired from the Correction Department as a Warden known for speaking out against the political games that were played by top management during both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, in 2006 he became an Investigative Consultant Manager at ACS.

Not There to Make Friends

A certified Child Protective Specialist who has also worked as a private investigator specializing in finding lost or runaway children, especially those who were victims of human trafficking, Mr. Gavin wasn’t hesitant to ruffle feathers within the agency rather than observe the code of silence that too often prevailed. At one point, he said, he discovered that a Juvenile Counselor working at Crossroads in Brooklyn had rigged a cell phone to take pictures of women—from teen residents to staffers—using a bathroom at the facility. He said he found out that workers there knew of the installation but were reluctant to turn in a colleague. Mr. Gavin had no such qualms: he said he went across the street to the 73rd Precinct, spoke to a supervising Detective there, and had the man arrested.

Late in 2011 he was promoted to Acting Chief of Staff by Oliver Pu-Folkes, the Associate Commissioner of ACS who was in charge of the Division of Youth and Family Justice. A few months later, Mr. Gavin left the agency to do private investigations, generally under contract to government agencies, related to child-abuse and human-trafficking allegations.

In discussing the potential dangers of placing juvenile inmates into youth-offender homes without adequate safety precautions, he focused on an incident that occurred a few months after he left ACS. In May 2012, an ACS security officer, Sgt. Joseph Forrester, was brutally attacked by six teen residents at Horizon Juvenile Center in The Bronx who were angered that they weren’t getting better-quality food and larger portions.

Evidence that it was a premeditated assault, Mr. Gavin said, could be found in the Vaseline that the residents had smeared over the security cameras prior to the incident to make it difficult to identify them. Mr. Forrester had responded upon learning that one resident had been punching a Juvenile Counselor in the stomach. When he tried to intervene, he was hit in the head with a chair thrown by one resident and struck in the back by a chair heaved by another, then repeatedly punched by six youths, all between the ages of 14 and 16. By the time paramedics arrived, Mr. Gavin recalled, Sergeant Forrester was bleeding heavily and experiencing convulsions, and had to be taken as an in-patient to Lincoln Hospital to have his injuries treated.

“He gets beaten to within an inch of his life,” he said.

‘Must Control Behavior’

“My views have evolved” over more than three decades in law-enforcement jobs, said the 58-year-old ex-Warden. “I believe that children are redeemable. But once you start stabbing someone, shooting someone, killing someone, your behavior has to be controlled. We have to be prepared to deal with you if and when you act out. You can’t apply social-work philosophies to criminal-justice problems.”

One concern he has is that ACS has offered few specifics as to how Correction Officers are going to be deployed in the two juvenile centers. A spokeswoman for the agency said it could not respond to the issues raised by Mr.Gavin because of litigation regarding Raise the Age. A source familiar with the project said, however, that renovations were being made at both facilities, including the use of stronger sheetrock and the upgrading of bedroom doors and fixtures.

To his knowledge, Mr. Gavin said, “These COs aren’t going to be given batons” because arming them in that fashion would make the facilities seem too much like jails. The other side of that coin, he pointed out, was that this could embolden residents, particularly those whose misbehavior had been severe enough to originally get them sent to Rikers.

“If these kids think it’s gonna be a cakewalk when they come in and can act however they want, that’s exactly what they’re going to do,” he said. “These kids are gonna wreak havoc; some of them like to destroy property.”

And whatever violence erupted, he said, would take a toll on the physical plant as well as on the employees and residents who would be the human targets. “You have to have support services—you have to have mechanics and engineers available to fix things,” Mr. Gavin said. “When I was there as Acting [Chief of Staff at ACS], they didn’t have anything like that, and there wasn’t any sense of urgency” about making those provisions.

Ran Adolescent Jail

He noted that since he left ACS early in 2012, he has not looked at either of the juvenile centers to see whether changes in their design might make them better able to withstand the destruction that some youths are capable of inflicted. But one thing that doesn’t change, Mr. Gavin said, is the propensity that adolescents have for doing damage, something he first witnessed at close quarters fresh out of the Correction Academy in 1982 as a rookie CO assigned to the Adolescent Reception and Detention Center—the primary jail for teens at Rikers—and then, in the mid-1990s, as an Assistant Deputy Warden serving as tour commander for ARDC.

When he began in that facility 36 years ago, “it was one of the most-violent jails in the United States. We would literally mop up blood from the floors every day.”

And that was in a jail where necessary precautions were taken to deal with violent outbursts. When he last saw Horizon and Crossroads, Mr. Gavin said, “The facilities were not designed to withstand the abuse that older children are able to inflict. Those facilities are not designed for maximum security.”

He also has a jurisdictional concern: where the jails are overseen by a state correctional body, the juvenile centers are governed by the state Office of Children and Family Services. He said he was surprised that the state had not been involved in the discussions that produced the decision to move the 16- and 17-year-olds out of penal facilities as part of the Raise the Age law. Then again, given the frosty relations between Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, it almost seems inevitable that the state will not intervene until some problem erupts that will give the Governor a chance to blame the Mayor for poor planning.

Whatever logic exists in believing that conditions at Rikers make rehabilitation within its walls a tough goal to achieve, Mr. Gavin said, “You must control to be able to rehabilitate.” He agrees with the jail-union leaders that the Correction Department’s scrapping of the use of punitive segregation to deal with violent inmates has taken away the best deterrent staff had when it came to curbing bad behavior, and questioned whether the change of scenery would make a difference for those adolescent inmates when it came to eventually moving them out of the system in better condition to adapt to society than when they entered it.

Flaws in ACS Model

“I don’t think the ACS model is going to be able to do that,” he said. One reason, he said, is that ACS is creating an ombudsman’s position to deal with complaints by residents about their treatment. This, he argued, would undermine officers’ disciplinary authority: “If a correction officer says boo to one of the residents, they’re gonna run right to the ombudsman.”

He didn’t envision the Youth Development Specialists, who will be represented by Local 371 of District Council 37, being involved with the “custodian work” of keeping residents in line. “But it doesn’t make sense to put Correction Officers in charge in a facility that isn’t fortified, either,” Mr. Gavin said. “The answer is build a correction facility and staff it with COs and let the [inmates] get counseling.”

What also troubles him, he said, is that the plan is to move a more-violence-prone population into the juvenile centers without taking necessary precautions despite the reality that “de Blasio and company can’t even keep the peace at the facilities they’re using now.”

The only source of comfort he has, Mr. Gavin said, rests in the belief that the unions will prevail in their lawsuit against the transfers because the conditions and responsibilities Correction Officers would have to handle violate the contractual guarantees regarding what their job duties entail.

“This violates civil-service laws,” Mr. Schwartzbaum said. He noted that Mr. Husamudeen recently remarked on the irony of having Correction Officers deployed in the juvenile centers after the courts decided during a lawsuit brought by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara against the jail system that resulted in a consent decree that “we weren’t suited to handling 16- and 17-year-olds, that they need a more-therapeutic environment.”

He continued, “When you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Mr. Gavin made clear that his reservations rest partly in his belief that based on the administration’s policies in the jails, Mr. de Blasio doesn’t care about correction officers’ well-being, “and I don’t think he cares about the juveniles if he’s ready to put them into this kind of situation.”

‘More Than They Can Chew’

Asked about one major difference: that the head of ACS, Mr. Hansell, has gotten far-better marks for his stewardship of the agency than the Correction Commissioner for much of Mr. de Blasio’s tenure, Joseph Ponte, Mr. Gavin conceded the point. But he said of Mr. Hansell, “I think he’s a fantastic guy and he’s doing a tremendous job. But he’s following the orders of the Mayor on this. I just think it’s a systemic problem and they’re biting off more than they can chew.”

And, he noted, the Mayor’s two most-innovative achievements have been the expansion of pre-kindergarten classes and his Vision Zero program to reduce traffic fatalities.

“Where’s the Vision Zero for correction officers?” Mr. Gavin asked.

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