"You see a lot of people fighting," said one teen, who had been there for four months. "It's up to you and how you act. You're on the unit with a lot of different personalities, and you can't really control them."
Both 17-year-olds were "pending placement," meaning they have been found "responsible," the juvenile equivalent of guilty, and are awaiting transfer to a secure treatment facility.
Maryland has just one such facility, the Victor Cullen Academy in Western Maryland, and it can house up to 48 youths. Many times, youths are sent out of state to receive treatment, and placing them can take months. Meanwhile, they don't receive the treatment they have been ordered to get, because that's not what the justice center was designed to do.
"We would have planned it totally differently if we had known it would come to be used as a pending placement facility," Welch said.
DeVore said he has reduced the average length of stay for the pending-placement youths. When he arrived, he said, there were juveniles who had been at the justice center for more than one year. Now, he said, the average length of stay has dropped to 49 days.
Yet some youths linger; one interviewed March 31 by a juvenile justice monitor had been at the facility for more than nine months. On Friday, 48 of the 125 youths there were pending placement. The longest-serving boy there this week had been there 204 days by the time he left Thursday.
Marlana Valdez, the state's juvenile justice monitor, recommended a population cap of 48 in her latest report. She wrote that pending-placement youths should immediately be moved to larger, more treatment-based facilities, such as the Charles H. Hickey School in Baltimore County. DeVore said he is not willing to do that, noting that Hickey, which was a troubled facility when he arrived, "has been doing extraordinarily well."
Instead, DeVore said he hopes to begin thinning the justice center's population, by as much as 20 percent, by releasing more youths who are awaiting trial. To do that safely, he said, he is using a new "risk-assessment instrument" developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
A solution to the pending-placement problem could be years away. The capital improvement plan for the DJS calls for four, 48-bed secure facilities, including one in Baltimore.
