Department Of Juvenile

When it comes to juvenile justice reforms, Gov. Martin O'Malley isn't just talking the talk. His proposed infusion of $21 million into the beleaguered state Department of Juvenile Services proves that he's serious about trying to improve the agency. He's putting precious dollars where they can make a difference in young people's lives. Supplemental budget appropriations, which this is, have been used in the past to fill budget needs that didn't make the chief executive's A-list or to fund new programs or to dole out pork.

Opening the state's first new residential treatment facility for juvenile offenders in years will cost about twice as much as officials first estimated. The Victor Cullen Academy in Frederick County, due to open July 1 on the site of a defunct privately run facility, will cost the state about $11.2 million in renovations, plus $5.8 million to run it for the next year - well over the $6.8 million the legislature approved for the project this spring, officials said yesterday. The state Board of Public Works approved a contract yesterday for roofing repairs that are part of the renovation, despite reservations from Treasurer Nancy K. Kopp and Comptroller Peter Franchot about the reliability of cost estimates for the project.

The superintendent of a state-run juvenile jail in Prince George's County lost his job yesterday, three weeks after the discovery that a teen-ager at the facility became pregnant by a counselor assigned to guard her, officials said.Carlton Richardson, who had run the Cheltenham Youth Center for three years, was demoted and transferred to headquarters of the state Department of Juvenile Justice, said Bob Kannenberg, spokesman for the agency."The young lady and the staff member had been having relations while she was involved in a work detail at the school on the grounds," Kannenberg said.

Closing boot camp, firing some officials doesn't go far enoughI am taking this opportunity to com-mend The Sun for its series on Maryland's juvenile hoot camps (Dec. 5-8). How sad for the state of Maryland that it took public disclosure before any action was taken.I am outraged by top officials who claim that they were either "misled" or thought rcports of abuse and violence were "isolated" incidents. My question is: Why didn't they know?I find it interesting that neither the governor nor the lieutenant governor was available for comment for a week.

In the wake of a string of security lapses and incidents of abuse at state juvenile justice facilities, Gov. Parris N. Glendening is dispatching a team of management experts to improve the troubled Department of Juvenile Justice.Mike Morrill, Glendening's chief press spokesman, said the governor and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend decided to send in the team after hearing "a few little rumblings" about problems in the department.The experts -- known unofficially in state government circles as a "SWAT team" -- will spend an estimated two to four months assessing the operations and procedures of the department, Morrill said.

A state appellate court has ruled that a Carroll circuit judge should have explained why he did not follow the recommendation of juvenile authorities last year when he waived a 16-year-old boy to adult court. The Westminster teen-ager was charged with selling a fatal overdose of heroin to a schoolmate.In its unpublished 27-page decision, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded the case of Kristopher Olenginski, now 17, saying that the court "must carefully consider the recommendation of the [Department of Juvenile Justice]

Under pressure for a series of security breaches -- including the rape of a staff member -- the company operating two Maryland juvenile jails has responded by firing a $7-an-hour dishwasher who was assigned guard duty because of a staff shortage.The dishwasher, Dwane Williams, 38, and others say he was fired to divert attention to staff shortages that have forced numerous employees at the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School to work double shifts and have left some shifts uncovered.Williams said that he had not been disciplined since he began work there almost a year ago and that his supervisor told him as she fired him that he had been an "outstanding" employee.

The executive director of the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School, a state juvenile institution in Baltimore County, was replaced yesterday as officials announced more than $900,000 in security enhancements to increase safety.Norman Townsel Jr. took over the facility in June, arriving the day after one of its nurses was raped in a clinic there. Three days after Townsel arrived, two juveniles escaped by kicking out a window screen. But state officials said yesterday the incidents were not the reason Townsel was removed.

A 15-year-old boy was charged yesterday with setting off fireworks last week in the North Carroll High School gym, according to the state fire marshal's office.The incident occurred about 2: 30 p.m. Friday, when Principal Gary Dunkleberger reportedly discovered the student discharging small fireworks in the gym, officials said.Deputy fire marshals interviewed the boy at the school in Hampstead yesterday, according to the incident report. No injuries or damage were reported.The boy, who was not identified because of his age, was suspended from school and released to his parents, a spokesman for the state fire marshal said.

An 18-year-old resident of the Charles H. Hickey School has been charged with committing a "perverted sexual practice" with his younger roommate at the facility, and the incident is being investigated by the Maryland State Police and the Department of Juvenile Justice.The charges stem from an incident Aug. 19 in Douglas Hall on the Cub Hill campus, according to officials at the school and documents filed in Baltimore County's district court. Jesse Allen Adkins, 18, and his 15-year-old roommate were locked in their room and began playing a kind of "truth or dare" game that turned sexual, according to charging documents.

Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold is asking state officials to step up their watch on a facility for troubled youths after a firefighter who responded to a false alarm was hit in the face with a plastic pipe - the latest of hundreds of police and fire calls there. "We want to make sure these facilities are held accountable," Leopold said Tuesday. He said he was troubled by the assault on a firefighter responding to an intentional false alarm at the shelter and group home outside Annapolis, and believed the overall number of police and fire calls there - more than 500 in about three and a half years - was "inordinate."

In May 2005, then-Mayor Martin O'Malley announced a 10-point plan to reform Maryland's juvenile justice system. He told Marylanders that "the community deserves juvenile justice that is responsive, effective and accountable to the public." Now, more than four years later and almost three years into his term as governor, the juvenile justice system in Maryland remains, as it was described in the O'Malley transition report, dangerously dysfunctional. Two years ago, Mr. O'Malley appointed Connecticut's juvenile justice director, Donald W. DeVore, to head Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services.

Maryland lawmakers said Tuesday that they plan fall hearings on the state Department of Juvenile Services in response to recent reports of problems at its highest-security treatment facility and concerns that the system is not equipped to deal with violent young offenders. Sen. Brian E. Frosh, the Montgomery County Democrat who chairs the Judicial Proceedings Committee, said he had been considering such a hearing for months, but "the revelations recently make it timely and urgent." A date had not been set. The chairman of the counterpart committee in the House of Delegates also is laying the groundwork for a review.

The young offenders sent to the Victor Cullen Center, the state's only locked facility for teenage boys convicted of crimes, might be too violent for the workers there to handle, Maryland's juvenile services watchdog said Monday in a report. The Maryland attorney general's Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit questioned whether Victor Cullen is secure enough - citing three escapes in two years, including one on May 27 in which several workers were seriously injured - and raised concerns about employee levels and training, and whether the treatment program used there is effective.

State officials promoted new GPS technology last year as a way to constantly monitor juvenile offenders, enabling the state to know the exact location of troubled youths and help keep communities and victims safe. But the shooting of a 5-year-old girl, caught in the crossfire as two juvenile offenders argued July 2, has cast attention on the limitations of the devices. Even though the person suspected in the shooting, a 17-year-old with a long juvenile record, was wearing a monitoring unit on his leg, officials did not know his whereabouts in the lead-up to the shooting and its aftermath.

Lamont Davis, the 17-year-old arrested and charged as an adult in the shooting of 5-year-old Raven Wyatt, should never have been on the streets. He had been arrested 15 times since he was 10, and he had been committed to the custody of the Department of Juvenile Services since February 2008, during which time he was arrested and charged in four separate incidents. Yet in June, a juvenile court judge let him out of the secure detention facility where he had been held after his last arrest in April for assaulting and robbing a teenage girl.

The Victor Cullen Center is Maryland's answer to big, noisy and unsafe juvenile treatment facilities. It is the model on which the state is planning a network of small, secure, regional centers for troubled youths who can't be served in their neighborhoods. But the Frederick County facility remains a work in progress as state officials continue to find the right mix of education opportunities, skills training and after-care programming. Rearrest of program participants is not uncommon, but most have not been convicted, and that's some measure of progress.

The five teens, brought from city juvenile detention facilities to participate in a panel discussion yesterday, talked about recognizing the bad choices they had made and how they wanted to better themselves. But asked whether they felt safe in their neighborhoods, their answers showed just how tenuous staying on the right path can be. "For me, safe or not safe, it doesn't matter because things can go bad in a second," said one of the teens, who added that he once made $850 a week on the streets slinging drugs.

Gov. Martin O'Malley will push to allow the Department of Juvenile Services to share information about children in its care with other social agencies - something now prohibited by state law. The governor's bill, which he plans to announce today, would lift the parental consent requirement that hampers even simple communication. For example, when a youth is arrested, Juvenile Services workers cannot make a phone call to social services workers to see whether the child is in foster care.

The 16-year-old boy sat quietly in the Central Booking courtroom yesterday, surrounded by young adults and middle-aged men, his standard-issue gray sweat shirt and khaki pants covered in writing, the kind of doodles someone his age might scrawl on a notebook in a classroom. Jerome Williams was ordered held without bail yesterday in the killing of former City Councilman Kenneth N. Harris Sr. The charges against the teenager - who was 15 at the time of the killing in September - include first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder, armed robbery and use of a handgun in a violent crime.