Tennessee lawmakers on Tuesday continued their review of the Department of Children’s Services, where resources have been stretched to the breaking point and children are sleeping on office floors or languishing in juvenile detention centers because there are no other places to put them.
“We are kind of full up on our bed situation, so we are hopeful the committee will make recommendations to help us alleviate the capacity and available bed situation,” Children’s Services Commissioner Margie Quinn, on the job for a little less than two months, told the bipartisan panel of lawmakers.
The panel, formally known as the Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Juvenile Justice, is charged with weighing legislative and budget changes to programs serving children who have been deemed delinquent by a judge. The panel is not examining the crisis in care for children who have been taken into state custody after being abused or neglected.
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A recent investigation by The Tennessean newspaper found more than 600 children taken into custody after allegations of abuse or neglect had spent multiple nights sleeping on office floors or in other makeshift shelters over a five-month period this year, a circumstance that Quinn acknowledged has been traumatizing.
The state’s shortage of beds for children found delinquent is equally dire. There’s a need for at least 180 beds to house teenage boys, but Wilder Youth Development Center, the state’s lockup for children who have committed crimes, has just 120 available, said state Sen. Page Walley, R-Bolivar, who is co-chair of the committee.
“The challenge is we don’t have 180-190 beds,” he said. “We need to find them.”
Without space available at Wilder, delinquent youth remain in county lockups intended only for short-term stays.
Last month, a panel of judges told the committee those county detention facilities are full and described the state’s juvenile justice system at “near collapse.”
Options lawmakers weighed Tuesday included reopening a pair of shuttered dorms within Wilder, adding more than 20 additional beds, repurposing former nursing homes or shuttered rural hospitals, utilizing existing state-owned buildings or constructing new facilities.
Ernst and Young, an outside consulting firm hired by the state, is studying possible options, Quinn said. Space, however, is only part of the problem.
“We know we can’t put any more youth (in Wilder) until we hire staff,” Quinn said. Salaries for youth development officers, however, start at just $22,000 annually.
“As you can imagine, we are not competitive in that area until we can raise compensation,” said Quinn, who told lawmakers she’d like to see that salary doubled.
Wilder, in rural Fayette County, has other challenges, too.
A report released in April by Disability Rights Tennessee and Youth Law Center found multiple instances of physical and sexual abuse by guards. More than 90% of youth at Wilder are Black, and 80% have learning disabilities but were provided few meaningful services, the report said.
“It would seem the Department of Children’s Services has simply given up” on trying to rehabilitate the youth inside, the report said, concluding that the department is “wasting taxpayer dollars by warehousing youth.”
Read more at TennesseeLookout.com.