Thursday, February 26, 2004

Youth Center lawsuit settled

By DAVID HENCH, Portland Press Herald Writer

The state will pay $600,000 to settle a lawsuit by a former resident of the Maine Youth Center whose charges of excessive restraint and isolation led to a management shake-up in Maine's juvenile corrections system.

A resident identified in court papers as Michael T. sued state corrections officials and workers at the former Maine Youth Center, saying that as a teenager there during the 1990s he was physically abused, tied down in restraints for as long as 49 hours and placed in solitary confinement for 87 days.

A psychiatrist said the adolescent's mistreatment in what was then the state's only youth detention facility probably made him behave worse.

"I certainly feel like what we did to this kid was incredibly destructive," said Sen. Ethan Strimling, D-Portland, co-chairman of the Legislature's Criminal Justice Committee. "I hope his family feels this will be adequate to help him repair some of the damage."

Conditions have improved significantly at the Long Creek Youth Development Center, previously the Maine Youth Center, and the settlement will likely help the facility continue improving, say observers.

"With this suit settled, it puts behind us a part of the past that needed very much to be put behind us so we can really concentrate on continuing to make gains in the future," said Daniel Reardon, a longtime volunteer at the center and chairman of the Long Creek Board of Visitors, which advocates for Youth Center residents.

The lawsuit, filed last fall, exposed abuses and showed that managers who approved the mistreatment continued to oversee the facility. That prompted Gov. John Baldacci to order an independent investigation of practices at both of the state's youth detention facilities, Long Creek in South Portland and the Mountain View Youth Development Center in Charleston.

Three top managers accused in the lawsuit of approving restraint and confinement that exceeded the facility's own policies continued to work at the center until the state review began. Now, two of them - Superintendent Lars Olsen and senior psychologist Barbara Heath - have transferred to assignments in the Department of Corrections not associated with juvenile justice. The third, Deputy Superintendent Richard Lancaster, still works at the South Portland facility.

The investigations into the state's juvenile facilities showed that significant improvements have been made since the 1990s and that isolation and restraint are now used less than the national average. But observers say it also raised concerns about how fragile those gains may be.

The report showed that even as the investigators were conducting their inquiry at the end of 2003, the staff at the Charleston facility was isolating residents in the special management unit for as long as 13 days without getting required approval from the department's associate commis- sioner.

Earlier in the year, isolations lasted as long as 27 days without appropriate approvals.

Michael T., who is 22 today and lives in Portland, was 13 when he arrived at the Maine Youth Center. He was detained there five times over the next four years.

Strimling said the lawsuit helped expose practices that should never be repeated.

"Above and beyond the settlement itself and what it means to that family, that family and Michael T. can feel they have shed light on something that was desperately in the dark," Strimling said. "It was a very significant factor in our being able to understand the problems at the Youth Center and make some very important changes."

The settlement calls for an immediate payment of $220,000 and then monthly payments of $850 for the next 20 years. At the end of that period, in 2024, the state will pay the plaintiff another $210,000.

The settlement also pays a $32,000 debt to MaineCare, the state's Medicaid program, which covered treatment of what the lawsuit said were injuries Michael T. developed as a result his abuse in custody. It also covers care he received in 1998 and 1999 at a behavioral treatment facility in Georgia.

The settlement was reached last week but dismissal of the lawsuit did not take effect until Wednesday.

The settlement bars both sides from commenting. Neither Michael T.'s lawyer, Edwin Chester, nor state officials would speak about the case. The settlement admits no wrongdoing by the state or the several people named in the lawsuit, calls the claims "doubtful and disputed," and says the state settled to avoid further litigation.

While people associated with the facility say they hope the settlement closes a painful chapter, it could lead other youths who feel they were mistreated to seek compensation.

The case has implications beyond the past practices of the Maine Youth Center, said Lisa Thurau-Gray, director of the New England Juvenile Defenders Center at Suffolk University in Boston.

"What's exciting and important about this case is that it got the state recognizing that it doesn't matter how beautiful your facility is if the people running it use an approach that harms children," she said. "I think this still raises the issue of what kind of monitoring will be done by the state, including outside people, to make sure this does not happen again."

The state is now giving juvenile defenders greater access to incarcerated youths, she said.

"If (Edwin) Chester hadn't been denied access to Michael, if he had access to Michael's records when he was in solitary confinement for 87 days, which is a violation of international human rights law," he might have intervened, she said. The center helped Chester sue by paying for expert witnesses, she said.

Reardon said the Youth Center - and now Long Creek - has come a long way in the nine years he has been associated with it.

"We clearly do have a treatment model we try to operate with," he said. "I believe by putting the past behind us we can really capitalize on it now. I think we're pretty close."

Staff Writer David Hench can be contacted at 791-6327 or at: dhench@pressherald.com

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