Report: Fix Ohio’s youth prisons

Children are not being educated or rehabilitated, the report said.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio’s youth prisons are overcrowded and understaffed and fail to educate children behind bars or keep them safe, according to a new report that found widespread problems in the system serving about 1,700 youths.

Excessive use of force is common and ingrained in the operations of the Department of Youth Services, according to the report by consultant Fred Cohen released Monday. The report found that guards regularly place children in solitary confinement for inappropriately long periods of time.

Such confinement “is unconstitutional on its face” and should cease immediately, the report concluded.

At one center, the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility in southern Ohio, fear is “an all-consuming fire,” the report said.

There, “youth fear other youth, youth fear staff, and staff fear youth,” the report said.

Cohen’s report also found that the department’s eight detention centers have no functioning mental health program and a school system in disarray.

The report also said guards learn a “we-they” attitude from the time they start working in the system. The guards function more like police officers or prison guards than members of a team trying to rehabilitate children, the report said.

Youths’ “physical and psychological well-being is at risk and often damaged at the present time,” the report concluded. “This environment, in turn, dramatically impedes whatever efforts are made to provide treatment and programs.”

The system, with about 770 guards, is understaffed by at least 188 guards, the report said.

The state hired Cohen to investigate after attorneys representing imprisoned youth sought to expand an existing 2004 civil rights lawsuit over conditions in the juvenile centers.

Youth Services director Tom Stickrath says he agrees with the report’s findings and is pushing for major changes.

“I don’t want to just look at improving the footprint that we have. I don’t want to take what we’re doing today and only do it better,” Stickrath said Monday. “There’s an opportunity to really change the landscape upfront.”