D.C. taxpayers are being charged yearly rates of up to $178,850 each to house some of the city’s teenage criminals in sites scattered around the country, The Examiner has learned.
The city has spent about $14.8 million since January 2008 to farm out hundreds of young offenders to private detention centers.
Dozens of them are shipped to clinics from Colorado to Florida. The highest rate to hold the youths is $490 a day — which projects to $178,850 per year, or more than three times the cost of a year at Yale University.
Other facilities charge the city between $115 a day and $375 a day to hold the youths, a rate that reaches more than six figures per offender per year at most of the centers.
The teens frequently escape, and there have been abuse charges leveled at staff of several of the centers.
One hundred thirty-two young offenders are currently in the pricey clinics. That’s about one of every five children in the city’s custody, Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services executive David Muhammad told The Examiner in an e-mail.
“DYRS is working to reduce that percentage even more,” he said. “The challenges have been the lack of local resources.”
Among the most expensive is the Jefferson Trail Treatment Center in Charlottesville, Va., the $490-per-day clinic. Currently, a teenage girl is being treated there and she’s expected to be released within a month, Muhammad said.
About 7 percent of the offenders have escaped from the far-flung facilities, agency spokesman Reggie Sanders said.
On May 30, four D.C. teens broke out of the Pines Residential Treatment Center in Norfolk, Va. One is still at large.
The Pines was singled out in a 2006 report by the Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, which detailed dozens of inmate brawls and abuse allegations.
Other clinics where D.C. youth are held have made news.
In 2007, for instance, the Florida inspector general found that a guard at the Manatee Palms Youth Service in Bradenton, Fla., choked teens in his care. That same year, the clinic was fined by Florida regulators, who called it “a clear and present danger to the public health and safety.”
In July 2008, Alabama authorities charged a 38-year-old staffer at Laurel Oaks Behavorial Health Center with raping a teenage girl at the clinic.
Officials at the three clinics declined comment.
“I believe the youth are particularly vulnerable because they’re so far away,” said D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells, D-Ward 6. “We’re very much dependent on the host state providing the protections for our kids.”
