The Clark County Juvenile Detention Officers Guild recently passed a no-confidence vote against Juvenile Court Administrator Pat Escamilla and his management team claiming that low staffing has led to escalating safety concerns in the detention facility.
Administrators routinely staff the Robert L. Harris Juvenile Justice Center below the minimum standards and refuse to address the problem, the guild wrote in a letter to The Columbian.
Paul Coiteux, executive board member for the guild, said that the problems started in August, when the Clark County Juvenile Justice Department began a switch to the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. This model intends to decrease the reliance on detention centers and utilize alternatives such as home confinement or shelter care.
Two pods were closed and seven detention officers were moved to other positions through that initiative. The move dropped the number of detention officers to 23, Coiteux said.
But the detention officers aren’t seeing a decrease in the juvenile offenders coming through the doors, Coiteux said. The facility currently can safely hold about 30 juveniles, Coiteux said.
“They’ve been pretty packed lately,” he said.
He said the current model doesn’t take into account sick leave or vacation time for the employees at the 24-hour facility.
Officers have had to fill the gaps by putting in overtime. But for several months, Coiteux said, instead of filling gaps in staffing, administrators let the amount of staff working at any given time fall below the minimum standards.
When there are not enough officers working, shift supervisors are forced to place the facility on lockdown — keeping the juveniles in their cells without recreational opportunities — for entire shifts and even 24-hour periods, the guild wrote.
“Best practice programming and results of studies in our field are clear that not getting youths out of their cells does harm to their psychological and physiological growth,” the guild wrote in the letter.
Coiteux said that these kids get restless when they’re stuck in their cells, which has negative effects.
“It’s like if you were locked in your bedroom … after awhile, you get antsy and your anger level goes up. They need to get out of their rooms,” he said. “Numbers make a difference. Kids can see lack of staff, and they’re more likely to act out.”
Similarly, Coiteux said that when the juvenile offenders are in the recreation areas, detention officers get a chance to interact with them.
“We spend more time with the juveniles than anybody,” he said. “We don’t just sit in a glass area and tell them to move around. We’re in the pods with them, interacting with them, talking about life skills. We’re trying to help these kids stay out of jail.”
Administrators stopped understaffing the facility a few weeks ago when two juvenile offenders teamed up and allegedly tried to escape. One of the boys reportedly struck a detention officer with a chair while the other tried to break out a window, according to court records.
The guild said the current model has another problem: With fewer staff and space, officers can’t as easily separate people based on gang affiliation.
Also, boys and girls are being housed in the same pods. Though they’re still in separate cells, they are in close, and they spend recreational time together. This is in direct conflict with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the guild stated in the letter.
Coiteux said that he’s seen boys and girls try to pass contact information to each other with the intent of meeting up with each other on the outside. While detention officers try to stop the activity, they can’t catch it all, he said.
“It’s probably safer for all if they weren’t housed together,” he said. “I’m not against the JDAI program, but I do want the kids who are in detention to be safe, and to do that you need staffing.”
In the past, when the guild has approached administrators, “they appear to listen, and make pronouncements, but take no action to improve this deteriorating situation,” the guild wrote.
When reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Escamilla said that he had not been informed about the no-confidence vote and was surprised to hear of the guild’s action.
He said he could not comment on the matter because of a labor management meeting tentatively scheduled for next week.
Juvenile Court appears to be attempting to remedy the problem with the addition of one more detention officer. On May 12, the Clark County council approved removing an unfilled probation counselor position and adding a detention officer.
The probation counselor position has been unstaffed since October.
Reporter Kaitlin Gillespie contributed to this story.
