There are encouraging signs that the Mills administration is moving to minimize the incarceration of teenagers and young adults in Maine.
After years of advocacy to close the state’s youth detention center in South Portland — and talk about making such a move — the Department of Corrections is taking steps to move in that direction.
On a broad scale, the department will create a committee of legislators and other relevant stakeholders to re-examine the state’s youth corrections system and make recommendations to the Mills administration in a few months. The committee’s findings will guide the administration’s decisions on the future of the youth criminal justice system.
“If that [means] stepping away from Long Creek on the juvenile side, then the [department and Mills’ administration] will consider that recommendation,” Ryan Thornell, deputy commissioner of the Department of Corrections, told the BDN.
The last time Maine’s system for providing children with mental health services got a comprehensive look was in 1997. That’s when state officials — at the Legislature’s direction, and with the help of service providers, parents and others — assembled a strategic plan for building up the range of services for children with mental health challenges that they could access without having to check into a hospital or be committed to an institution.
While well-intentioned, the system envisioned in the strategic plan did not receive the attention — or funding — needed to sustain it. For example, MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, pays the same rate today for many behavioral health services for children as it did a decade or more ago. As a result, few providers have been able to afford to offer these services. This has left psychiatric hospitals and the state’s youth prison as common destinations for many Maine youth with mental illness.
Eighty-five percent of the youth committed to Long Creek had three or more diagnosed mental health conditions and roughly four in 10 had spent time in a residential mental health treatment facility before being sent to the detention facility, according to corrections officials.
The Center for Children’s Law and Policy sounded the alarm in a 2017 audit of Long Creek. One of the group’s key findings was that, “Long Creek houses many youth with profound and complex mental health problems, youth whom the facility is neither designed for nor staffed to manage.” And the auditors highlighted a devastating number of children harming themselves and acting out due to mental illness and traumatic experiences in their past. In 2016, a 16-year-old transgender boy took his own life at the prison.
In addition to the review, the department plans, in coming months, to move a handful of currently incarcerated teens into a secure, step down residential facility on the Long Creek property, Associate Commissioner of Juvenile Services Colin O’Neill told the BDN.
The LePage administration pledged a similar move in 2017, and, there has been success in shrinking the youth center’s population. The number of juveniles being held has been cut in half in the last decade.
Long Creek currently houses roughly 45 teens but has capacity for 163.
Because it has so much empty space, the corrections department plans to house female adult prisoners at the Long Creek property, a move that requires legislative approval. Maine’s population of female prisoners has sharply risen in the last 15 years, to more than 200 from only 25 in 2002.
Separating women from male prisoners will allow corrections staff to better target programs to the needs of women, who often come to the system as victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
All of these moves point in a positive direction, but sustained attention and funding is required to build a better system to help youth with behavioral and mental health challenges.