By Guy Page
The State of Vermont has no secure location to hold treat our most violent children.
The Woodside Juvenile Rehabilition Center in Essex Junction closed in October 2020 after the state settled a federal lawsuit alleging excessive use of restraints at the 30-bed secure facility, the only one of its kind in Vermont. At the time the facility was often empty anyway.
Elected officials from Gov. Scott on down promised they’d open another program, somewhere, to keep these children safe from each other and the rest of Vermont safe from them while providing the mental health, substance abuse, and just plain adolescent direction they need.
That hasn’t happened. A temporary facility in Middlesex opened, then closed. It’s not that the State hasn’t tried to open a permanent, secure youth treatment facility. It has applied heavy pressure on the tiny Orange County Town of Newbury to accept a privately-run (and perhaps euphemistically called) ‘group home for mentally disabled children.’
Newbury’s not buying it. A local board vehemently rejected the plan. 92% of voters said NO in a referendum. Despite an initial promise to proceed only with community support, the State pushed back and won in the Vermont Supreme Court, four of five justices agreeing that “all youth who commit a crime are mentally disabled.” Now Newbury’s demanding a review of the decision. Former youth worker and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Sears told fellow lawmakers last month he despairs of ever seeing Newbury facility opened. Sen. Jane Kitchel – the chair of the Appropriations Committee – asked the Scott administration to pull the plug.
Gov. Phil Scott’s 2025 budget proposes funding for a youth psychiatric facility at a Bennington hospital. But right now, today, except for a secure, staffed bed here and there in the 14 counties, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) has no choice but to ship violent children out-of-state, far from community and family support. And even those beds aren’t always available. When they’re not, the dangerous, difficult burden falls on DCF to provide what it calls “staffing.” This catch-all term means watching violent youth in hotels, in group homes, in foster care, and a myriad of other options.
The stats reflect the growing dependence on staffing. In 2023 there were 129 staffings of a minimum of 10 hours and usually overnight.This is a significant increase from prior years. In 2022 there were 63 staffings,
21-year DCF veteran Trissie Casanova told the Legislature Jan. 13 that staffing is not a program, is not secure, and is not the answer.
We need an intervention that includes a secure facility now,” Trissie Casanova told the House Institutions Committee. “Yesterday we had two 14-year-old youths who seriously assaulted another resident in one of our programs. As of tomorrow, we will be staffing one of those youth with law enforcement.”
Lack of a secure facility has an awful ‘ripple effect’ on the community, Casanova said. Dangerous criminals released back into communities. Unsafe children being held in unsafe environments.
“It has become a more common occurrence for youth to be charged with a Big 12 offense and subsequently incarcerated,” Casanova said. “In the last six months we have had numerous youth who have engaged in crimes that involved violence and the use of firearms. Due to a lack of secure placement and the risk they posed to our staff we have been releasing them back into communities, where the communities and the families they are with are potentially at risk of harm.
“Judges are making decisions to place children and youth with families that DCF would not be able to approve based on prior criminal histories, current allegations of abuse or neglect or holding them without bail because jail is the safest and the only option available to them,” she added.
The rise of teen gangs are complicating the problem, Casanova said.
“In the last year we have seen a higher prevalence of gang activity amongst our youth where they are making videos talking about killing one another, we have seen in the news kids dying, being shot either accidentally or as a result of homicide. We have been lucky there has not been more since we have no secure facilities to hold these youth while we assess their treatment needs,” she told lawmakers.
By December, DCF was ‘staffing’ five youth a day with violent/aggressive behaviors, gang affiliation, sexualized behaviors, destruction of property, personal care needs, medications, mental health diagnoes, and significant medical needs.
Casanova cited many examples of youth DCF has been staffing:
Male, 17, with police reporting multiple responses to the home for physically assaulting parents. Probable cause found to charge with first-degree aggravated domestic assault by chasing a family member with a butter knife, threatening to kill them.
Male, 13, physically assaulted his mother.
Male, 14, who identifies as part of a gang. Charges include reckless endangerment, grand larceny and stolen vehicle. Assaulted Depot (youth facility) staff – pushed, slapped, and punched in the face multiple times while another youth held staff.
Female, 12, attempted to attack her mother.
Male, 15 – entered custody after he was in a vehicle where his friend discharged a handgun, killing his other friend. During this incident, youth was in possession of the handgun and after the shooting he hid the magazine from the gun in his room.
Male, 14 – Car theft, physically aggressive to mother. Punched father in face.
Male, 16 – attempted to take control of the vehicle of his NFI Worker and assaulted her with his crutches and hit her car causing damage. Verbally escalated (swearing and threatening) and used crutches as weapons. A month ago, made threats to kill his family members with a hammer over the span of a few days.
Male, 16 – Aggravated Assault, Simple Assault, disorderly conduct, and False Public alarms.
Male, 13 – Runs away, selling drugs, coerced a female peer into sexual acts. Physical assault to mother and females.
Male, 11 – Charged with arson, unlawful mischief, reckless endangerment.
Female sliced her grandmother with a box cutter and punched her in the head multiple times.
Female Charged w/ Agg. Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Reckless Endangerment shooting sibling and bludgeoned father in the head with a pistol.
Foster parents found bottles of gasoline and lighters in [another] youth’s room. Youth said that he wanted to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at his adoptive parents. He then damaged the state car that the family services workers came in and smashed the windshield as the FSW began driving away.
Another youth was charged with Aggravated Assault after he “tazed” three people with one being injured. The same youth had other assaultive behavior and sexual acting out.
In his budget address Tuesday, January 23, Gov. Scott addressed the growing numbers of violent Vermont youth and the state’s collective inability or unwillingness to hold and treat them.
“I wish I had better anticipated the challenge of implementing laws to raise the age of criminal accountability. Because we weren’t ready. We put the policy idea ahead of the fundamentals, the real work of actually helping our youth.
“Like many other areas, we moved too far and too fast into a policy experiment. And we didn’t plan for, or build, the system needed to address extreme cases, or have the workforce to support it. We focused so much on our well-intentioned goals that we didn’t think through all the possible consequences. Like what adding older, more violent youth to DCF caseloads would do. Or how traffickers would exploit young adults to run their deadliest drugs and expand their markets in Vermont.”
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: State Government
help me understand////there are on empty state building that can solve this problem/// will we have to bond a few million dollars to build a new building///
correction ///no //
I have to ask the obvious question: what the hell is wrong about continuing to use Woodside? Isn’t the complaint that it “looks too institutional” or too “prisonlike”? Well so what, it IS an institution and realistically it IS a prison. How about some colorful murals painted inside and out…we have so many talented mural painters around here. Or, I’m sure many of the “clients” would have experience as “spraypaint street artists” and have plenty of time on their hands. Essex is close to where most of the “clients” originate from…the bowels of Chittenden County. CVU High School has the same concrete architecture and I dont hear anyone saying we need to close it down since it looks “too institutional”. What the hell do these social scientists think, that we should go back to the log cabin look like 200 years ago? If they yearn for the ways of the past, the hickory switch form of discipline was also quite successful. Vermont has some serious youth crime issues and we need a serious way to deal with them.
Thank you Rich for asking the question. Does Woodside still belong to the State? Why was it allowed to be so mismanaged?
Really, the State of Vermont seems to be run by morons.
It seems to me that it was closed after allegations of inmate abuse by staff, as a means of sweeping the matter under the rug…
This is another policy failure. Our welfare system incentivizes people with no parenting skills to have as many kids as possible.
I think we should start paying women on welfare not to have kids. It could cost more in the ST but would save a boat load of money down the road
Vermont Resettled Somalis, Shootings Are Up 185%
Shootings are up 185% in Vermont from 2021 to 2022.
“We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger complained after the city racked up 5 murders. That may not sound like much, but it gives the normally sleepy city, where Bernie Sanders got his start, a higher murder rate than Philly.
When James Eaton, a mentally unstable leftist who had praised Hamas, shot and wounded three Arab Muslim men outside his home, the media eagerly diverted attention from the crime wave to the shooter, who was conveniently white, while falsely blaming it on ‘Islamophobia’.
The discredited hoax was not only trying to rally support for terrorists, but also to distract attention from the real perpetrators of the violence that has overtaken Bernie’s old city.
The shooters in Burlington, VT are much more likely to be Muslim male teens.
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/01/vermont-resettled-somalis-shootings-are-up-185#
Everyone should understand… this is another ‘education’ issue. Or should I say revenue enhancement scheme.
Quite a while ago now, our public schools added a new disability category to the ever-expanding Special Education potpourri. It’s a revenue enhancement because SPED costs are, to a large extent, reimbursed to the schools. And the reimbursements aren’t recognized on the financial statements as revenues until the year after the money is expended.
This is just another financial slight-of-hand (i.e., ‘smoke and mirrors) administrators use to fluff their spending – much like the so-called equalized student enrollment charade. Regular education costs are not reimbursed. So why not turn a profit on this dysfunction? But I digress.
The point is that because offending behavior is now a recognized learning disability, that generates income, school administrators and staff are incentivized to nurture the offending behavior. Again, there is nothing like dysfunction in a victimized class of parents and students to justify more and more spending. God forbid our public schools ever did anything that actually improved our lives. Where and why then would they spend all that money?
So now the proverbial chickens are, yet again, coming home to roost. We have an entire and ever-expanding cohort of young people who have never learned to control themselves. Why should they? We all know kids act out to get attention. So too, apparently, do our educators. It’s just that the attention they crave is monetary. You know – ‘For The Children’.
So, let’s build more ‘secure’ juvenile detention centers and hire a bunch of people (‘experts and professionals’ at the DCF) to save us from these disabled children.
Their parents and grandparents can’t do it. Never mind that they’ve been told over and again so many times that they are incapable, that now everyone believes it. Which, of course, will make the problem worse, so we’ll have to spend more and more money.
Does anyone not see how this works?
Is this continuing catastrophe inevitable? Can we turn the corruption around? Is a ‘soft landing’ not possible?
Consider School Choice – if you can stop the legislature from eliminating it as a possibility. At least, with School Choice, motivated parents will take their voucher and correct the problem in their own back yards. And, hopefully, as other parents watch them do it, they’ll realize the benefits and try it themselves too.
How bad can the School Choice option be? For those of you old enough, remember Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid contemplating their escape from the Pinkertons by jumping off a cliff into the river below.
Butch: I’ll jump first.
Sundance: Nope.
Butch: Then you jump first.
Sundance: No, I said!
Butch: What’s the matter with you?!
Sundance: I can’t swim!
Butch: [laughing] Why, you crazy — the fall will probably kill you!
“I wish I had better anticipated the challenge…we moved too far and too fast into a policy experiment.” What kind of explanation is that, Gov. Scott? Did you think making life easier for criminals was going to create less crime? That doesn’t make any sense. That has never happened.
There are more violent kids in this country now because they can see there are minimal consequences to being violent. Vermont had the second highest murder rate in New England in 2022 and likely in 2023. Demographics say it should be the safest.
The state is putting DCF and other social workers in serious jeopardy of being harmed by these delinquent youths, especially if they are unable to defend themselves lest they get charged with assault. Some youths can be placed in a correctional center if there is no other suitable facility, as long as a judge can be convinced that is the case. They would have to be segregated from the adult population in the facility. Although some of these youths are probably more dangerous that some of the adults in there. The talk of raising the age of charging a person as a youth rather than an adult is compounding the problem, because then they have no place to put them. Closing Woodside was a terrible mistake! They had the facility to hold and possibly treat the juveniles, but they just needed to clean up their act on how to deal with them, especially the violent ones.
The absurdity of the supreme court decision is summarized nicely in a Valley News editorial as one that is “…allowing DCF to channel Alice in Wonderland: When the agency uses a word, it means just what the agency chooses it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Now that Vermont has decided all youth who commit a crime are mentally disabled, where is all this going? Youth who successfully leave the system and live productive lives will be branded as mentally disabled solely for DCF’s convinience. But what about those who go on to commit crimes as adults, does the crime induced mental disability and its associated lack of consequences stay with them? Does being a justice-involved juvenile now equate to a lifetime get out of jail card? And what about former youths – who as adults may only ‘discover’ they have a crime induced mental disability later in life, probably shortly after getting caught. Are they too deemed to be mentally disabled by the State’s blanket predetermination, thereby protected from consequence and ‘treated’ in one of many privately run boutique ‘secure facilities’ masquerading as ‘group homes for the disabled’ coming soon to somewhere near you.
I’m pretty sure every defense attorney in Vermont has taken note as well as progressives with an anti-corrections agenda. It’s already started; pay close attention to some of the hearings this session. And I couldn’t help but notice that the new Vermont woman’s correctional facility currently in planning is now a “secure residential treatment facility”.
I doubt most are “mentally disabled” in the traditional sense. But most have likely been “mentally retarded” or “irreversibly psychologically damaged” by the copious quantities of psychotropic medications being handed out like candy these days.
Let me guess. Every single one of these “problem children” are on government provided drugs that have listed side effects that align with their behavior? I’d put money on it.
When you use pharmaceutical drugs to try and fix behavior and attention issues, these are your results. Congratulations! I hope the system enjoys their stolen money.
Little meth children will grow into big meth adults.
Oh and there is a shortage of pharmaceutical meth right now. Get prepared for the withdraw symptoms coming to a neighborhood near you.
BINGO 🎯🎯🎯
big pharma laughing all the way to the bank and that includes all there stock holders///
The reason is clear: decades of failed policies and failed programs of those who sit in the selected seats, the bureaucrats who are never held to account for failing to do their jobs, and the non-profits who are too busy chasing money and their own tails. Decades ago, the foster care program was under a hot spotlight then quickly swept under the rug. The schools had more special needs children than not. They hired more staff to deal with it. Being a child in Vermont these days is akin to the Hunger Games. The adults are preying upon them, they are being subjected to perverted, disgusting things every day on the internet, in the classroom, and on the street. Many are living in homes with drug addicted, distracted, stressed out, delusional parents. God have mercy! It takes a village, but in Pervmont[sic] the sheer ignorance is all it has taken to destroy a few generations worth of innocent children.
So, if you really want to know what is going on… talk with the largely untrained staff that work directly with the children in these “homes” here in Vermont. The Designated agency I worked for (redacted)…. is responsible for both developmentally disabled children and adults and mentally ill children and young adults and I had the experience for about a year. It was mindboggling and distressing. For the first time in my career, I took out liability insurance because they were asking the nursing staff to do things and be responsible for things completely outrageous.
And these Vermont kids that were being cared for (not immigrant’s children) were either very dangerous and mentally ill or some level of developmentally disabled. That was 10 years ago. I don’t expect it’s gotten any better.
The dangerous/mentally ill ones had round the clock staffing, usually 2:1. Sometimes 3:1 in a home or apartment that the state rented for them. And every single staff member, despite “training” in “Crisis Prevention”, had been injured at one time or another. Some very seriously.
You have no idea what really is going on.
And “they” certainly don’t advertise what happens. Same could be said for the large institution in the southeastern part of the state that treats mental illness.
You have no idea.