Rampant hindsighting usually accompanies postmortem analysis of tragedies. The April 11 suicide of 16-year-old Brittany Kish at the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center is no different.
"The tragedy the other day really hit home (regarding) the lack of resources in our community," Juvenile Justice Services Director Kirby Burgess told the Las Vegas Sun, promising a stringent internal probe and lamenting the county's poor mental health care infrastructure.
Department spokeswoman Lisa McGee told the Review-Journal that the death came just weeks before a planned visit by officials of the Annie Casey Foundation, a national advocacy group for disadvantaged children that's been working with the county on finding alternatives to juvenile incarceration. The foundation, she told the state's paper of record, has been invited to conduct its own investigation.
But a source inside the juvenile facility claims the investigations are merely window dressing, masking deeper problems.
"There are real administrative issues here," a probation officer, who declined to be named, says. "Heads are probably going to roll, but this incident wasn't a case of someone not doing their job. This facility is operating understaffed, plain and simple. At the end of the year, management gets bonuses for saving on overtime, so there's no push to hire enough staff ... We've been running units short-staffed for years. There've been times where one side of the facility had to be shut down—and the kids couldn't eat on time—because there's not enough staff.
"The staff checks on the kids in the prescribed five-minute intervals," the officer continues, "so the rules were being followed. However, it only takes someone two to three minutes to commit suicide."
Kish, who'd been sexually abused by former state mental health counselor Barry Bergmann (serving two to 10 years on the charges), had tried to kill herself four times and was placed on suicide watch, the bedsheets removed from her room. For some reason, they weren't on April 11, when she reportedly knotted a sheet around the door and the toilet, hanging herself with the rudimentary noose.
One of the detention center's oldest units, Zenoff Hall, where Kish committed suicide, is W-shaped, with two wings of 21 and 22 rooms. Whereas detainees see walls when they look out the windows of their cells, the probation officer says, kids in the other units (which are shaped like university quads) can see from their windows standing in the middle and pirouetting around, and staff can see into all the rooms. Another problem: Rooms are equipped with speakers so staff can hear inside; the source says Zenoff's speakers were inoperable.
Andrea Shorter, deputy director of the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, which promotes criminal justice policies that reduce incarceration, says the raft of early-'90s, tough-on-juvenile-crime laws exploded incarceration, creating a slew of problems, including understaffing and erratic oversight. While understaffing plagues some cities—annual turnover tops 30 percent in one juvenile facility in Maryland—inadequate training is a greater problem, Shorter says.
The key is for the training to be holistic, including instruction on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (and other emergency medical procedures) with schooling on topics like recognizing emotional triggers, identifying negative psychological behaviors—such as suicidal ideation—guidance on proper intervention methods and reporting procedures. Training needs to be completed continually and there should be a no-nonsense approach to those who are noncompliant. If heads must roll, she says, let 'em.
"One can surmise that whatever leadership is in place, there has to be a change in the workforce—layoffs or whatever," Shorter says. "Any time a child is detained, he or she suffers. So you have to make sure that whoever is on duty is equipped, trained and prepared for critical response."
County probation officers appear to be well prepared, receiving even weeks of Police Officer Standard Training. The program covers crisis intervention, dealing with the mentally ill, diffusing anger and incorporating youth and their families in the problem-solving process, among numerous other subjects. They're also required to complete 40 hours of training annually, of which 24 must be P.O.S.T.-certified. (As a comparison, juvenile detention workers in Maryland receive 160 hours of entry-level training in criminal justice, human development, security procedures and other topics.)
McGee says the county juvenile detention center meets (and works to exceed) federal juvenile justice standards for the ration of staff to inmates (one to eight in the daytime and two to 16 at night) and turnover is low—some 200 or more juveniles are incarcerated there on an average day. She declined comment about whether there've been any reprimands or firings, citing county policy prohibiting discussion of personnel matters or an ongoing investigation.
"We're letting (an internal team) investigate every aspect, every policy and procedure, gathering every log and every record to determine what was going on in the unit and the whole facility," she says, noting that the Child Fatality Review Committee, which examines deaths of children under age 18, is reviewing Kish's case. "In my research (confined, she admits, to Googling fatalities in juvenile detention), it seems most of them are condition-based—bad conditions led to the suicide; either long incarceration and poor treatment. That wasn't the case here. Two or three in Arizona. For a couple of years, we've been looking at ways to reduce our incarceration numbers via support services, home confinement and other avenues."
Best-case scenario, says UNLV criminal justice professor Randall Shelden: The Kish tragedy can be used to re-evaluate what he calls on "over-reliance" on the juvenile justice system to solve social issues—Kish was sexually abused, had family problems and behavioral issues.
"I've said this for years ... that it's wrong that we've chosen to deal with these types of issues through a legal institution. This type of problem shouldn't have ended up on the doorstep of the juvenile justice system in the first place ... she (Kish) wasn't a hard-core criminal," Shelden says. Kish was brought in on a probation violation; she'd been in trouble before for shoplifting, running away and assaulting her parents; her actions were thought to be the result of bipolar disorder. Shelden points to the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which innocent males were put in makeshift prison, as an example of the horrid effects of incarceration. "I have a student who's doing an internship at the juvenile center who talked to the girl and had a bad feeling (something might happen)."
Through its 12-year-old Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, the Baltimore-based Annie Casey Foundation offers municipalities an incarceration-reduction blueprint that stresses collaboration among the courts and community, accessing resources and addressing issues surrounding screening juvenile offenders. The foundation's senior associate for juvenile justice reform, Raquel Mariscal, says there are youth who can be released because they aren't a danger, those who need supportive services and intervention to be successful on the outside and "those whose butts need to be in confinement because that's where they belong to protect public safety."
Contrary to published reports, Mariscal says the foundation will not investigate Kish's suicide, but will offer its resources in an attempt to prevent future tragedies. A year ago, the foundation developed a program that sets standards on confinement stricter than any federal or state laws. Baltimore will be the first city to measure itself against Annie Casey's requirements.
"Clark County is going through its own self-inspection now," Mariscal says. "So the county isn't shying away from this and is working to correct any deficiencies. We're just as devastated about the tragedy, so we're here to help them."