Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s a scandal involving horrific abuse at a residential treatment center.
No, not the one in Arizona, or the one in Kentucky, or the one in Tennessee, or Indiana, or Utah, or Oklahoma, or Washington state or Arkansas, or Connecticut or — well, you get the idea.
This time it’s Rhode Island. But don’t worry. Some Rhode Island lawmakers have come up with the perfect solution: Put locked suggestion boxes in all the group homes and institutions! And that was only the second worst idea to come from legislators or state officials.
Let’s start with some context. The institution getting all the attention this time is St. Mary’s Home for Children.
According to a 119-page report from the state’s Office of Child Advocate, investigators found an institution rife with abuse and turmoil. The Boston Globe did its own investigation. Andrew Marsalli, a neighbor of St. Mary’s, told the Globe he remembers:
“the boy with cuts and bruises who showed up at his door asking for help. ‘The boy would say, “Please don’t let me go with them. Don’t let them find me,”’ Marsalli said. ‘He would just come knock on my door to talk. But . . . they would know where to find him.’ … One time, Marsalli and [his partner Ken] Richey said, they watched in horror when two staff members tackled the boy in their yard and hauled him away. They said an ambulance was called because the boy’s arm had been yanked back.”
The state has stopped new admissions to St. Mary’s, but the institution still gets a cool $1,059 per day for every child still there.
But hey, if the bill sponsored by Rhode Island State Rep. Thomas Noret becomes law, the next time that happens the boy can drop a note in the suggestion box! (Assuming he can write with his other arm, of course.)
For decades, Rhode Island has torn apart families at one of the highest rates in America — more than double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.
Black children are thrown into foster care at nearly double their rate in the Rhode Island child population, a far worse rate of disparity than the national average.
And within foster care, Rhode Island has had a longstanding love affair with institutionalizing children, something we first documented in 2010. As of 2022, Rhode Island still was institutionalizing children at a rate more than 50% above the national average.
So with all that in mind, let’s consider the proposals to solve the problem of abuse in group homes and institutions in Rhode Island.
Under Rep. Noret’s plan, children would drop suggestions in a locked box wherever they happen to be institutionalized or, if they have internet access, online. Presumably, the suggestions would include things like: Please don’t let them beat me. Please don’t let them rape me. Please don’t let them dope me up on psychiatric meds.
Employees of the Office of Child Advocate (OCA) would collect the suggestions from Rhode Island’s 85 group homes and institutions — every two weeks. And then they’d leap into action and — oh, wait: OCA can, in theory, sue on behalf of an individual child or join in a class-action seeking systemic changes, but it can’t actually do anything about an abusive institution. Still, I’m sure they’d issue lots of scathing reports. They’d even be required to send a report to the Legislature.
And then there’s the matter of the 27 out-of-state institutions which now house Rhode Island children. Right now, OCA says those places are visited roughly once a year.
Sure, the whole thing is pretty dumb, but at least no one thinks the way to solve the problems at St. Mary’s is to make the place even bigger, right? Well, no one except those who agree with Ashley Deckert, director of the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, & Families (DCYF). She wants to spend $11 million to add 12 more beds to St. Mary’s.
Ignoring the mass of research that says residential treatment doesn’t work even when centers are not rife with abuse, Deckert explains it this way:
“It almost reminds me of a family. If we wrap St. Mary’s with the support and the resources and the intensity that we’re attempting to do, I really do believe that they can be ready to take the first girl into their intake in April of 2025 [at the new facility].”
If only it occurred to Deckert to treat families like a family and wrap them with support and resources and intensity. There’s actually a term for this: It’s called wraparound.
At least some legislators seem to have been suckered. After a guided tour of St. Mary’s, Rhode Island state Rep. Patricia Serpa said:
“What I saw today was encouraging. The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint.”
Because no child has ever been abused in a room that smells of Pine-Sol.
Deckert made clear the real reason she’s so keen on expanding St. Mary’s. At another hearing she said“…it’s almost ‘like a too-big-to-fail sort of situation.”
That argument turns up all over the country. After horrific abuse that included the death of a seven-year-old child was exposed in Kentucky, a social work professor explained:
“One of the problems that we run into is if we shut down a problematic facility, where do those kids go? That leaves kiddos that are in need of residential treatment with no place to go. There aren’t enough beds for little guys that need this level of care, and the child welfare system has to kind of figure out ‘how can we do the best with what we have?’”
But Kentucky also tears apart families at a rate well above the national average. And no “kiddo” or “little guy” ever needs to be institutionalized.
The too-big-to-fail argument also is being made by big, powerful foster care and residential treatment agencies in New York. As a small fraction of those victimized for decades in these places win damages, the agencies are demanding a taxpayer bailout of up to $200 million or else, they say, they might go out of business. Meanwhile, the CEO of the parent agency for an institution often in the news due to horrific abuse — Ron Richter of the Jewish Child Care Association — pulled down compensation totaling $700,000 in 2022.
So, Rhode Island Legislature and DCYF, let me drop a few items into your “suggestion box.”
- Shut down St. Mary’s.
- ● Shut down the other institutions.
- ● Bring all the kids home from out-of-state institutions.
- ● Free up space in foster homes by letting all those “kiddos” and “little guys” you never should have taken return to their own homes.
- ● When children really have serious behavior problems, use Wraparound.
Oh, and one thing more:
Please don’t be fooled by the scent of fresh paint and Pine-Sol.
