‘It just looks to me like a dumpster fire’: Senate panel discusses scathing DJJ audit
From staffing shortages to misdirected pay raises to poor training, widespread problems plaguing the S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice were detailed to a S.C. Senate panel Wednesday.
It was the first in what likely will be multiple hearings on the plethora of issues facing the agency that houses and rehabilitates South Carolina juveniles who are incarcerated or on parole or probation. Numerous issues were detailed in a recent report by the state Legislative Audit Council.
“It just looks to me like a dumpster fire,” said Sen. Dick Harpootlian, one of four senators who attended Wednesday’s Corrections and Penology subcommittee hearing on the report.
The LAC, which evaluates state agencies and programs to identify ways to cut costs and improve performance, released a 178-page report on Juvenile Justice earlier this month that Harpootlian Wednesday called a “damning indictment” of South Carolina’s juvenile justice system.
The audit was intended to document any progress made since 2017, when a scathing LAC review prompted the agency’s former director to resign, and to assess aspects of the agency’s operations that the prior audit did not address.
The auditors’ recent review found DJJ had only implemented half of their 2017 recommendations and that problems with insufficient staffing and violence had actually grown worse and left the agency unequipped to adequately supervise the juveniles in its care.
“People are telling us they do not feel safe at work,” LAC deputy director Marcia Lindsay, who oversaw both audits, testified Wednesday. “Some of these folks have worked there for years and have never felt unsafe, and now they do.”
Reported incidents at secure DJJ facilities have increased 124% since 2017, and violent ones, like the alleged sexual assaults of four girls at the Midlands Evaluation Center in December 2019, have jumped 42%, the report found.
As a result, a smaller percentage of juvenile justice employees feel safe at work than did four years ago, and three quarters who responded to an LAC survey said they would feel safer if the agency hired more juvenile corrections officers, almost twice as many as in 2017.
Harpootlian, D-Richland, said conditions at DJJ’s secure facilities sounded like “Lord of the Flies,” the 1954 novel where boys stranded on a deserted island fail spectacularly at governing themselves.
“Inmates are running the asylum,” he said.
Lindsay testified that auditors found numerous instances in which DJJ employees filed reports miscategorizing serious, violent incidents, including fights and potential gang activity, as “information only” and failed to assign the incidents for further investigation or forward them to management.
She said one of the solicitors they interviewed indicated that DJJ officials failed to notify him of multiple significant incidents at one Juvenile Justice facility and said he only learned of the issues from a third party.
“That may be a crime,” Harpootlian responded.
The Richland senator asked Lindsay whether DJJ’s staffing shortages were due to the agency not receiving enough funding to hire suitable workers — as its director has argued — or simply a result of misusing the money it does receive from the state.
“I think it may be both,” Lindsay told him, “but the money that they get for security needs to go to security only.”
She questioned the wisdom of the agency giving its top managers larger pay increases than corrections officers and other low-level staff received.
”There was money available, and they were not using it for the critical needs positions,” Lindsay said. “They gave it to some top management positions.”
The dearth of staff also prevented juveniles from receiving timely medical care, as doctors visits, counseling appointments and trips to the emergency room were regularly missed or delayed because no one was available to provide transportation, according to the audit.
New security staffers are poorly trained — the majority of DJJ’s Criminal Justice Academy graduates failed to complete mandatory training within a year of their hire dates — and are often not held accountable for misconduct, the auditors wrote.
Their report also found the agency relied on officers with a “history of reckless or indifferent behavior towards juvenile safety,” including at least one who should have been terminated for repeated disciplinary infractions.
The audit also found DJJ regularly fell behind in its payments to vendors and that several companies had refused to work with the agency until they received their outstanding payments.
Despite the significant issues auditors identified, Lindsay said the investigation was actually somewhat impaired by the agency director’s apparent attempt to discourage employees from cooperating with them.
She said that when DJJ Director Freddie Pough became aware of their audit, he emailed all senior employees and instructed them to notify a specific staff person within an hour if they were contacted by auditors. Pough also told employees to inform this staffer of all auditor visits and to provide them a written summary of any visits and interviews the auditors conducted within 24 hours, she said.
“That kind of set the tone for our confidentiality and for folks feeling comfortable to come and talk to us,” Lindsay said. “We had employees calling us and sending us emails, going, ‘They’re gonna track everything we say to y’all, everything we give you and everything we tell you.’”
The Legislative Audit Council’s assessment of DJJ comes roughly four years after it issued a similarly harsh report asserting that the agency was not properly training its correctional officers and calling its police department “ineffective and unnecessary.”
The 2017 report, which prompted the resignation of former agency director Sylvia Murray, found the juvenile jail at the Broad River Road Complex in Columbia was unprepared for riots, which had plagued the facility, and that security policies and procedures were outdated and in need of revision.
It touched on many of the same problems highlighted in the recent audit report, including inadequately trained corrections officers, substandard supervision of juveniles and poor financial controls.
Only half of the 74 recommendations auditors made in the 2017 report have been fully implemented four years later, auditors wrote in their recent report. About a quarter of the recommendations have been partially implemented and the final quarter have not been implemented, according to the report.
Pough, who has led the agency since the prior director’s departure in early 2017, disputed many of the auditors’ recent findings and said all but two, or 96%, or the previously accepted recommendations had been implemented.
He wrote in a 10-page letter to the Legislative Audit Council that their report contained “numerous instances where LAC simply failed to understand fundamental aspects of DJJ’s operations, misstated facts, dismissed the conclusions of trained professionals within their specific areas of expertise in favor of LAC’s, and failed to consider information provided by DJJ.”
Pough acknowledged some of the deficiencies identified in the audit but said DJJ was already in the process of rectifying many of them.
He pinned DJJ’s staffing problems on its inability to pay correctional officers a competitive salary — juvenile corrections officers start at $30,425 per year — and asked the General Assembly to increase entry-level salaries for correctional staff.
Pough also said his agency would benefit from an overhaul of the state’s juvenile justice system, which incarcerates juveniles accused of non-violent or low-level offenses, and encouraged passage of a Senate bill that calls for a more rehabilitative and less punitive approach to juvenile justice.
Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, who chaired Wednesday’s subcommittee panel on the DJJ audit, said she plans to hold another hearing on it in a couple weeks. Subsequent hearings are likely to include the agency’s executive director and employees, she said.
Pough did not attend Wednesday’s hearing, which was held at the same time Gov. Henry McMaster announced he was awarding the Department of Juvenile Justice $12 million from his share of federal COVID-19 relief money.
McMaster, who stood beside Pough during the announcement, reiterated his confidence in the embattled director’s leadership of the agency and said the money would be used to keep South Carolina’s youth out of the criminal justice system.
The money will go toward childhood therapy programs targeted at keeping kids in school, after-school programs for at-risk middle and high school students and full-time mentoring programs to support education and life skills development.
This story was originally published April 21, 2021 at 4:30 PM.