Oak Hill Outrage . . . 

The District makes a lot of noise about helping its young people, but the reality speaks louder than fine words.

July 28, 2002

Imagine a home where children are confined to their rooms for as long as 23 hours a day and rarely have the time or space to play. Imagine that these same children rarely see their parents and that they receive inadequate medical attention. Then imagine them living amid crumbling walls, poor plumbing and often-broken heating and air-conditioning systems. Not surprisingly, their home fails to meet two-thirds of the District's health and safety standards.

Yet the District owns this home and has let thousands of children live under such conditions for decades. Despite 16 years of litigation, the District continues to to operate Oak Hill Youth Detention Center, ignoring the needs of the young people there while failing to hold anyone accountable for their deplorable situation.

Earlier this month [Metro, July 16], a court monitor issued the 47th report in 16 years on Oak Hill. The monitor's negative findings prompted D.C. Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr. to threaten the District and top officials at the city's Youth Services Administration with contempt of court for failing to improve conditions at the decrepit facility.

D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams ran on a platform of improving the lives of the District's most vulnerable population -- our children. And while he did not create the disaster at Oak Hill, he has not stopped the abuse and neglect that occurs there daily.

>From the beginning of his administration, the mayor's advisers have told him to close Oak Hill and create a smaller, more humane locked facility for young people who need to be incarcerated. Williams has been urged to develop a continuum of rigorous community programs to address the needs of the city's troubled young people who don't need to be locked up -- many of those at Oak Hill are there for nonviolent offenses. But he has not acted.

As recently as this month, in response to Dixon's threat of contempt of court, Joseph B. Tulman, appointed by Mayor Williams to chair the D.C. Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, has said that Oak Hill should be closed and that most of the young people incarcerated there should be returned to their families or foster homes under intensive supervision. "Using incarceration for children who have behavioral problems and are involved in delinquency is a failed approach," Tulman said.

But perhaps the most substantive analysis of the Oak Hill situation has come from a blue ribbon commission the mayor appointed with fanfare in 2000. After months of investigation, public testimony and visits to the nation's most effective juvenile delinquency programs, the commission issued a 300-plus page report urging the mayor to close Oak Hill and replace it with a continuum of community-based care.

Many of the commission's recommendations were modeled after a system its members saw in Missouri, where young people who need to be placed in locked facilities are housed in situations that are limited to no more than 20 residents; all the facilities were much more rehabilitative than the prison-like Oak Hill. But the mayor has yet to state his intentions to implement any of the commission's recommendations.

It is time that the District stopped wasting taxpayer dollars on litigation and its de facto sanctioning of the child abuse and neglect at Oak Hill. And it is past time the mayor acted on some of the well-reasoned recommendations forwarded to him by his advisers and shaped a system that is both humane and effective in turning around the lives of the District's troubled young people.