District officials expect to break ground in the next two months on the new Oak Hill Youth Detention Center, finally ending years of delay that prevented meaningful improvement at the D.C. juvenile facility.
“It’s going to be open and airy and welcoming and inviting,” Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services spokeswoman LaShon Seastrunk said. “That’s the basis of our reform efforts.”
The existing 1970s-era Oak Hill, part of an 800-acre campus in Laurel, is configured like an adult prison, featuring a double razor-wire perimeter fence, freestanding one-story buildings and individual cells on double-loaded corridors. Fire-safety hazards, inadequate heating and crumbling buildings have led to 20 years of court action against the city on behalf of detained youth.
But the new $42 million facility will feel more home-like and include indoor and outdoor recreational space, educational and work force development facilities, studios and a theater. It will have 60 beds, while the current facility houses about 75 detainees.
DYRS Director Vincent Schiraldi envisions the new Oak Hill as a model for positive youth development, as opposed to the “decrepit facility that had been criticized, sued and lambasted in the media for decades.”
“While we have gradually been refurbishing that outmoded facility — softening the units, adding carpeting and comfortable furniture, pictures on the walls, wooden beds and desks in the youth’s rooms — the basic design of Oak Hill, as a mini-prison, along with its dilapidated condition, fights against our reforms every day,” Schiraldi told the D.C. Council during a recent oversight hearing.
Contractors are preparing to start work. The District last week awarded a $530,000 contract to Goel Services Inc. to clear asbestos from several vacant buildings slated for demolition.
A new Oak Hill has been promised since 1987. Citing intolerable delays, caused in part by months-long permitting and procurement requirements, the council last year approved a bill to streamline the process. The District now expects to open the new facility in spring 2008.
“He’s moving as fast as possible,” Mayor Adrian Fenty, who had oversight of Oak Hill as a D.C. Council member, said of Schiraldi. “We’re going to give him the support he may not have gotten in the past from other agencies, like procurement, to move even faster.”
Former residents to build new detention center
About a dozen former residents of Oak Hill juvenile detention center, who are still under the District’s supervision, will have a direct role in the construction of the new facility.
“They’re going to have at least 12 of the young people, who are trained and who may have graduated from Oak Hill, come back and start working on the building, kind of like vocational education,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said Tuesday.
Seven current and former Oak Hill detainees spent 30 days on the Gulf Coast earlier this year helping Hurricane Katrina victims get back on their feet. Their work included installing sheet rock and drywall for a half-dozen homes, painting residences and building two community playgrounds.
Many of those same youth will return to Laurel build the new Oak Hill.
“In addition to obtaining a trade, they’re actually getting work,” Department of Youth Rehabilitation spokeswoman Services LaShon Seastrunk said. – Michael Neibauer
