The roughly $20 million the District spends annually on sending delinquent youths to detention centers run by other jurisdictions is being scrutinized by a D.C. Council member after four city wards escaped a South Carolina facility. Three of the four teens who escaped late Wednesday were back behind bars by noon Thursday. Delonte Parker, a 19-year-old who sources said was convicted of murder, was yet to be caught as of Thursday evening. The four escapees were among nine wards of the city’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services being held at the Palmetto Summerville Behavioral Health Center in Summerville, S.C.
The escape in South Carolina “underscores the need for us to review and analyze our use of residential treatment centers outside the District of Columbia,” said Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham, whose committee oversees DYRS. Graham said his committee is gathering data on the program.
The city has about 225 wards in detention centers spread across about a dozen states and spends about $300 a day on each, officials said Thursday. That’s more than twice the number of DYRS youths housed in the District’s detention center and about 20 percent of the agency’s 1,113 wards, most of whom are not behind bars.
Sending youths to distant detention centers “has a terrible impact on family connections, increasing the likelihood youths will be disoriented when they return to the community,” Graham said. The councilman said he’d like to see the city’s troubled youth placed at treatment facilities within 100 miles of the District.
Police union chief Kris Baumann said the District is sending delinquents to other jurisdictions “out of necessity” because it can’t handle them on its own.
Those it does send, he said, “are not kids who have shoplifted, these are hard-core bad guys.” And when dangerous criminals from D.C. escape in other jurisdictions, “it shows D.C. doesn’t take protecting public safety seriously. How will a senator from South Carolina explain to his constituents that this city deserves autonomy when it lets dangerous kids run loose?”
Meanwhile, city officials said they continue to search for an 18-year-old who escaped from the District’s detention center in Laurel on Monday. Travon Carey is believed to be in Southeast Washington. DYRS chief Neil Stanley said the facility has been locked down as investigators work to determine what went wrong.
