The 130-year-old Cheltenham Youth Facility, a detention center for juvenile offenders in Prince George’s County, is overloaded and understaffed.
But under a plan announced Friday by Gov. Martin O’Malley to spend $200 million on the state’s aging juvenile detention centers, Cheltenham would be replaced by two new facilities in the county.
The plan also calls for upgrades and new facilities throughout the state.
“It’s the end of an era in which the Department of Juvenile Services has been forced to provide services in decrepit facilities,” said Donald DeVore, secretary of the Department of Juvenile Services.
The state has too few residential centers where sentenced child criminals are housed, which means in many cases they’re sent out of state, said Tammy Brown, a Juvenile Services Department spokeswoman.
While they wait for a more permanent home, the children linger in detention centers where they may not receive the attention needed to aid their returns to society, Brown said.
According to a 2007 report by the Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit, eight children had been held in Cheltenham between 60 and 186 days as they waited for placement in residential centers during the first half of 2007.
O’Malley’s plan is to build more residential centers and shrink the size of detention centers, decentralizing the system so troubled youth remain closer to their communities, Brown said.
The governor’s capital budget for fiscal year 2009 already includes $5.7 million to study the design for the new treatment center in Prince George’s County, with that facility, along with those to be built in its image throughout the state, to be complete by 2012.
Under the plan, Cheltenham, which has been scheduled to shut down since 2000, would finally be closed, replaced by a new detention center nearby.
O’Malley, however, isn’t the first governor to roll out a plan for overhauling juvenile justice facilities, said Marlana Valdez, director of the monitoring unit.
O’Malley’s predecessor, Gov. Robert Ehrlich, had a General Assembly-approved plan that O’Malley threw out when he took office.
And while Valdez said she believes O’Malley intends to fix the system, “my concern is that we’ll plan it to death.”
Examiner Staff Writer Jaime Malarkey contributed to this report.
