The boy was playing cards in an open recreation area at Baltimore City?s Juvenile Justice Center when two boys struck from behind, punching him in the face, knocking him to the ground.
With a staff person distracted, the boy was kicked and stomped on the head, leaving him with a fractured skull, a broken jaw and several knocked-out teeth. He will need several surgeries in the future.
The assault in Baltimore?s juvenile facility, known in some arenas as “Baby Booking,” occurred Dec. 10. But it wasn?t made public until the Attorney General?s Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit released a scathing report Monday on violence and poor conditions at state juvenile facilities.
“One of our concerns is that there are too many youth in the Baltimore City Justice Center,” said Marlana Valdez, the director of the unit. “They need to reduce the number of kids there. There are a lot of long-term, systemic changes needed.”
Valdez?s report said the circumstances that led to the boy?s assault are “ever-present” and there is the “potential for serious injury” in many of the 1,460 assaults that occurred in state juvenile facilities in 2007.
“Conditions which lead to aggressive incidents have been described in virtually every report issued by the Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit since its inception,” Valdez wrote in her report.
The report criticized “inadequate numbers of staff, inadequate training of staff, overcrowding, improper classification and separation of vulnerable from violent youth, lack of meaningful activities to occupy youths? time, and ineffective behavior management programs.”
Disturbances in juvenile facilities across Maryland more than doubled during 2007 due to a “sharp spike” at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, where there were 537 assaults last year, the report states.
Tammy Brown, a spokeswoman for the Department of Juvenile Services, said Secretary Donald DeVore has targeted the city facility for improvement.
“It is one of our most difficult facilities,” she said. “We?re notdisputing there are challenges there. The secretary has started a violence reduction strategy.”
Brown said hiring and recruiting have increased, meaning there is now one staff member for every six children at the Juvenile Justice Center.
“Our incidents have gone down since we put focus on this facility,” she said.
