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State to send abuse report to prosecutor
RAY PIERCE
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

In an abundance of caution, the state will let a prosecutor decide whether any charges should be filed on the basis of an Arkansas State Police report about when state officials learned about abuses of youths in state custody.
The report contains no suggestion by investigators that there were any criminal activities, and the investigators themselves had the power to send the report to the prosecutor had they deemed such action necessary.
Nevertheless, the Department of Human Services will pass the report along to Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley of Little Rock, the department's interim director, Richard Weiss, said Monday.
Weiss revealed his intention after consulting the department's chief counsel, Jonann Coniglio, while two legislative committees were conducting a joint hearing related to recently disclosed problems in the department's Youth Services Division.
The committees also learned during Monday's hearing that state police have begun an investigation to see if documents found shredded at the division within the past two weeks were incident reports coming from one of the division's facilities.
It's not clear whether there is any wrongdoing in the shredding of the documents, a division executive said, but he considered it wiser to let state police look into the matter and make the decision than for the division to decide on its own.
The request for this new investigation was made Monday morning, a state police captain disclosed to lawmakers during the hearing.
Weiss is interim director of the department because Lee Frazier has resigned as director to take another job in state government. Frazier sat in the hearing room during Monday's session, but was not called to testify. His name is on a list of possible witnesses, as is Coniglio's and those of several other past and present department officials.
The state police investigation was requested in April by Coniglio, who said she talked about it at the time with Frazier, who agreed it should be done and authorized her to make the request.
The aim was to put the top brass of the department and the division under scrutiny by an outside, independent investigative agency rather than have the investigation done by the department's in-house investigators, Coniglio said.
The state police report, a 7-inch stack of summaries and documents, deals with what officials recall of the department's and division's administrative processes, including information that was passed along to officials about problems in the division and what, if anything, was done about the problems.
The investigators neither sought nor made criminal allegations, though investigators said they would have pursued criminal leads if any had turned up. The investigation is more like an internal audit indicating whether department procedures were properly followed, state officials and investigators told legislators.
Weiss said referring the report to Jegley is just a way of going an extra mile to make sure the department does the right thing during the current uproar over treatment of youths in state custody.
The hearing was held by the Senate Committee on Children and Youth and the House Committee on Aging, Children and Youth, Legislative and Military Affairs.
During the 2 1/2-hour morning session, the committees' members suggested to the committee chairmen that invitations to testify before the committees be issued not only to the past and present officials but also to Gov. Mike Huckabee and an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette associate editor, Mary Hargrove, who wrote several recent articles about the division's troubles.
Jim Harris, Huckabee's spokesman, said later that the governor said he would be willing to accept an invitation from the committee to "visit with them on these issues." Huckabee said he knew that the committees would work with him on scheduling his appearance. Huckabee was at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday, Harris said.
The chairmen of the committees, Sen. Mike Ross, D-Prescott, and Rep. Sue Madison, D-Fayetteville, will decide later who will be invited. The committees also have subpoena power.
In June, the Democrat-Gazette ran articles on three successive Sundays and Mondays, mostly by Hargrove, dealing with problems in the Youth Services Division, including the physical abuse of juveniles. The articles contained information that some juveniles were made to clean up human waste that had overflowed from a backed-up sewer.
Ross said Monday's hearing was to be "more of an educational hearing than anything else." In a sometimes confused proceeding, lawmakers learned the difference between a state police criminal investigation and an internal affairs investigation.
In a letter to Col. John Bailey, director of the state police, the Human Services Department's Coniglio said that while the department had its own internal investigators, the charges of abuse and cover-up were so serious that she wanted people not associated with the department to handle the investigation. The state police investigated as a courtesy to the department, she said.
Some lawmakers wanted to know why the state police had not forwarded the report to prosecutors. Others wanted to know why the investigators had not drawn conclusions as to who might have acted improperly. Still others wanted to know why the investigators had not talked to the employees at the division's Observation and Assessment Center in North Little Rock, where some abuse was alleged to have occurred.
The answers to those questions had to do with the difference between a criminal investigation and an internal affairs inquiry, state police Capt. Doug Williams said. "This was a fact-finding, informational query requested by the Office of Chief Counsel," he told the committee. He also explained that dozens of other recent investigations focused on the criminal aspects of allegations of abuse in the division.
After a lengthy explanation of the chronology of events by Sen. Mike Beebe, D-Searcy, the difference appeared to sink in among the lawmakers.
Officials with the Department of Health, which conducted audits of the division's Youth Service Center in Alexander and the soon-to-be-closed Observation and Assessment Center on May 13 and May 18, told the committee that much of what the Health Department had found was that the division either had outdated health and safety policies and procedures needed for a juvenile detention facility or had none at all.
As far as the sanitation issues were concerned, Bill Teer, director of the Health Department's Environmental Health Protection Division, said the surveyors didn't find the sewage overflow that had been reported earlier. "The survey is only a snapshot of that time, that hour, that they are there," he said.
The committees asked the Health and Human Services departments to set up an agreement where the Youth Services Division facilities will be checked by the health inspectors.
Lewis Leslie, director of the Bureau of Health Resources, said the Health Department doesn't routinely check the Youth Services Division's facilities to see that they are up to code. He said only those that serve food are checked by sanitarians, and only in that one specific area.
Monday's agenda also was to have included employees of the state Department Correction, which conducted sanitation and security surveys of two youth facilities in May. The Correction Department never got a chance to give its presentation.
Huckabee told a news conference April 24 he had just learned of the problems in the division. He announced steps to address them.
Questions about who knew what, and when they knew it, have arisen partly because an August 1997 memo from one of his liaisons told Huckabee of "founded cases of abuse" and an alleged sexual assault at the North Little Rock center.
But the governor has said he believed department officials who told him last fall that the problems were being corrected. Once he learned specifics of problems in April, thanks in part to Hargrove's information, he took action himself to correct the problems, Huckabee said.
Paul Doramus, the director of the Youth Services Division since June 1, told the committees during the afternoon session that the North Little Rock center had 38 residents on Monday. On June 19, Huckabee ordered the closure of the center within 60 days. At that time, the center housed 61 children.
Doramus said the children are being moved to the Alexander Youth Services Center, the Arkansas State Hospital and other youth facilities.
Juvenile delinquents placed in the state's custody are sent to the center for medical check-ups and an assessment of their mental and emotional state. From there, division officials decide where to place juveniles within the system. Under the initial plan, the juveniles are to remain at the center for no longer than 60 days. But because of overcrowding at other facilities, the youths frequently remain longer.
Doramus said he is working on a plan in which the juvenile delinquents will be assessed at regional facilities. He said the goal is to assess children within 10 to 14 days.
Doramus said the division has not decided what to do with the North Little Rock center after it is closed.
The state has not canceled its contract with Pulaski County to lease the facility, which at one time was the North Little Rock jail.
The state pays the county $230,000 a year to lease the jail. In the 1994 lease agreement, the state must give 180 days notice before moving out.
Information for this article was contributed by Rachel O'Neal of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

This article was published on Tuesday, July 14, 1998

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