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Florida Civil Commitment Center, Arcadia, Florida
March 5, 2007 Herald Tribune
Inside a privately run treatment center here for pedophiles and rapists
who have completed their prison sentences, where they are supposed to
reflect on their crimes and learn to control their sexual urges, bikini
posters were pinned to walls. Two men took their shirts off, rubbed each
other’s backs and held hands, while others disappeared together into
dormitory rooms. Some of the sex offenders appeared to be drunk from
homemade “buck” liquor secretly brewed and sold here. And some of the
center’s employees, who openly ignored the breaking of rules (“As long as
they are happy, we let them go,” one explained), reported that a high
turnover rate among staff members was mostly because of female employees
leaving their jobs after having had sex with the offenders. These and other
observations were included in a memorandum composed in 2004 by six
employees on loan here from Pennsylvania. They had been dispatched by the
Liberty Behavioral Health Corporation, which ran the facility, the Florida
Civil Commitment Center, and a facility in Pennsylvania. Nineteen states
have laws that allow them to confine or restrict sex criminals beyond
prison in a trend that is expanding around the country, with legislators in
New York last week announcing agreement on a new civil commitment law
there. The courts have upheld the constitutionality of such laws in part
because they are meant to furnish treatment where possible. Most of the
states run their own centers to hold and treat such predators, generally
with meager results, but at a time when private solutions are popular for
prisons, toll roads and other state functions, a few have teamed with
private industry. Yet as the story of the center here in Arcadia reveals,
even a $19 million partnership between the state and a company that
describes itself as “a national leader in the field of specialized sex
offender treatment and management” failed to meet a central purpose:
treating sex offenders so they would be well enough to return to society.
“It was like walking into a war zone,” Jared Lamantia,
one of the visiting workers who signed the memorandum, recalled in an
interview. “The residents in that place ran the whole facility.” The
memorandum is among thousands of pages of public and private documents
about the Florida center reviewed by The New York Times, providing a rare
window into the lives of civilly committed sexual predators and the people
who guard and treat them. While programs like Florida’s are popular because
they keep sex offenders locked away past their prison terms, they cost far
more than prison — in the case of Florida, on average twice as much — with
no measurable benefit beyond confinement. For more than seven years,
Liberty was in charge of almost every facet of the Florida center, where
more than 500 men are held beyond their criminal sentences in a crowded
former prison surrounded by cow pastures. That ended last June in a cloud
of claims and counterclaims, investigations and legislative hearings. By
the end, after the state did not renew Liberty’s contract, the Florida
Department of Children and Families was virtually at war with the company,
with each side pinning blame on the other — the state accused of failing to
properly finance the center, the company accused of failing to manage it.
“The place is a cesspool of despair and depression and drug abuse — of
people being lost,” said Don Sweeney, a mental health counselor in St.
Petersburg who treats some former residents of the center, reflecting on
Liberty’s tenure there. Many outside experts, even some of the center’s
critics, said the state’s insufficient financing of the center made Florida
as much to blame as Liberty for the many failings, many of which are common
in other states. Florida spends less than $42,000 a year per resident, one
of the lowest rates in the country. “There was no money to support that
facility and to do what had to be done,” Dr. Robert Bellino,
a psychiatrist who worked at the center here, said of the company. “It’s a
political football. They were always turning the screws on Liberty — ‘Cut
this, cut that, don’t spend this, don’t spend that.’ ” Ambitious Private
Contractors: As legislators across the nation have answered public outrage
about heinous sex crimes with civil commitment laws, a bevy of companies
and well-paid specialists have cropped up like constellations around the
expanding demand. Liberty Behavioral Health and Liberty Healthcare
Corporation, affiliates with common ownership, have emerged as the most
ambitious private contractors in the commitment center arena. As recently
as last year, the affiliates had accumulated contracts worth up to $26
million a year in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Florida, which was
the biggest both in terms of compensation and responsibility. Growing out
of a company that provided emergency room employees to hospitals starting
in the mid 1970s, Liberty Healthcare Corporation was founded in 1986 as a
provider of mental health, developmental disability and primary care
services. In its earliest days, it had no experience treating sex offenders
and, its officials said, there was never a particular moment when company
officials said to one another, “Let’s go into the sex offender business.”
Yet as Shan Jumper, Liberty’s clinical director in Illinois, tells it,
after “analyzing market trends and seeing what areas they could jump into,”
Liberty executives apparently recognized the potential. By 1998, the
company, which is privately held and based in Bala
Cynwyd, Pa., won its first contract to provide
services inside a civil commitment center, in Illinois. Rick Robinson,
executive vice president and chief operating officer of Liberty Healthcare,
described the move as a natural outgrowth of its work, which included
creating an adolescent sex offender unit in an Arkansas hospital in 1995.
The states that have hired private companies reason that outside experts
have more background in the complex realm of detaining and treating sex
offenders than most public workers, and in several states where Liberty
holds contracts, officials say they have been impressed with the company’s
expertise. But at the Florida center, even beyond a string of embarrassing
failures — an escape, the death of an offender after a fight with another
over a bag of chips, a sit-in that the state ultimately quashed with
hundreds of law enforcement officers — the treatment record was poor. In
Liberty’s tenure, only one of the hundreds of men here progressed far
enough in therapy to earn a recommendation from company clinicians that he
be released. At various points, many residents were not attending the group
therapy specifically addressing sex offending; in May 2005, 35 percent of
the center’s 484 residents fell into that category. In written responses to
questions from The New York Times, as well as court depositions,
legislative testimony, e-mail messages, letters and memorandums, Liberty
defended its treatment record, blamed Florida as insufficiently financing
its commitment program and, for years, failing to define exactly what it
expected of Liberty. Early Praise and Promise: Liberty’s early tenure in
Florida won praise from independent evaluators who said the treatment
program showed promise. Over the first four years the state asked for few
changes, and on matters such as the treatment of mentally ill residents,
had a “just do the best you can” attitude, as Susan Keenan Nayda, vice president of operations for behavioral
health programs at Liberty, said in a court deposition. But problems began
to surface publicly in June 2000 in dramatic fashion when a resident
escaped in a helicopter that an accomplice had landed inside the center’s
perimeter. The helicopter crashed after departing with the escapee, who was
caught 26 hours later in a canal with the pilot, 2 handguns and 28 rounds
of ammunition. The pilot, a longtime friend, had visited the escapee 10
times in the five months before the escape. The bizarre incident raised
worrisome questions and the first hints of a conflict over the center’s
combined goals of security and treatment. Too few Liberty staff members
were in the yard when the escape occurred, a report by state officials
found, and the center’s director had ordered razor wire removed from a
security fence because, he said, the wire was damaging volleyballs from a
nearby court the residents used. The report also complained about the
state’s role, questioning why corrections officers, who were in charge of
security on the perimeter, were unarmed. Commitment centers across the
country have wavered between following the legal mandate to run a
therapeutic program, as laid out by the courts, and the politically
acceptable alternative of a more prisonlike one. In Florida, the conflict
emerged again and again. The state’s emphasis swung, at various points,
toward and away from a “correctional” approach, company officials suggested.
At one point, Ms. Nayda told a Florida State
Senate committee that even she was not entirely sure what the center was
trying to be. “There’s a little bit of confusion,” Ms. Nayda
said. “What is this place? Is it a prison? Is it a mental health center? A
residential treatment facility where people are clients? What is it? We ask
that question sometimes too. We really don’t have a lot of guidance around
what it is the state wants the facility to be, and we would encourage the
state to look at that.” By the end of 2000, the state moved its civil
commitment center from Martin County on the state’s East Coast to its
current home here in Arcadia, a 14-acre compound with eight dormitories and
other buildings. From there, the population rose swiftly, even as staff levels
mostly stayed put. Liberty repeatedly sought more money from the state for
the center’s operations, for special treatment of its large severely
mentally ill population and for creation of a supervised release program.
Asked to respond to Liberty’s complaints about financing, Rod Hall,
director of the mental health program office for the state Department of
Children and Families, said, “The funding provided to operate the facility
was the amount negotiated and agreed upon by Liberty prior to its signing
of the contracts.” Liberty’s monthly reports began suggesting that the
company was feeling the crunch. The reports noted frequent troubling
incidents: residents having sex, assaulting staff members and each another,
hiding knives in their rooms. Liberty also said it faced an unusual
challenge in Florida, where hundreds of the center’s residents are not
formally committed, but awaiting trials for commitment. These “detainees,”
the company said, often reject treatment to focus on their legal battles.
Some critics, meanwhile, began questioning the treatment. Ted Shaw, a
forensic psychologist who evaluates civilly committed sex offenders,
complained that Liberty held men back in treatment as punishment for minor
infractions. Liberty officials deny the allegations, but Michael Canty, a child molester who was detained at the center
but was never formally committed, concurred with Dr. Shaw, saying Liberty
staff members would “harass, taunt — try to get you in trouble so you would
get kicked out of treatment.” Rising Tensions, and
Violence: By the time the six workers from Liberty’s facility in
Pennsylvania arrived here in 2004, tensions inside the center and with the
state authorities were reaching a peak. In April of that year, a mentally
ill man jumped off the center’s roof and was injured after staff members
rushed at him to get him down. In June, a resident stabbed another 12 times
and the staff had residents mop up the blood, destroying evidence before
outside law enforcement officials arrived, an internal report showed. “It
was basically a free-for-all prison, out of control,” said Josh Stiles,
another of the visiting workers from Pennsylvania. Liberty officials said
they investigated and immediately took “appropriate actions” regarding all
that their Pennsylvania employees reported. But they also said the
atmosphere in the center at the time was “probably very conducive for
allegations that were either unfounded or exaggerated,” and noted that a
second group from the Pennsylvania facility, including its director,
returned to Florida several weeks later and reported no similar problems.
Nonetheless, Lynda Sommers, a consultant hired by
the state to monitor the facility over a number of years, also found it in
disarray in the period after the second Pennsylvania group. Ms. Sommers reported suspected sexual relationships between
staff members and offenders, staff members who slept on the job, crumbling facilities, and vague policies on punishing
troublemakers and treating the mentally ill. Liberty’s own internal investigator,
Kenneth Dudding, was also deeply critical of
hiring decisions for low-level staff members, whose salaries started at a
base rate of $12.89 an hour. “You could have worked at Wal-Mart last week,
they put you in front of a computer to read policy for a few hours, then
they send you to a dorm and let you go,” said Mr. Dudding,
who left after clashing with Liberty’s management. As for female security
workers, Mr. Dudding said they were easily
manipulated by the sex offenders. “It’s like putting candy in front of a
baby,” he said. Mr. Dudding said he ultimately
called a state whistle-blower’s hot line. The inspector general of the
Department of Children and Families investigated and issued stinging
reports, saying that the facility’s safety director had tried to cover up
wrongdoing by tampering with evidence, that an employee was suspected of
selling marijuana, and that alcohol was being made and sold there. Liberty
officials said the safety director was fired for “failure to properly
function in her role” before they received the inspector general’s
critique, and they said they fired the worker suspected of drug sales — on
whom no contraband was found — for an unrelated reason. Then a group of
residents, angry when the fire marshal demanded that they not have so many
personal items, moved into a yard. For months, the staff could not persuade
them to go back to their rooms, creating a scene one law enforcement
officer called “Woodstock gone amok.” Liberty said it first asked for help
from the Department of Corrections and was turned down, only to ultimately
get a response the company called “excessive.” In February 2005, several
hundred corrections and law enforcement officers in riot gear arrived and
restored order. That spring, Liberty’s requests to the state grew more
insistent. The company asked for $31.1 million for the next fiscal year; it
received $18.7 million, the same as the year before. By April, having
described an “alarming” set of “chronic and serious” issues at the
facility, the state was preparing to end its relationship with Liberty. New
Company Takes Over: In the end, the struggle between security and treatment
may help explain Liberty’s doomed tenure at the Florida center. “I had
imagined that we would be trying to do research or publish or be innovative
or at least use state-of-the-art equipment,” said Dean Cauley,
a former therapist at the center. “When I arrived, the equipment wasn’t
being used, tests were outdated and treatment was very much secondary to
maintaining security.” Liberty officials said that treating patients had
always been their company’s reason for being. Most of the company leaders,
including Dr. Herbert T. Caskey, the founder,
were originally clinicians, not business people. If states wanted simply to
lock up, not treat, the worst sexual predators, Kenneth Carabello,
Liberty’s director of regional operations for California and the western
United States, said, “We’d let somebody else do this.” Despite the center’s
history, Don Ryce, the father of Jimmy Ryce, the 9-year-old boy whose 1995 rape and murder
spurred the Florida Legislature to adopt a civil commitment law in his name
three years later, said the law’s “overall intention” had been
accomplished. “There are a lot of people who are confined who otherwise I
guarantee you would be out there reoffending,” Mr. Ryce
said, though he added, “I’m not going to pretend there aren’t serious
problems that need to be addressed.” As Liberty departed, Florida picked
another private company, the GEO Group Inc., to run the center here. The
GEO Group, once known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, has more than
23 years of experience running prisons. Of 63 centers GEO operates
worldwide, 58 are correctional and detention facilities. Last fall, under
GEO’s watch, a new glimpse of turmoil began emerging. Early one morning, a
resident said he was attacked by another in his bunk. His screaming,
kicking and banging on his door went unanswered for almost 15 minutes
before staff members responded, other residents said. GEO officials said workers
from the company and the Department of Corrections “responded promptly” to
what GEO described as a “resident upon resident” fight, an assessment
echoed in a DeSoto County sheriff’s report. But
some 100 residents signed a letter calling for an end to the practice of
housing two residents in a single room. The center “is supposed to be a
mental health facility, not a prison,” the residents wrote. “We are to be
treated as patients, not state convicts.”
July 13, 2006 Sun-Herald
The Florida Civil Commitment Center near Arcadia underwent a changing of
the guard this week -- without changing many of the guards. A new
contractor, the GEO Group of Boca Raton, has taken over the operation of
the facility from the former contractor, Liberty of Philadelphia. But GEO
has hired 182 of Liberty's former employees, under a 90-day probation
agreement in which the employees have to prove themselves, said Timothy Budz, GEO facility administrator. "We did that in
three days," Budz said Wednesday. "The
transition has progressed very well." Established by the Legislature's
1998 Jimmy Ryce Act, the center houses some 545
violence sex offenders. It is located 10 miles east of Arcadia in a former
state prison.
June 19, 2006 Miami Herald
Holding the razor in his mouth, Ernest Contrillo
ran the blade over his right wrist seven times as blood flowed from the
crooked wounds. It wasn't the first time he mutilated himself inside the
Florida Civil Commitment Center. A year earlier in the center, Contrillo, 52, lost his left arm to a gangrene
infection he coaxed along by severing his flesh. State records show that
for four decades Contrillo had sought comfort in
pain, yet he managed to obtain razor blades and cut himself numerous times
in what's supposed to be a secure mental health facility for Florida's most
menacing sexual predators. Since it opened in 1999, the center -- created
to treat men for their sexual disorders after serving prison terms -- has
struggled to meet its most basic mission, let alone deal with the medical
needs of men like Contrillo. After his arm was
amputated, he spent 10 days in the hospital because caregivers did not keep
him on antibiotics. In fact, a four-month review of monitoring reports,
court cases and internal documents show so many breakdowns in medical and
mental care that drugs often were dispensed without doctors' approval, men
languished without treatment, and in some cases, those with severe
psychological disorders were forced into solitary confinement -- some never
getting treatment for sexual problems. Gaps in care were often noted during
state reviews, but problems continued. One man was given a powerful
antipsychotic drug even though he was not diagnosed with a mental illness.
Another was left in an infirmary for days while urine in his bedpan
collected mold. ''All I ever heard from everybody was that they were sexual
predators. But they're also human,'' said Beverly Babb, a former nurse who
quit the center in 2004 after a year. Said Douglas Shadle,
a psychiatrist who left because of conditions: ``This is an asylum-era
institution that has no place in this century.'' Despite problems, state
lawmakers repeatedly refused requests to adequately fund the center. But
they waived laws that require the civil commitment facility to meet state
medical and mental care standards. Seven years later, those decisions have
exposed the state to a class-action lawsuit that places the entire program
in jeopardy and exposes taxpayers to millions in potential court fines, a
Miami Herald investigation has found. Consider: • For years, medical care
has been plagued by shoddy record keeping, failure to provide basic
checkups, delayed treatment of serious illnesses and potential violations
of state and federal laws. • Crucial medications, such as powerful
psychotropic and cancer drugs, were often not available or provided to
residents without proper documentation. • Records show the center's use of
solitary confinement defies state and federal guidelines. • As the facility
began filling up with mentally ill men, the private contractor hired to run
the center, Liberty Behavioral Health, asked the state five times for more
money and staff to provide psychiatric care. Each time, the state balked. •
As the center's population grew by more than 300 percent, its funding
increased just 46 percent, leaving it to operate on a budget that's less
than half of those found at other mental health facilities in Florida. •
The facility's staffing levels are now less than half of similar programs
in other states. ''Anytime offenders are put in the position where they can
pretend to have the moral high ground, then we have done something very
stupid,'' said Don Ryce, the father of 9-year-old
Jimmy Ryce, whose 1995 abduction, rape and murder
led to the creation of Florida's civil commitment law, known as the Jimmy Ryce Act. BLAME GAME With Liberty's contract set to
expire June 30, the Florida Department of Children
& Families -- the agency that runs the program -- has the difficult job
of cleaning up a treatment center it allowed to deteriorate during the past
seven years. DCF lays most of the blame for the center's woes on its
Pennsylvania-based contractor and has decided to manage the center until
January 2007, when the international corrections company GEO Group is
slated to take over the contract. But Liberty, which holds similar
contracts in four other states, says the agency's decisions and the state's
refusal to adequately fund the program caused it to falter. ''[Now] that
the Department of Children & Families has chosen to publicly denounce
our company and turn Liberty into a scapegoat for a legacy of its own poor
decisions, we are prepared to speak out,'' Sue Nayda,
Liberty's vice president, wrote in a 9-page letter to The Miami Herald on
June 9. Liberty says that since the program began, the DCF ''abdicated its
responsibilities to establish formal, fundamental administrative rules,
regulations or standards to govern the program,'' leaving Liberty to fend
for itself as it struggled to treat offenders with a shoestring staff.
CLASS-ACTION SUIT Florida now faces a class-action lawsuit that claims the
center is failing to provide constitutionally adequate care. One other
state with a similar program, Washington, has racked up $10 million in
court fines after losing a similar class-action case in 1992 -- and it
spends twice as much per offender as Florida. Already, the center in
Northwest Florida lost one state case over its disciplinary methods. Four
offenders at the facility filed suit in DeSoto
County Circuit Court in 2002, claiming the center violated their rights by
placing them in confinement without telling them why or allowing them to
contact lawyers. Ruling in favor of the offenders, DeSoto
County Circuit Court Judge Vincent T. Hall found the center not only broke
rules governing mental health facilities, but also state prisons and
standards set forth by the U.S. Supreme Court.
June 2, 2006 Sun-Herald
When its contract expires June 30, the contractor operating a state
treatment center for sexually violent predators near Arcadia will be shown
the door. The Florida Department of Children and Families, which manages
the Florida Civil Commitment Center, will not retain Liberty Behavioral
Health to run the facility until a new contractor can be hired, said Tim Bottcher, spokesman for the Florida Department of
Children and Families. The process to award a new contract and build a new
facility could take six months or more. To run the facility in the interim,
the state will assign perhaps dozens of Department of
Corrections officers from prisons in surrounding counties to provide
security. And a temporary employee service will provide other workers, Bottcher indicated. Technically, Liberty is still in
the running for the new contract. But the DCF's inspector general in a past
investigation cited numerous incidents of violent assaults, drug abuse, alcohol bootlegging and inappropriate behavior involving
both residents and staffers. "I don't think it's any secret we haven't
been happy with Liberty's performance as far as the current contract is
concerned," Bottcher said. The change in
center management has Liberty's local employees worried about both their
jobs and the treatment of the residents, said John Brosnihan,
a security supervisor for Liberty. Liberty was the only bidder at the time
the center was started. A competing firm had declined to bid because of the
facility proposed for the center -- in a defunct state prison, an officer
of the firm, Geo Group, said in a past interview. In 2005, the Legislature
passed a bill that authorized the DCF to hire a contractor to both build
and operate a new 600-bed center. The DCF's bidding process was derailed,
however, after Liberty challenged the bid specifications for alleged
bid-rigging. That litigation was recently resolved and now the bidding
selection process will get under way, Bottcher
said. Liberty and the Geo Group have submitted bids. Bottcher
said a site for the new facility has not been identified, but it will
likely be located within the Arcadia area. Prison Health Services will be
hired to provide health care and clinical treatment until the contract is
awarded. The DCF is still "in talks" with a temporary employment
service to fill other roles in the interim, Bottcher
said.
February 3, 2006 Sun Herald
Chronic problems with the way Florida deals with its sexually violent
predators by detaining them in a prison-like institution called the Florida
Civil Commitment Center have been reported to state officials, lawmakers
and the governor for years. So far, little has changed. But a four-part
series of articles about the center published this week by the Miami Herald
may change that, said Ken Dudding of Port
Charlotte, a former internal affairs investigator at the facility who is
featured in the series. Now, Dudding said he
hopes the Herald's exposure of the problems will spur Gov. Jeb. Bush and
the Legislature to reform the facility. Dudding
cites a phone call he received Thursday morning from the show "60
Minutes" to arrange an interview next week. "I mean, you can report
it to the governor, report it to the Legislature and nothing happens,"
Dudding said. "All of a sudden, an article
like this comes out, and (state officials are) taking notice. At least they
can't claim ignorance." A spokesman for the program said "60
Minutes" does not comment on stories it may or may not be doing. Dudding, a retired Charlotte County sheriff's deputy,
worked for Liberty Behavioral Health, the company hired by the state to run
the facility, for a year in 2004-05. Dudding
resigned citing a lackadaisical response by Liberty's administrators to his
investigations. His investigations often found that staffers turned a blind
eye to incidents in which residents committed
physical assaults, stabbings, sexual assaults and drug and alcohol abuse.
January 30, 2006 Miami Herald
For seven years, Florida taxpayers pumped more than $100 million into the
Florida Civil Commitment Center, a facility set up to treat the mental
disorders of the state's most dangerous sexual predators. What taxpayers
got: a place where child pornography arrived in the mail, stashed inside
transistor radios. Bags of marijuana came in care packages, stuffed in the
guts of peanut butter jars, and men brewed gallons of homemade alcohol
under the noses of a shoestring staff. The cornerstone of a program named
after a slain 9-year-old boy, the center eroded into a place where boredom,
violence and the fog of drugs and alcohol became as common as group therapy
sessions -- with one man dying after a fight over a bag of Cheetos. Overcrowded and short-staffed, with less than
half of the men actually in treatment, the center lies at the heart of what
is wrong with the Jimmy Ryce Act, an
investigation by The Miami Herald found. ''It's a terribly, terribly run
program,'' said Kelly Summers, a former investigator for the Florida
Department of Children & Families, who uncovered a slew of problems at
the center. ``Because no one wants to appear soft on sex offenders, no one
wants to address what's going on down there.''Among
the newspaper's findings: • Employees struggle to manage a facility plagued
with fights, substance abuse and suicide attempts. Guards have been caught
covering up mistakes by erasing security tapes and altering reports, while
others have been accused of selling drugs and having sex with offenders. •
While the state has sent more men to the center, staffing hasn't kept pace
because the Legislature refuses to provide enough funds -- creating a
dangerous disparity that reached an all-time high in the months before
authorities were forced to conduct a raid last February to restore order. •
The number of clinicians also has failed to keep pace with the ballooning
population. Since the facility opened seven years ago, psychologists'
caseloads have quadrupled, leaving hundreds of men pacing the yard,
dwelling in doldrums and stirring up trouble. • Nearly three dozen men who
suffer from severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar
disorder receive little or no specialized treatment -- let alone therapy
for their psychosexual disorders -- a direct violation of federal law,
several civil rights attorneys say. • Meanwhile, a treatment center
originally slated to house 460 men now holds more than 520, creating more
tension. Liberty Behavioral Health, the private company that runs the
center, insists that security is now under control and that problems at the
center are no different from those found at any institution of a
``correctional nature.'' ''To characterize the facility as rife with
trouble . . . is a gross exaggeration,'' the company wrote in a response to
The Miami Herald's findings. But the center never was intended to be a
correctional facility, according to the legislation. In fact, the
Department of Children & Families, which hired Liberty to operate the
center, told The Miami Herald that it has ''identified numerous
deficiencies in Liberty's performance,'' including inadequate supervision
and ''mismanagement'' of security. Several men recently interviewed at the
center by The Miami Herald said disruptions and fights continue at the facility.The boredom and frustration felt by the
offenders boiled over on Feb. 9, 2005, when more than 300 officers clad in
riot gear and armed with billy clubs and pepper
spray began to assemble before dawn. At sunrise, they descended on the
cluster of concrete buildings tucked into the sprawling prison compound
that houses the treatment center. Their mission: Restore order. Conditions
at the center had deteriorated so badly that a lockdown was under way to
force the men to obey orders from the state fire marshal. Dozens of
offenders refused to leave the yard, where they dragged mattresses from
their dormitories and draped sheets on extension cords running from
buildings to television sets outside. Minutes after storming the center,
police confronted men who were brandishing broom handles. In one dorm,
officers had to call for reinforcements and shoot bursts of chemical agents
into the air to regain control. The raid was a culmination of events
building inside the facility for many years. By 2004, the men outnumbered
employees more than 2-1, a disparity so lopsided that many guards felt
inclined to let bad behavior pass, according to internal documents and
interviews with several workers. ''As long as they are happy, we let them
go,'' one staff member told corporate officers from Liberty Behavioral
Health during a tour of the facility in July 2004. According to an internal
memo obtained by The Miami Herald, Liberty's officers described fights
breaking out between drunken offenders, bikini posters hanging in the rooms
of sexual offenders, and a facility where ''residents appear to have the
run of the cafeteria.'' In one packed dorm, men outnumbered staff members
45-3. To this day, Liberty has had difficulty attracting and keeping staff
members because of stressful working conditions and because Arcadia's labor
pool is so small, according to state investigators.The
DCF had to pay the Department of Corrections $2 million to ship in 300
officers and conduct a raid on the center just to get the men to comply
with orders from the state fire marshal. During the raid, officers searched
offenders' rooms and found more than eight gallons of homemade alcohol and
other contraband. After the raid, the Legislature provided an additional
$2.6 million last May for more security at the center. But experts say
that's not enough to fix the center's woes. Last October, a man housed in
the quad died after a brawl over a bag of cheese curls. Daniel Donnelly,
38, sat at a table in the bay area of F Dorm Quad 2 when Alfredo Roebuck,
48, called in payment for two rolled cigarettes he had given to Donnelly
earlier. Owed to Roebuck: a bag of Cheetos.
Donnelly, five feet four inches tall, 134 pounds, had a history of reneging
on barters, common at a facility where many men have no money. He refused
to give the bag to Roebuck -- who was five inches taller and nearly 100
pounds heavier. Offenders in F Dorm say no guards were watching when
Roebuck and Donnelly began to scuffle. State reports say there was one
staff member present, a 51-year-old therapeutic assistant responsible for
monitoring all four quads in the dorm while most offenders were at lunch --
a deficiency noted in reports conducted after Donnelly's death. After the
altercation, Donnelly's condition rapidly deteriorated. He later slipped
into a coma. Paramedics airlifted him to Lee Memorial Hospital, where he
was placed on life support. Donnelly died nine days later, after his family
decided to remove his feeding tube. Donnelly's death came as no surprise to
Kenneth Dudding, a former Washington, D.C., police detective, hired by the center as an internal
investigator in March 2004. During the next year, he conducted
investigations at a facility that had completely broken down as an
inadequate, untrained staff struggled to handle hundreds of men. In one
case, Jerome Wagner, an offender with severe mental illness, was able to
climb onto the roof of one of the buildings in April 2004. Instead of
trying to coax him into climbing down, staff members on duty rushed him. So
Wagner jumped off the roof and injured his left leg. He was later treated
by DeSoto County emergency medical workers. In
another case, a two-time sexual offender named Jorge Delgado stabbed
offender Marshal Watson 12 times, using a 10-inch metal shank with a white-taped
handle in October 2004. After the incident, staff members ordered offenders
in the dorm to clean up the crime scene with bleach, ruining an
investigation by the DeSoto County Sheriff's
Office, according to an internal report. In both cases, Dudding
went back to review security tapes and read reports of the incidents but
found that they had been erased or tampered with. ''During these
investigations, staff immediately began covering up what happened --
destroying tapes, altering reports. I was being hampered,'' Dudding said. He said that when he complained, he was
told that he was being too aggressive. Fed up after just two months on the
job, Dudding blew the whistle on the facility in
May 2004. Investigators from the DCF's Office of Inspector General spent
the next four months picking the facility apart. Records show that they
corroborated nearly every problem outlined by Dudding:
widespread use of alcohol and drugs, sex among offenders and staff members.
There were also instances of tampering with security tapes and incident
reports and a general lack of control, the inspector general's report
stated. In addition, the investigators reported that marijuana arrived in
care packages, with some stashes stuffed in peanut butter jars. Cocaine was
found in one room but was flushed down a toilet by a staff member. No one
was charged. But after DCF investigator Summers and her boss issued their
report in September 2004, little changed at the facility at first. ''When
my supervisor and I sent up our preliminary reports, we were surprised
about the minimal attention it got,'' Summers said. She said they pushed
harder to help persuade the DCF to conduct the raid in February, after
offenders refused to comply with orders from the state fire marshal. ''Part
of the problem is that DCF is not equipped to handle a facility that is
responsible for violent criminals,'' she said. The Legislature provided
$2.6 million more for additional staff members after the February raid, and
the DCF says it contracted with the DCF last October to monitor safety and
security at the center. But even with the additional money and oversight,
problems persist. Donnelly was killed four months after the increase, while
Delgado repeatedly stabbed another man with a metal shank in December. ''The
program doesn't work because it's not designed to work,'' said Dean Cauley, a former clinician at the center. ``This was a
harebrained idea and an expensive idea that really wasn't thought out very
well, and now we are seeing the result of it.''
December 15, 2005 Sun Herald
It was 42-year-old George Williams' hobby to tend to a patch of flowers
outside his dormitory at the Florida Civil Commitment Center. But his
devotion to his flower garden nearly got Williams killed Friday. Williams
was stabbed seven times with a homemade knife. The stabbing came after he
got into a fight with another center resident when a basketball bounced
into his garden, according to a DeSoto County
Sheriff's Office report. Friday's stabbing fits a pattern indicating that
chronic understaffing and mismanagement by administrators have created an
insecure environment, according to Ken Dudding, a
former internal affairs investigator for Liberty Behavioral Health, the
contractor that runs the facility for the Florida Department of Children
and Families. "My point is, this (Delgado) is a guy that goes around
stabbing people -- and he can find a knife laying
around anyplace," Dudding said in a phone
interview Tuesday. Located 10 miles east of Arcadia, the center houses 520
sex offenders who have completed their prison terms but have been deemed by
the state to still pose a risk of re-offending. The center was established
in a former state prison under the Legislature's 1998 Jimmy Ryce Act. The act calls for the civil commitment of
sexual predators for "care, control and treatment." Dudding resigned in January 2005 after a year with
Liberty. He said he investigated about 100 violent incidents involving
bodily harm, as well as other allegations of drug dealing, alcohol
smuggling and nepotism. Dudding claimed that his
supervisors stymied some of his investigations and failed to adequately
discipline misconduct by some of the staffers. Resident John Curry, who has
filed numerous complaints with the DCF and the courts on behalf of himself
and other residents, described the current atmosphere within the facility
as "a battle zone." "We're erupting because they're
tightening down the hatch intensely and there's no release, so we react to
the least little thing," Curry said. "What it boils down to is we
do not have adequate staff to operate this facility." Curry said
facility staffers often complain their ranks are understaffed to the point
they can't handle incidents effectively. Liberty's contract requires 179
employees. The number of vacant positions could not be obtained Tuesday.
April 8, 2005 St. Petersburg Times
Sexual predators too violent to be released into society would get a new
600-bed, privately built facility under a plan the state Department of
Children and Families is quietly pitching in the Legislature. The proposal,
largely unnoticed until Democrats discovered it in the Senate budget, comes
six months after state officials discovered rampant lawlessness at the
Florida Civil Commitment Facility near Arcadia, a facility run by Liberty Behavioral
Health Corp. of Pennsylvania. A February report by DCF's inspector general
revealed that residents made and abused homemade alcohol. It said fights
between residents were common. The report also found Liberty employees
compromised an investigation of a stabbing by ordering residents to clean
up before law enforcement arrived.
September 30, 2004 Sun-Herald
Florida's commitment center for sexually violent predators has serious
problems with employee nepotism, cover-ups of staff mismanagement, marijuana
smuggling, money laundering, and a lack of professional response to violent
incidents -- and the contractor that runs the facility needs to do more to
solve them. That's the conclusion of Sheryl Steckler,
inspector general for the Department of Children and Families, the agency
responsible for the Florida Civil Commitment Center. And the department
itself, headed by Luci D. Hadi,
Interim Secretary, echoes that conclusion, in a statement issued Wednesday
by DCF spokesman Tim Bottcher. "The
performance of the contractor with regard to these issues is
unsatisfactory," the department stated. "The residents of the
Florida Civil Commitment Center are dangerous, and it is vital that the
facility be secure and safe at all times. The inspector general concluded that facility safety director
Tiffany Lane failed to document incidents of alleged misconduct or
mismanagement by staff. In some cases, she also destroyed evidence,
including erasing videotapes. The DCF has hired Liberty Behavioral Health
of Pennsylvania to run the facility under a $50 million, three-year
contract. Lane and several staffers worked to cover up evidence or discard
complaints to thwart internal investigations into the handling of a
half-dozen incidents, the investigative report states. In
several instances, employees who complained of misconduct or mismanagement
by Lane or members of her clique were given demotions, suspensions and
terminations, the report indicates. The investigation "demonstrated
how Ms. Lane either failed to document or destroyed documents that she felt
were unfavorable toward or certain staff members, including her own mother
whom she supervised," wrote Summers. The report also cites that a half-dozen employees have criminal records. Sworn
statements from residents also revealed that racial tensions had led to
stabbings and beatings. Also,
residents and employees told investigators that marijuana use inside the
facility is rampant. Since the investigation, the Florida Department of Law
Enforcement has opened an investigation into drug dealing and money
laundering. Also, the inspector general plans to investigate additional
allegations in a separate investigation, according to the report.
May
12, 2004 AP
Eight sexual predators detained under the Jimmy Ryce
Act have sued the state, claiming they are getting inadequate treatment for
their mental health problems, which leaves them with little chance of being
released. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Myers on Friday
named the Department of Children & Families and Liberty Behavioral
Health Corp., the company contracted to run the Florida Civil Commitment
Center in Arcadia.The suit claims Liberty
Behavioral Health is short staffed and fails to provide adequate,
individualized treatment. Some detainees spend as little as two hours per
week in treatment, according to the suit.
Liberty
Health Care
January 14, 2011 News Observer
Three out-of-state companies are jockeying for a potentially lucrative
state contract to house and care for people with mental illness accused of
crimes that include murder. Facing massive budget cuts, the state
Department of Health and Human Services last month issued a "request
for information" seeking private firms interested in operating a
facility for about 90 forensic patients. Some of those patients are housed
at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, which is set to close. The patients
include those facing charges or found not guilty by reason of insanity for
offenses ranging from first-degree murder to misdemeanor trespassing. Staff
members at Dix also provide the psychiatric evaluations that help determine
whether an accused person exhibiting signs of mental illness is competent
to stand trial, a responsibility that could now be entrusted to a private
contractor. District attorneys and disability advocates have expressed
serious reservations about the plan, citing the sensitivity of the job and
the state's checkered history of privatizations with mental health care and
prisons. A DHHS spokeswoman this week disclosed the names of three firms that
have filed proposals: The GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla.; MHM Services of
Vienna, Va., and Liberty Healthcare of Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Records show that all three companies have
hired well-known Raleigh-based lobbyists to help them get the contract,
which is potentially worth millions of dollars: ♦Since 2009, GEO has
been represented by Franklin Freeman at McGuireWoods.
Freeman previously served as a secretary of correction, an associate
justice on the N.C. Supreme Court and senior staffer to Govs. Jim Hunt and
Mike Easley. ♦MHM Services hired lobbyist Mark Beason
in 2008. Beason, along with his father Don Beason, were fined for lobbying violations last year.
Once considered among the state's most powerful lobbyists, Don Beason left the profession because of his entanglements
with disgraced House Speaker Jim Black, who pleaded guilty to federal
corruption charges. ♦Liberty Healthcare hired George M. Teague, a law
partner at Nelson Mullins and longtime lobbyist for insurance companies and
bankers. The News & Observer reported in May that Lanier Cansler, the DHHS secretary who was a lobbyist, had
been meeting with lobbyists for at least three companies interested in
taking over chunks of the state's mental health system, including the care
of those in the forensic unit.
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