GLENDENING SUSPENDS JUVENILE BOOT CAMPS

Top state officials knew of beatings but failed to act, task force finds;
National Guard takes over; Governor and Townsend order camps converted into
residential centers

Gov. Parris N. Glendening suspended Maryland's boot camp operations
yesterday, turning them over to the commander of the state's National
Guard, and a task force in Baltimore concluded that top state officials
knew delinquents at the camps were routinely being beaten but did almost
nothing to protect them.

After a dizzying week of action surrounding the military-style camps,
Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend ordered the facilities
converted into interim residential centers.

Until the state Department of Juvenile Justice figures out what to do with
them, the Garrett County sites will continue to house 79 delinquents who
had been enrolled in the boot camp programs and are still there.

The state task force the governor appointed to investigate the camps noted
yesterday memos from the juvenile justice agency's files showing that
orders from the governor and lieutenant governor to protect the teen-agers
from guards were essentially ignored.

Task force members are debating whether the camps should be converted to
traditional detention or treatment facilities, or whether some version of
the boot camps should continue. The governor will decide after the task
force reports to him Wednesday.

Glendening said he was disturbed by reports in a four-part series The Sun
began publishing Dec. 5 that described guards kicking delinquents, punching
them and slamming them to the ground. The assaults were witnessed over five
months by a reporter and photographer.

He noted that the teens are delinquents and sometimes dangerous but said
that is no excuse for the beatings.

"We're obviously very frustrated," Glendening said in a telephone interview
yesterday. "We do understand most of these individuals are violent and
continue to be a violent threat to society, but we have very strong rules,
and there is to be no violent abuse of any individual in our care.

"It increasingly appears there were major infractions of those rules."

24-hour watch

Glendening ordered the state Department of Social Services to continue to
post workers at the three camps on a 24-hour watch to make sure the
delinquents are safe. He said 14 boot camp guards accused of taking part in
the assaults will remain on administrative duty and will have no contact
with the juvenile offenders or facilities.

The camps will maintain their programs for academics, counseling, drug
treatment and community service.

Glendening told the state National Guard commander, Lt. Gen. James F.
Fretterd, to immediately assume supervision of the Savage Leadership
Challenge, Backbone Leadership Challenge and Meadow Mountain Leadership
Challenge, the three Western Maryland camps.

'I was so frustrated'

"I was so frustrated by the events over the past 48 hours that we had to
suspend the boot camp aspects of the programs," the governor said.

Glendening was referring to a group of teens from the camps who told a
judge Friday that they had been routinely beaten in recent weeks and to an
article in The Sun Friday that showed the assaults have not ended.

Noting internal documents from the juvenile justice agency, that article
described how guards fractured the wrist of a Talbot County 16-year-old
Nov. 29 during a violent induction into the Savage camp. Nobody at the camp
notified the boy's parents until his father called the camp to check on his
son's health after reading The Sun's series.

Teens from the camps traveled to Baltimore Friday under a city judge's
order to testify about treatment at the camps. After listening to accounts
the delinquents gave of guards breaking noses and banging heads for such
infractions as talking out of turn, the judge ordered all 26 Baltimore City
teens moved from the camp to other facilities or sent home.

A Howard County (http://www.co.ho.md.us) court official did the same
Thursday for three other delinquents at the camps. In all, 34 teen-agers
had been removed from the camps by Friday.

Concern began in August

Glendening said he and Townsend had been concerned about conditions at the
camp since a reporter began raising questions about the assaults in August.

He said he and the lieutenant governor told Gilberto de Jesus, the juvenile
justice secretary, that if the juveniles were being assaulted, steps had to
be taken to end them and the guards had to be held responsible.

"We had been assured repeatedly that if there were some earlier violations
of our rules and regulations, they have since been corrected," the governor
said. "It seems clear from the testimony before the judge that apparently
wasn't so."

Uncertain future

The future of the camps and the fate of de Jesus and other employees of the
juvenile justice agency will be reviewed Thursday and Friday, Glendening
said, after the seven-member task force he appointed reports to him.

De Jesus has been criticized by children's advocates since Glendening
appointed him in 1997, and the governor's remarks yesterday were the least
supportive of the secretary since then.

A spokesman for de Jesus said he could not be found for comment. The
secretary had been scheduled to talk to the governor's task force
yesterday, but that was postponed until tomorrow. The task force, chaired
by Bishop L. Robinson, a former state public safety secretary, began an
outline yesterday for the report due to be presented to the governor
Wednesday. The group was quickly formed by the governor Wednesday.

The report is likely to scorch the juvenile justice agency. Among its
findings as of yesterday is that de Jesus was aware of reported assaults as
early as Aug. 9 and failed to end them.

Robinson said the juvenile justice agency's memos indicate that its
inspector general, Joan McEntyre, informed de Jesus of allegations of
assaults and that she intended to investigate them.

"It's clear to me that the inspector general went to the boot camps to
investigate with the concurrence and blessing of the secretary," Robinson
said in an interview. "It's hard for us to reach any other conclusion."

The task force found scant evidence that any measures were taken to protect
the teen-agers, even after McEntyre held dozens of reports of assaults.

'Not sufficient'

Robinson said the juvenile justice agency could provide only two memos that
made any mention of corrective actions since de Jesus was told in August to
end any abuses.

Both were essentially restatements of existing policy, he said.

"This is all we have," Robinson told the task force. "That is not
acceptable to me. It's not sufficient."

Task force members said they were aghast at how the department has been run.

"It's like nobody's in charge, everybody's in charge," said former state
Sen. Decatur W. Trotter of Prince George's County. "Nobody seems to know
nothing about nothing."

Five investigations

Robinson is leading one of five investigations into the department, four of
which began after the Sun series reported the assaults. The series also
showed that the agency's after-care system for delinquents on probation
routinely allows them to skip drug rehabilitation and other programs.

Among those other investigations, state social workers and state police,
looking for evidence of possible child abuse, continued yesterday their
combined efforts to interview 500 teen-agers who have passed through the
three camps.

In the first hour of its first meeting Friday, Robinson's task force found
that the beatings at the camps amounted to a pattern of abuse that
stretched back at least a year.