U.S.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – In the darkness, juvenile delinquents armed with sticks and rocks ran through the fenced-in yard at Woodland Hills Development Center, chasing and knocking over adult guards and striking them with makeshift weapons.
The kids – serving time for everything from drug offenses to serious crimes like aggravated robbery – had left their unlocked rooms late on Sept. 1 and found freedom by kicking through a flimsy panel below a window at the youth-rehabilitation center where they lived.
After making it to the yard outside the center, 32 of them slipped under a weak spot in the perimeter fence and escaped.
Three weeks later, two are still on the run. The rest were captured or returned within a week.
And rioting erupted at the facility two days after the breakout.
"This is a system fail of epic proportions," said Terry Maroney, a Vanderbilt University law professor who specializes in juvenile justice.
She said the mass escape was unlike anything she'd ever seen before.
"A mass escape from a secure juvenile facility -- something has gone very wrong," she said.
So what led so many young men to coordinate a breakout in such a violent manner? A declining budget, understaffing, undertrained staff and less-than-ideal infrastructure may be partly to blame. But reports of abuse from recent years may also lend answers.
From January to early September, there were 51 reports of staff assaults on teens, according to data obtained by The Tennessean. In 2010, the newspaper documented sexual abuse allegations at Woodland Hills, including a 15-year-old with mental difficulties who told his mother that a security guard solicited him for oral sex.
"Something is very horrific, terribly wrong at this facility," said Wallace Nabaa, whose 17-year-old son Kuyvonta, escaped and remains on the lam. "I believe these kids broke out because they wasn't getting treated right ... A lot of them say that they would do it again just to get out of that facility. They'd rather be locked up somewhere else or down at the juvenile [facility] downtown than be at this facility. So it's something inside the facility that's making these kids feel this way."
Nabaa said he believes the staff is too young and unprepared to deal with troubled young men like his son, who has some mental issues. He called it "kids babysitting kids."
Woodland Hills Development Center is not a maximum-security prison, nor is it a jail. Staffers use terms like "students" and "dorms" instead of "inmates" or "cells." The 132-bed facility is a place where teens aged 13 to 19, who have a certain seriousness to their criminal records, are supposed to receive rehabilitative services to learn how to become more productive members of society.
"It's not meant to punish. It's not meant to do anything other than protect them from themselves, protect the community from them … for as long as they present some sort of danger, and help them learn to be more functional in the world," Maroney said.
Jeremy Hollis, 18, who committed a burglary, lived at the facility when the breakout occurred.
He was days away from completing his sentence when he heard a group of kids preparing for the escape.
"Eight or nine kids, they came out, they was all, like, 'What's up? What's up? Let's go, who's trying to run? Who's trying to run?' And I was, like, 'Y'all go ahead. I isn't going nowhere.' Because I knew I was leaving in like two days. But so everyone went in their rooms, they put their shoes on and went right out the hole," he said.
Hollis credits his own willpower for making his experience at Woodland Hills successful. He took advantage of a program that helped him earn his GED and apply for college.
He also enrolled in an alcohol and drug treatment program and an anger-relief treatment program, which he said helped him change his attitude before leaving.
Despite all of the academic and social offerings, Hollis said he believed some kids broke out because they were frustrated with a constantly changing routine. Others felt bullied and unsafe, he said. Many did not have respect for the guards, he said.
"There's a few guards that'll try to give you a hard time," he said. "There's a few that'll just be cool with you and let you just hang out and chill."
Hollis said he also witnessed guards permitting violence.
"They would let kids get beat up on the dorms and I seen [another student] … a guard paid two students to beat him up because they got into a argument. And she waited till they was done beating him up before she even said anything about it," he alleged.
September's breakout wasn't the first sign of trouble at the facility.
In May, half a dozen kids tried to break out after curfew, and in 2004, a similar attempt involving teens armed with bricks left nearly 20 staff members injured.
Days before the latest breakout, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth sent a letter to the governor expressing concern about "substantial budget reductions," saying the juvenile justice system "critically needs additional funding to improve staffing and programming within the youth development centers." The commission also called for a system that uses smaller, more therapeutic facilities.
Maroney, the Vanderbilt professor, said Woodland Hills hardly feels therapeutic.
"When you treat kids like criminals, they learn to act like criminals," she said. "When a delinquent kid is put in state care, that should be a place that doesn't look like an adult prison, doesn't feel like an adult prison and doesn't run like an adult prison."
Located down the road from a women's prison surrounded by barbed wire, Woodland Hills is surrounded by a large perimeter fence that's being reinforced with a concrete footer after the latest breakout.
Although they are called students instead of inmates, children live in dorm rooms that look similar to jail cells. However, there are no bars on the doors, which also don't lock from the outside.
Maroney said a prison-like atmosphere is not an ideal space for rehabilitating children.
"That is not recommended as a best practice," she said. "There are a lot of things about Woodland Hills that I think get in the way of them being able to do the kind of rehabilitative work that they are in the business of doing."
Officials with the state Department of Children's Services say they're trying to fix the system.
"We were shocked because they were able to get out with such ease – and that they began to feed off of each other and kind of went into a situation that got out of control," said Jim Henry, the state commissioner for DCS.
"We've got a long way to go," he added, "but everybody's having this problem."
In a recently released "action plan," Tennessee's DCS announced it would conduct a security audit on all youth facilities to identify needed improvements "to assure safety of staff and students."
The action plan also indicated the need to hire additional staff and conduct evaluations "to determine more effective ways to maintain a safe and secure environment for staff and students."
"You want to get kids into a smaller setting," said DCS Commissioner Henry, "because that way, you can localize care."
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