Thread by @JimmyJenkins

The Auditor General found that Arizona is putting more seriously mentally ill children in our juvenile prison because we lack the resources to treat them anywhere else

"For example, the closing of the adolescent unit of the Arizona State Hospital in September 2009 removed a
secure treatment option for these youth." azauditor.gov/sites/default/…

In Arizona's juvenile prison there were "9 serious and life-threatening youth suicide attempts during calendar year 2019, and 7 serious and life-threatening youth suicide attempts during calendar year 2020."

Arizona forces the kids in its juvenile prison to participate in a "Work Incentive Pay Program" but the audit found that we're . . . not paying them:

"Specifically, the Department did not pay 16 youth for all the hours they worked, (a total of 186 hours not paid)"

While failing to pay children for compulsory labor, the Arizona Dept. of Juvenile Corrections was found to have paid "a now former employee" $94K for hours they DID NOT work over the course of 3 years: "the employee believed that he/she was allowed to be paid for being on call"

This part is from a previous audit but worth repeating that the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections is still putting juveniles in isolation too often and without documenting the reasoning kjzz.org/content/169987…

Sending a youth to an isolation cell is especially traumatic because they are forced to endure a strip search, and many times they are shackled while being transported to the isolation cell kjzz.org/content/169987…

It's incredible to me that auditors keep finding the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections is not handling the use of isolation properly, because that very issue has been the focus of TWO previous Federal investigations - It's one of the reasons why ADJC was created

Here's a map showing what parts of the state the kids in Arizona's youth prison come from - the Adobe Mountain School Secure Care facility is located North of Phoenix

Adobe Mountain School was built in 1970 - I've been there. Parts of it look kind of like a school, but most of it looks like a prison. Arizona is planning on building a new juvenile prison - ADJC tells me they are still in the planning process kjzz.org/content/165004…

I've never seen these statistics before. The audit found nearly 1/5 of the youths in Arizona's juvenile prison are parents:

"From 2017 through 2020, there were 2 youth in the Facility who were pregnant"

"30 of the youth in the Facility in calendar year 2020 were parents."

This is something - the audit found a group called RSAC, which "consists primarily of representatives from the religious community who are responsible for advising the Director on the religious programming for youth in the Facility" is potentially violating AZ's open meeting law

This is an issue I hear about a lot from current and former employees, that basically the Department tries to deal with potential criminal violations "in house" to keep the press off bad stories instead of referring them to an outside agency

Those are the main findings that jump out at me - I have interviews scheduled with the auditors and will report more on this next week - until then, major props to the Arizona Auditor General - they published a ton of incredible information this week azauditor.gov