Police helicopters no longer hover over the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School, looking for escapees who were some of Maryland's worst young criminals. For that, State Juvenile Services Secretary Mary Ann Saar is grateful.
But a year after taking over the troubled reformatory, Youth Services International Inc. still doesn't have the programs in place that most agree are needed to turn Hickey's 300 residents away from their next predictable stop -- jail -- and toward productive lives.
For about $55,000 a year of taxpayer money per youth -- more than enough for a sound college education -- the firm is offering students inadequate schooling, spotty job training and virtually no treatment for the drug addictions that affect many of them, critics say.
"The food is good. The place is 100 percent cleaner. But we're paying an enormous amount of money per child for this program," said Pat Hanges, a longtime volunteer and child advocate at Hickey. "What we thought we bought, we don't have."
To be sure, executives of the Owings Mills-based company, started by the founder of Jiffy Lube, are being asked to do something no other operator of the school has: change the behavior of system-savvy delinquents, provide a good education and vocational skills, and calm a security-conscious public. And all for about $2,000 less per student than the state spent when it ran Hickey.
"Our first objective was to provide peace of mind, safety and security," said Youth Services chief executive officer W. James Hindman. He said the company had to gain control of a chaotic facility before it could launch programs.
But concerns about Youth Services' ability to rehabilitate its charges are voiced by teachers and youth workers at the school, former staff members who left during the past year and child advocates who have monitored conditions at Hickey. Among their complaints:
* Not enough money goes into programs or materials, critics charge. Several teachers spoke of picking through donated textbooks from the 1960s to stitch together lesson plans while orders for new supplies went unfilled.
* An auto shop and print shop have remained empty and unstaffed through most of the year, despite the boast in a recent newsletter to company shareholders that students were learning new skills" in those shops.
* Youth Services' use of peaceful confrontation to change behavior frequently results instead in physical restraint by staff of the 158 students confined to the school's most secure program. Restraint in these cases -- sometimes for infractions as minor as talking in class or refusing to surrender a comb -- usually means students are held, dropped to the floor and kept there several minutes until they settle down.
* Staff turnover is unacceptably high, critics say. Of top administrators originally hired to turn the school around, many have left or have been promoted in the company. Many line-staff members were disillusioned by pay cuts Youth Services instituted when it came in; some have left, and others plan to leave.
* A mostly white teaching staff educates a population that is 85 percent black, prompting charges that the company does not provide effective role models who understand what the youths will face when they return to inner-city neighborhoods.
Ms. Saar, whose department is completing an audit of Hickey operations, gives the company credit for reducing escapes that plagued the first private operator, the Rebound Corp. of Denver, and for running some aspects of the school well.
'Needs work'
But she said that what is being offered is not enough, and Youth Services has to produce the programs it promised when it got a contract paying $49 million in its first three years; the final two years of the contract are still to be negotiated.
In many areas, the company's performance "needs work," Ms. Saar said.
Youth Services executives generally don't dispute the problems, and say they are working to correct each one. "We are on the road to doing a lot of things," Mr. Hindman said.
Whether the company can succeed should matter to Marylanders worried about how to prevent crimes and punish those who commit them.
As across the nation, juvenile crime in the state is on the rise, with a 31 percent increase in charges against youngsters for offenses such as assault, rape and robbery between 1991 and 1993. These are some of the young offenders who wind up at Hickey.
Those whose behavior does not change or whose mental, drug and alcohol or sexual impulse problems are not addressed, stand poised to overwhelm already crowded state prisons, collecting victims along the way who frequently are younger still.
A history of failure
Hickey historically has failed miserably to rehabilitate most of its charges. At its worst, the 144-year-old school has been a warehouse from which escape was easy and frequent.
A 1991 examination of conditions at Hickey by the Public Justice Center in Baltimore, a nonprofit advocacy group, found an excessive use of isolation as punishment for all types of infractions, including minor behavior problems and cursing. Fighting among youths on living units was routine.
The report further criticized the vocational program at Hickey, saying it did not offer meaningful training.
The state hired Rebound later that year to take over the school in the hope of solving the problems, but the company's contract was terminated after more than 80 youths escaped from the facility in one year. Youth Services took over in July 1993.
Today, the pastoral campus near the Carney area of Baltimore County remains a study in contrasts. Stucco buildings, some with large porticos, hold classrooms, offices and staff housing on the "open" portion of the grounds. The less dangerous students are placed here and live in dilapidated stucco cottages. Thoroughbred horses, newly donated to help students learn horse grooming, roam a pasture nearby.
But to the west, a high fence topped with spirals of razor wire surrounds the school's higher security program. The more serious offenders at Hickey live in this section, in locked units with bars on doors and windows, in rooms stripped of virtually all decoration.
Promise amid adversity
When Mr. Hindman, a 58-year-old former football coach, stepped into this picture, he promised to teach Hickey's young offenders to make something of themselves despite adversity, just as he created multimillion-dollar businesses after growing up in an orphanage.
Mr. Hindman said he would capture the imagination of these youngsters by giving them "life-altering" experiences, ranging from working with the new thoroughbreds to taking trips to South America to participate in a project that helps children in need of reconstructive surgery.
Kids would learn to be "taxpayers, not tax-eaters" through a "World of Work" curriculum that would teach students everything from how to find a job to resume-writing and interviewing skills.
They would start behaving better because they would be taught to motivate one another into positive behavior, much as some young people in the outside world might goad one another into drugs, drinking and crime. Occasionally, and as a last resort, a student would be restrained by staff members until he was ready to accept the group norms.
Some successes
Some of Mr. Hindman's vision appears to be succeeding. Ms. Saar said Youth Services has done an excellent job running a 24-student sex offender program set up by state officials before the company arrived. And she gives generally good marks to a short-term program in which about 75 less dangerous youngsters are sentenced to up to 90 days at Hickey.
Several students are taking college classes outside the institution, paid for by Youth Services, and others have gone on the trips promised.
Escapes are down dramatically, which officials attribute in part to a greater sense of order on the open campus, where most escapes in the past had occurred. The company's behavior modification program seems to be having some success with these students, at least while they are in custody.
Tougher problems
But so far, the company's treatment model is not working nearly as well for youths who are hardened to the system, state officials acknowledge. Behind the fence are young men who still rebel against the program Youth Services tries to offer. Students frequently are taken to the floor for breaking rules, and they sometimes fight back.
Said one youth worker: "It's still more like a jail mentality. It's too dangerous for the kids to try to use peer pressure when you don't have control."
State officials also remain troubled by staff turnover, the quality of the educational program and the continued lack of vocational training on both sides of the campus.
Ms. Saar is especially critical that there is still no "World of Work." Though there was no date set in the contract with Youth Services, the state's understanding was that the program was to have been running by now.
"I have not seen it yet," Ms. Saar said. "I would like to see it."
Company officials say they are on the way to delivering all they promised. It takes time to fix a place as troubled as Hickey has been, they say.
Hickey deputy director George Hudgens said he recently completed a survey of educational materials and put in a mass order that should arrive soon. He said problems with supplies had been caused in part by miscommunication among teachers over whose responsibility it was to place orders.
'It takes awhile'
Mr. Hudgens acknowledges that the vocational program at the school is less than adequate -- it consists largely of sporadic student participation in construction and landscaping projects on campus. But he said a more formal construction-trades program is scheduled to begin this fall.
The "World of Work" curriculum should be implemented next year, officials say, while the auto and print shops will be opened "soon," said David Morrison, acting director at Hickey.
The company also is working to better define groups of students with substance abuse and emotional problems and give them specialized care, Mr. Morrison said.
Salaries for 56 of the school's 386 employees recently were raised, and staff turnover is said to be slowing. "The kids deserve to know who's coming to dinner," Mr. Morrison said, referring to the lack of staff stability. The company also is trying to recruit more minority teachers, officials say.
They acknowledge their program behind the fence too often results in restraint of students, but they said time and additional staff training are slowly helping to foster an atmosphere of cooperation.
"We've done some things really well and some things not so well," Mr. Morrison said. "It takes awhile to build a positive peer culture, and we're working toward doing that."
Indeed, one student who recently was released from Hickey said aspects of the program worked for him.
Charles R., a 17-year-old former Hickey student from West Baltimore, said he has been sent to the school three times under various administrations, and has been in its lower and higher security sections.
His latest term was to be a three-month stay for drug dealing, beginning late last year. But frequent fighting and rule violations landed him a longer stay and a transfer to the school's secure section, ultimately to Unit 6, a maximum-security wing. He finally was released about two months ago, and now has a job waiting tables.
"They try," Charles said of Youth Services. "It teaches you a few things. It's helping me now, with anger, disrespect, self-control."
He said that students had less idle time than when the state ran the facility, but that they still didn't get enough individual counseling.
Behind the fence, confrontations and fighting were constant, he said. Students often fought being held down by staff, causing injury to staff members and themselves.
"I wasn't going down without damaging something," he said, recalling one incident in which he was restrained.
Profit motive
The fact that Youth Services must make a profit for its shareholders while it tries to help youths like Charles disturbs some. The company, privately held when it was formed in 1991, went public in February, seven months after taking over Hickey.
But even some supporters of giving the private sector a second go at a state government function say the cost of running Hickey still is far too high and the product inadequate for the money.
Because Mr. Hindman's company is one of the few to deal solely with youthful offenders and one of the first of its kind to go public, it is difficult for stock analysts to say whether another provider could deliver better services for less, or to advise investors about the company's long-term prospects.
All of this gives Youth Services incentive to grow rapidly, said William Oliver, an analyst based in Nashville, Tenn., who watches the corporate corrections field.
In the three years since its founding, the company has taken on nine facilities across the country and is opening a 10th.
At Hickey, Mr. Hindman said, his dream is to provide computers, encyclopedias to every dorm, more college opportunities -- and he hopes to do all that, eventually.
"We will have quality," Mr. Hindman said. "Our first and foremost objective is that the kids get what they need to get."