At the December 9 County Commissioners Meeting, Youth Intervention Center (YIC) Director Drew Fredericks offered a departmental presentation on the County’s longstanding juvenile detention center and shelter care facility, located in the Sunnyside Peninsula. Fredericks later told NewsLanc that one of the most significant challenges that the center now faces is the recently increasing prominence of mental health issues among its residents.
The basic function of the YIC is to hold residents as they pass through the court process—be it for juvenile court (in the detention center) or family court (in the shelter). As Fredericks elaborated, “We don’t provide treatment; we don’t rehabilitate the residents while they’re with us.” The center’s juvenile detention component is running an annual budget of $4.6 million, 50% of which is funded by State and Federal dollars; the shelter component is running a budget of $2 million, 90% of which is funded by State and Federal dollars.
Although an average stay at the center—for both the detention facility and shelter—is no more than eighteen days, the YIC strives to provide a “structured” environment where residents can be exposed to “diverse programming.” According to Fredericks, “We don’t want them to just come in and watch TV and play basketball. That’s too easy. We expose them to as many different things as possible,…hoping that they latch onto something they’ve never been exposed to and that that becomes their interest when they get out.” Some of these activities include foam hockey, lacrosse, badminton, fishing, and gardening.
The county’s first youth detention facility, founded in 1799, did not share such an emphasis on rehabilitation and education, Fredericks said. Rather, the facility emphasized hard labor through work at the farm or nearby stone quarry. Among the qualifications for entry, which did include “mental illness,” was a special category for “immoral” youths.
Today, Fredericks told NewsLanc, a large portion of the YIC’s residency is diagnosed with some degree of mental illness. According to Fredericks, 50% of the center’s population in on one psychotropic medication or another, and most of those residents arrive at the center with their prescriptions already in tow.
The center, Fredericks said, is still adjusting to the complexities of serving so many residents diagnosed with mental health problems: “These mental health issues, probably over the last three or four years, have really surfaced as the main issue. It used to be really aggressive residents, and that’s kind of curtailed a bit, and now it’s the mental health piece.”
This shift, Fredericks noted, might say more about changes in professional practice than it does about changes in the challenges that these minors have always carried: “We could go into a sociological study on this—there are so many different speculations as to why,” Fredericks said, “I think people are more open to diagnosing things….I think people are looking into the mental health piece, which, I think, really does need to be addressed.”
