Greater care needed for troubled children

Children who are placed in the state's care seemed to just be put into a holding area. There is no great care placed on their education or psychological well-being. The children need greater care so they can be helped to live normal and productive lives.

State failing troubled children

1 Mar 2022

IT CANNOT be a strain on anyone’s imagination to discern that maladjusted children without schooling are at a greater risk of becoming adult criminals, especially if they are already on a pathway to deviance. Which is essentially what Dr Maurice Guy, the People’s National Party’s spokesperson on health, concluded at a hearing by the committee last week into juvenile correctional centres.

What, however, boggles the mind is that children who come into conflict with the law, and fall to the control and care of these facilities are being systemically failed by the Jamaican State. And there is no urgency or aggressive action to cauterise, or reverse, the problem. People may indeed care, but not sufficiently, it seems, to recognise the urgency of the crisis.

A broad outline of how the children in these centres, and critically, too, the wider society, are being badly short-changed was provided in presentations and supporting documents by officials of the Department of Correctional Service (DCS) during their appearance last week before Parliament’s Human Resources and Social Development Committee, of which Dr Guy is a member. What they revealed about how children in the facilities are being cheated of their education, and of help in psychological and social adjustment, is deeply troubling.

According to one of the documents, of the 75 children in the system who used to be enrolled in public schools, 53, or approximately 71 per cent, had been suspended and expelled, or had just stopped going prior to entering the correctional system. These things happen. Often, they are symptoms of the problems that caused the children to get into trouble.

MORAL OBLIGATION

In Jamaica, children are expected to stay in school until at least age 16. But irrespective of custom or what the law says – including legal exceptions from responsibility – this newspaper holds that there is a moral obligation by the State to vigorously pursue the educational needs, and the appropriate socialisation, of children under its care.

However, according to the DCS report, “there is no established pathway” for the return of children under 18 to the public school system if they leave the correctional system. That, of itself, is a failing to which people who are serious about the welfare of children, and are concerned about their social development, should have long ago paid attention to – and fixed.

There is, however, an even graver dereliction of responsibility by the State. The DCS itself undertakes the education of the approximately 200 children in its charge. Marc Thomas, its deputy commissioner for rehabilitation and probation aftercare, told the parliamentary committee that the curriculum with which DCS teachers work is the same as that of the normal school system. However, an explanatory document conceded that the DCS lacked “a structured education system to deliver the standard education programmes for wards”. Which makes sense if they do not have the teachers to deliver the curriculum.

Gary Rowe, a retired Jamaica Defence Force lieutenant colonel who heads the DCS, told the committee that he has an establishment of 48 teaching posts – the numbers that can be employed. Thirty of these positions, or 62.5 per cent, are vacant. People leave and the DCS cannot recruit new staff. It cannot compete on salaries.

Part of the problem here is that the guidelines require that DCS teachers be qualified up to the level of a certificate. The pay scales, therefore, are on that basis. Increasingly, however, teachers are entering the education system with bachelor degrees, while, according to Lt Col Rowe, the DCS’s “pay scale has not changed”.

“So … we have a high attrition among our teachers,” he said.

DISCUSSIONS

Lt Col Rowe said that there have been discussions with the authorities about these pay scales, including incentives for the conditions under which teachers in the DCS system work. But these negotiations were slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lack of equipment weakens the quality of the vocational training provided at the juvenile correctional facilities.

These children, many of whom suffer from deep psychological problems and psychiatric illnesses, live in substandard, largely decrepit facilities, environments that make rehabilitation difficult. And that is exacerbated by the limited access they have to professional help to deal with their issues.

For example, there are two psychologists on the DCS staff, as well as two part-time psychiatrists This small team, according to the DCS document, “prepares reports for the children’s courts, leaving little time to deal with the children,” some of whom “present with different types and levels of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, sleeping disorder, depression and suicide ideation”.

If at-risk children who are under the direct watch of the State lack its support, we shudder to think of the danger lurking for those in the wider society. This is an institutional crisis in need of urgent action.

Dr Guy was right about the indictment of the DCS and the national security ministry. But it is also really all of us. For failing to hold the State accountable.

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