In the wake of a clash last month at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center that injured dozens of children and staffers, authorities want to find out what went wrong.

"We are trying to determine the circumstances that caused this to happen and the culpability, if any, of the staff," says County Inspector General Joseph Price.

His office is currently interviewing staff and inmates of the juvenile home. "Once our investigation is completed we will forward it to (County Board President) Todd Stroger's office with recommendations on how to make sure this does not happen again."

No date is set for the completion of the study.

At a morning Black History Month presentation in the chapel of the West Side facility Feb. 18, inmates pulled down bookcases, wrecked copy machines and hurled chairs.

Ten staff members were taken to the hospital with minor injuries and 45 kids were treated at the center's infirmary with cuts and bruises, according to Jennifer Koehler, a spokeswoman for the center.

The violence began when one boy tackled another at the assembly and a third stood up and called for other inmates to trash the room and brawl, according to Koehler.

There were 78 children and 17 staffers at the presentation when the fighting began; another 16 adults arrived to help quell the disturbance 10 minutes later, followed by the Chicago Police.

The fight is the latest chapter in the juvenile home's troubled history.

In 1999 the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued Cook County alleging that employees of the facility were physically and sexually abusing inmates and that the center was dirty, crowded and chaotic.

Following a 2002 settlement, county officials pledged to fix the center but the ACLU complained that the abuses continued unchecked.

Last year the court took control of the home and appointed a new interim director, Earl Dunlap, executive director of the National Juvenile Detention Association, to overhaul the facility.

"This place is totally dysfunctional," Dunlap told the Chi-Town Daily News in October. "Ultimately it needs to be run by a professional and not someone who's been thrown a political bone."

Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, says "group disturbances" at the home are nothing new. Smaller fights resulting in more serious injuries took place every few weeks before Dunlap took over, Wolf says.

"Change hasn't come as quickly as we'd hoped," he says.
"It's a very violent place. That's one reason we sued them."

Although the situation has improved somewhat during Dunlap's tenure, Wolf estimates that brawls involving a handful of children still take place every week or so and some type of violence occurs daily.

He criticized the staff's handling of the disturbance, saying the response was not as organized as it should have been. "I don't think it was a problem of understaffing," he says. "We were lucky - no one was seriously hurt."

Malcolm Young, executive director of the John Howard Association, a juvenile center watchdog group that keeps tabs on the Cook County facility, says dispersing staffers among the children during group events is one way to prevent fights.

"It's like watching a high school lunch room," Young says. "Their presence might help defuse problems. In the past we've seen staff off to themselves and kids off to themselves."

Young says "appropriate staffing and training" is the best way to make sure this doesn't happen again."

But he says there have been improvements already.

"Earl, the County, the Circuit Court and everyone involved seem committed to improving the staffing situation," he says.

"In the past there has been totally inappropriate hiring and retention of staff. People were hired who were not educationally or temperamentally qualified to be working with troubled kids."

Young says past problems included supervisors who  failed to properly document misconduct and abuse, resulting in  disciplinary actions and firings that were reversed in arbitration proceedings.

Better training and new hires were already on the on the horizon before the recent fight, says Brenda Welch, Dunlap's second-in-command.

National juvenile detention experts David Roush and Carol Cramer Brooks are currently writing a new training curriculum for the facility, she says. No timetable or cost estimates have been determined yet, she said.

The federal court has also mandated that a special response team be present at the facility all times during waking hours, says Welch. These staff will receive special training in de-escalating conflicts and in techniques for safely restraining children.

It has been a year since any new hiring was done at the facility, but the recently passed county budget includes funds that should allow the hiring of more staff, she says.

"We're looking at hiring ten team leaders and 20 assistant team leaders," Welch said. Dunlap plans to have one mid-level manager in place for every 50 children, she says.

Despite the recent violence, Koehler, the center's  spokeswoman, maintains that the center is cleaner, safer and better organized since Dunlap took over.

"The culture here evolved over the last decade," Koehler say. "It's going to take a year or two to turn it around."

Dunlap, a 40-year veteran of the juvenile justice system, has begun to clean up the facility, literally, says Koehler. Hiring a private a private janitorial firm has "absolutely" improved cleanliness where graffiti once covered the walls, floors were un-mopped and toilets filthy, she says.

Along with a solid, workable budget and a new table of organization, the center has hired two qualified investigators to look into allegations of physical and sexual abuse of inmates by staff, says Koehler. "They mete out fair and swift discipline."

In spite of last month's setback Wolf agrees that Dunlap is making progress. "I'm still supportive of his efforts. We've still got a long ways to go in improving the center. It saddens me that this is such a hard problem."

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