Inside Green Hill, pillars with labels in a large room designate inmate areas.
A federal audit of Green Hill School in Chehalis, a medium/maximum security facility for juvenile offenders in Chehalis, found a number of areas that don’t meet standards of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).
Officials say they are working to comply with the new standards.
“(Green Hill School) is undergoing a transition to another agency and that transition made it difficult for them to become compliant with some of the standards under corrective action,” wrote the auditor. “…Green Hill School worked hard and made a lot of progress toward compliance; however, still has a lot of work to do to attain full compliance.”
Green Hill was recently transferred from management by the state Department of Social and Health Services to the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families.
The audit was completed through received documentation, on-site visits and multiple rounds of interviews. A 180-day corrective plan was devised to correct standards that hadn’t been met, with some still unmet at the end of that timeframe. Of the 37 areas of evaluation within the audit, seven were marked as “does not meet standard,” including a section marked “supervision and monitoring.” Green Hill is required under PREA standards to maintain one staff member per eight incarcerated persons in areas where juveniles occupy during waking hours and one staffer per 16 juveniles during sleeping hours.
Green Hill submitted documentation indicating most shifts didn’t meet the standard, and the audit indicates cameras are not actively monitored.
“The way staffing ratio requirements in the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act standards are interpreted changed last summer, long after the previous budget and staffing plan were approved. The new interpretation changed the way the measurement occurred so that it looked at individual wings of a building rather than the entire building,” wrote Debra Johnson, director of communications for the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families in an email.
The audit indicates Green Hill is working with the governor’s office for funding to help meet needed staffing levels.
Other areas listed as not meeting compliance include: “residents with disabilities and residents who are limited English proficient,” “policies to ensure referrals of allegations for investigations,” “specialized training: investigations,” “reporting to other confinement facilities,” “criminal and administrative agency investigations,” and “sexual abuse incident reviews.”
Those areas were marked as either needing additional training or addressing, and in some cases the transition from one state department to the other was noted as making certain standards difficult to meet at the time.
“Every facility like this across the country struggles with violence, both youth on youth and youth on staff. Washington state has a lower incidence of violence than most states, and we want to keep it that way,” wrote Johnson, adding that while some issues of violence will be reported to area law enforcement, most will not. “… We want our staff to report these issues, and we want to deal with them in a way that is likely to make the situation better, not worse.”
Recent legislation allowing people incarcerated as a juvenile for serious crimes to remain in a juvenile facility until the age of 25 is set to change staffing and the physical space model of the facility, wrote Johnson. Facilities in Oregon that underwent those same changes reported positive differences, however, work remains to be done to determine how those facilities made the change a positive one.
“We are working through our planning for this,” wrote Johnson, who added that a recent L&I audit on workplace safety came back with no concerns.
