Ron Wyden Highlights Negative Incentives At Youth Residential Treatment Facilities

let me start with you um Miss Stanford you are the chief facility Watchdog as I understand it for Arkansas and obviously in addition to the lack of care we found acute harms like physical sexual verbal abuse and unacceptable living conditions and taxpayers as I've said are paying for a significant amount of these harms sometimes over $1,000 per day with medic a in child welfare dollars and to me these daily sums create an incentive for providers to admit as many kids as they can and then keep costs low to maximize their profits so I want to start with you because you're an expert in the field so that we can take a look at what American taxpayers are actually paying for so my first question to you is since you've been working in this field for some time have you seen the kind of abuse and neglect like the type of accounts documented on our report yes I would say we we see lots of abuse and neglect we um things are reported to us um almost daily um different instances of abuse neglect you know they range um and and how they can but kids are being raped they're they're being raped um by peers and by staff members um there's lot lot of abuse that's related to restraints but just other abuse also for staff that are untrained um in tasks with watching lots of children um they're failing to Dees learn deescalation techniques to be able to create a safe environment but I would say it's very widespread that we see instances of abuse and neglect in the way of failure to prevent violence among peers so would it be fair to say that serious problems at these facilities are not isolated incidents yes that' be very fair to say now you did some work in prisons as I understand it how would you say these facilities compare to jails so I I would say in comparison to jails it they're it's treated very similar the kids it's very rigid rules um they don't have a lot of access to the outside world to calls to contact their family they're cut off they have L don't have a lot of personal belongings um they're very drab facilities that are very comparable um to jail settings in in many instances okay so M len over at uh the GAO our uh important uh agency that looks into these kinds of abuses you've been looking into these issues for quite some time I think uh something like 15 years or some such period have you identified similar types of issues in your reports to what we're talking about today yes absolutely starting back in 2008 where we identified literally thousands of instances of abuse um and up to our most recent report in 2022 we found this is a pervasive issue that continues today all right let me go back to you Ms Stanford and ask you about one facility the Piney Ridge Treatment Center in Arkansas we reviewed countless reports from this facility and as I understand it you have seen it firsthand the documents and the public uh reports that our investigative team reviewed are just horrifying one report found the facility conducted 110 restraints and seclusions in a 30-day period another found that the facility regularly physically restrained children injected them with drugs place them in seclusion in violation of federal rules and the list based on what we're picking up goes on and on with endless failures there and as is so often the case some facilities seem to be doing a decent job others are just horrendous so my question to you is is the Piney Ridge treatment Center an outlier like to know your thoughts on this and can you give us an idea of the scope and prevalence of the kind of violations that I've been discussing I would say that they are not an outlier certainly there are better and worse facilities um and ones that we get um more com more complaints from than others the conditions that Piney Ridge Treatment Center a couple several years ago were absolutely appalling um and they were operating a with full knowledge of aadia healthcare um and now they have improved slight they have improved recently um but it took years and years of sustained pressure and pressure that had to come from outside that was not going to come inside from aadia Executives um to improve that facility but we see that at lots of other places I'm I'm over my my my time and we'll have some questions for you in a bit Miss Manley uh Senator crpo thank