Last week, the final episode of The Salt Lake Tribune’s podcast “Sent Away” aired — and if you haven’t listened to it, stop what you’re doing and go do it now. I’ll be here when you come back.
The seven-part series — a collaboration between my colleague Jessica Miller, KUER’s David Fuchs and American Public Media’s Curtis Gilbert — offers a shocking insight into Utah’s massive teen treatment industry and how the state’s laissez-faire attitude exposed an untold number of kids to neglect, mistreatment and abuse.
Utah’s teen treatment industry originated in the 1960s. As a cub reporter more than 20 years ago, I wrote a handful of stories about the emergence of the still-sprouting teen treatment industry and how it operated largely without oversight from the state. At that time, there were also stories of abuse, mistreatment and what is essentially kidnapping.
In the ensuing years the industry, and the problems that have permeated it, grew and grew. Today, Utah is the nation’s epicenter of the teen treatment industry, where some 20,000 kids have been sent away since 2015. It’s estimated that the industry generates hundreds of millions into Utah’s economy every year.
Among those scores of facilities, hundreds of staffers and thousands of kids, take a guess at how many incidents resulted in rule violations in 2016?
That’s because regulators typically only inspected facilities once a year and operators were notified in advance when those inspections would occur. And facilities were not self-reporting when things went wrong.
As more scrutiny was focused on the industry in the last few years, Miller reported, the violations jumped to more than 100 in 2020.
A new law, sponsored by Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, took effect last year limiting the use of physical restraint and chemical sedation of kids in facilities. It prohibited strip searches in most instances and mandates that kids have the right to unmonitored communication with parents at least once a week.
It also expanded the types of incidents that need to be reported to the state — for example, when a child is physically restrained — and required the state to follow up on such incidents. During the first year the law was in effect, the number of violations rose to more than 200, twice as many violations as the year prior.
Obviously, the jump from four violations to more than 200 didn’t come about because these places were suddenly 50 times as bad as they were five years earlier. It’s because the state of Utah had been turning a blind eye to the problems, letting treatment centers operators in some instances get away with deplorable treatment of the youth in their care.
Miller and her colleagues documented instances where a young woman at one center, Integrity House, fell and died in a cave while on an outing they were ill-equipped for. They identified a case where police found a young girl zip-tied and put in a horse trough full of water. There have been allegations of sexual abuse, mistreatment and physical harm.
The state, in short, failed these kids. It also allowed itself to be exploited while greedy private companies raked in the profits.
I’m encouraged that the attention focused on these centers and the new state law have led to improvements, but the problems in these treatment centers have not been solved.
Weeks after the law took effect, a 9-year-old boy was left in a hot car and died at a facility called Roost Services. In January, a girl at Maple Lake Academy in Spanish Fork died after, according to state regulators, she was not given proper medical care.
McKell, who lives just a few miles from Maple Lake Academy told me that more needs to be done. Part of that, he said, is providing more resources to regulators.
We need more transparency (which the state says is coming) so parents looking for help for their kids can make informed decisions.
Part of it will require fixes at the federal level — which McKell hopes comes in a bill being sponsored by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley that seeks to address the transportation of kids across state lines to treatment centers, sometimes against their will.
Even if these reforms are enacted — and congressional action is always a dicey proposition — a fundamental problem will remain: It is, and always has been, far too easy to open a youth treatment center and far, far too difficult to close one down.
That needs to change. Until these companies, which have operated with impunity for decades, realize their business may be on the line it will be hard to get them to take their obligations seriously. And in a regulation-averse state like Utah, this may seem like a lot to hope for.
But we also like to think of ourselves as a state that values the well-being of children. If the government can’t, or won’t, step in to protect vulnerable kids from being mistreated and abused for profit, we need to question our priorities as a community.
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