Commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Commissioner Josh Parsons said Wednesday that are on board with the review of the Youth Intervention Center’s protocols that Commissioner Alice Yoder called for on Tuesday; and D’Agostino said that it had been Parsons’ idea in the first place.
D’Agostino said he was “taken aback” by Yoder’s comments at the commissioners’ work session, because Parsons had told him last week he was planning to put together a group to look into the YIC’s policies and procedures. D’Agostino said he told his colleague, “That’s a great idea.”
Neither D’Agostino nor Parsons had responded when Yoder broached the idea Tuesday. She said Wednesday that she had done so because “I feel it’s urgent and needs to be acted on.”
The commissioners’ comments came amid a public outcry over the YIC’s past strip search policy.
At the YIC’s quarterly board of managers meeting on Aug. 2, Director Drew Fredericks told the board the facility had discontinued what he referred to as “unclothed searches and body cavity searches, otherwise known as strip searches” of youths in the YIC’s shelter program.
The facility serves both as a detention center for youths accused of criminal activity, and a residential shelter for at-risk youths awaiting placement in foster care or a residential treatment center.
Previously, shelter youths who left and re-entered the building had been strip-searched for contraband. Under the new policy, implemented June 24, they are patted down and questioned, Fredericks said. Questions may also be directed at those in charge of transporting them.
So far, the new approach seems to be working, Fredericks said. Strip searches remain an option in “certain escalated situations,” he said.
LNP reported on the change Aug. 2 and editorialized about it Aug. 7. In a Facebook post Monday, Parsons wrote that the body cavity searches that Frederick mentioned “are actually a hands-off examination of the mouth with a flashlight” to check for weapons or drugs. He accused LNP of trying to “falsely intimate … that something much different was going on” as part of a deliberate ongoing campaign to smear the county and its leaders. Parsons has frequently complained about LNP’s coverage of county issues.
At Tuesday’s work session, LNP reporter Tom Lisi asked if the YIC conducts “squat and cough” searches, conducts strip searches after family visits or places youth detainees in isolation. Parsons declined to answer, saying those are matters of security and that “your goal is to inflame the public.”
Yoder said the county should compare the YIC’s practices with those at youth detention centers statewide and nationwide, looking at evidence-based and trauma-informed research and consulting outside experts. Separate policies should be developed for the YIC’s detention and shelter components, she said.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, community members spoke out forcefully against strip searches of young people who are already traumatized and vulnerable. How, they asked, could the policy have remained unchallenged for so long?
Kristy Moore, a secondary school teacher and Mount Joy Township resident, told the commissioners Tuesday she was appalled when she read about the strip searches. She read out an excerpt from an American Bar Association resolution condemning routine strip searches of minors and citing research that they can lead to lifelong emotional damage.
“We harmed these children,” she said. “How will we bring healing?”
More than half a dozen county residents echoed her comments at Wednesday’s meeting. Ben Cattell Noll asked why Fredericks had used the term “body cavity search” if he only meant a visual inspection of the mouth. He noted that the International Chiefs of Police Association reserves the term for much more intrusive searches, as does federal Prison Rape Elimination Act policy, which the YIC’s policies reference.
Parsons said Wednesday that he agrees with reviewing all policies in light of best practices. That said, he continued, the YIC, like any secure facility, must take robust measures to interdict drugs and weapons to ensure safety, and that those entail tradeoffs.
It’s complicated, he said: Among other things, a youth facing delinquency proceedings can be moved between shelter and detention based on court order, and security practices have to take that into account.
The YIC staff care deeply about the children in their charge, and any notion they’re abusing them “is just false,” he said.
In his Aug. 2 comments, Fredericks said the decision to discontinue strip searches stemmed from “conversations between the commissioners and courts.” Yoder said the issue had arisen at the YIC board’s May 3 meeting, and that she had asked Fredericks to look at policies elsewhere. The new policy was modeled on York County’s, she said.
President Judge David Ashworth confirmed to LNP that he had become aware of the policy around the time of the YIC board meeting and had worked with county solicitor, Jackie Pfursich, to revise it.
