Following Monday’s release of a report by a national expert, the Department of Children and Families said it plans to focus more on rehabilitation and less on restraint and seclusion at its locked facilities for boys and girls in Middletown.
The 52-page report from Robert Kinscherff of the National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice offers several observations about DCF’s practices and facilities, including the Connecticut Juvenile Training School and the Pueblo Girls Program on the grounds of the former Riverview Hospital, referred to in the report as the “Pueblo Unit.”
Kinscherff observed that there is tension about whether the goal of the two locked facilities is to rehabilitate the boys and girls through therapy, or to incarcerate them.
( entire story can be read at CT News Junkie ).
The last paragraph in this long story was broached by activists years ago at CJTS. Cornell Lewis a former employee sent a one page letter to Superintendent William Rosenbeck asking "whether CJTS was a rehabilitation facility for boys or training school seeking to change boys through therapy." It must be mentioned how management rather than answer the question, decided to go into bunker mentality. The white administrators took exception to an intelligent black man posing such questions and branded Lewis as trouble maker, finally using a trumped up charge at the facility to get rid of him. Now the "chickens have come home to roost" and someone else made those same observations and was paid $40,000 plus dollars for a study of things needing to be fixed at CJTS plus Pueblo Unit [ newly built girls facility ].
Several other points in this study were brought up by Lewis in the past, only to fall on tone deaf ears by management interested only in maintaining their hegemony and expanding white privilege on the DCF Plantation.
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