THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702090054
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY AND JON FRANK, STAFF WRITERS
LENGTH: 112 lines
The Pines Residential Treatment Center's campus in Tucson, Ariz., closed last summer shortly after residents rioted, causing at least $10,000 in damage and forcing police to arrest eight youths who were receiving treatment there.
The riot occurred about three weeks before the lease for the 32-bed facility was to expire.
Pines officials could not find a suitable new location in Tucson for the center, which, like its parent program in Portsmouth, treated adolescent sex offenders.
Pines treatment centers in Tucson and Portsmouth were operated by the same parent company, Norfolk-based First Hospital Corp. After the Tucson facility closed, about 10 of the residents were flown to Portsmouth to continue their treatment there.
Pines officials in Portsmouth said last week that the riot in Arizona came at after residents and staff found out about problems renewing the lease in Tucson.
Some staff had left and new staffers were sent to replace them, so residents were being cared for by unfamiliar faces, the officials said.
Dr. John Hunter, who started treatment programs at The Pines in Portsmouth and Tucson, said he did not think the problems would have occurred if he had been present at the Arizona center more often.
Police in Arizona said that on the night of July 9, they responded to the Tucson facility shortly before midnight after a disturbance was reported. The center was located near a hospital in northwest Tucson.
``The ward appeared to be in chaos,'' said a report filed by the Pima County Sheriff's Department the day after the riot. ``The residents had control of supervisors and the unit.''
Police said that several residents and one staff member were assaulted by the rioting residents. Other staff members were threatened with physical violence during the melee, which began after 8 p.m.
``It was very scary,'' said a staff member at the facility who was interviewed by police.
Former staff members said that residents kicked holes in the facility's plaster walls large enough for men to walk through, and that after the riot it was possible to walk through 10 rooms without opening a door.
``Almost every wall within my view had been damaged in some way or form,'' wrote one of the police officers who quelled the riot.
Police said the damage estimate of $10,000 was ``very conservative.''
The riot was the most serious in a long history of problems at the facility, which opened in 1994 as a version of The Pines Behavioral Studies Program pioneered in Portsmouth by First Hospital Corp. and Hunter, clinical director of the Behavioral Studies Program.
The Pima County Sheriff's Department in Arizona had at least 80 contacts with the facility from Jan. 1, 1995, until it closed.
Lt. Mike Sacco of the Pima County Sheriff's Department said the calls in 1996 included assaults, vandalisms, sex offenses and fires.
``We were happy to see it close,'' Sacco said last week during an interview. ``The facility was a very volatile situation.''
At the time of the riot, Hunter told a Tucson newspaper that the problems at the Arizona facility were ``. . . not what we have experienced here in Virginia.''
Police in Portsmouth have reported similar of problems at The Pines' two campuses in Portsmouth. Police records showed that between Jan. 1, 1991, and Sept. 25, 1996, there were 520 calls to police from The Pines. They included calls for grand larceny, escape, bomb threats and sexual assault. Most were reports of runaways. A riot was reported in April of 1996.
The campus on Portsmouth Boulevard, located on the site of the former Frederick Military Academy, houses Hunter's Behavioral Studies Program, which served as the model for the Arizona facility.
The other campus, on Crawford Parkway, houses a program for youths with severe behavioral problems.
The Pines in Portsmouth attracts residents from up and down the East Coast and from several foreign countries. It is licensed to treat 300 residents, and currently has about 265 residents. It recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.
According to former staff members, The Pines expanded to Arizona three years ago with the intention of eventually creating a similar program to the one in Portsmouth to treat juveniles from the western part of the country.
Arizona was chosen, in part, because of Hunter's relationship with Dr. Judith Becker of the University of Arizona, which is located in Tucson. Becker worked at The Pines in Tucson.
The Arizona program was costing taxpayers there about $1 million a year, according to Arizona newspaper reports at the time of the riot. The average length of stay at the facility was 15 months at about $90,000 per youth.
Most of the youths who stayed at The Pines were referred by their county juvenile courts. The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections occasionally sent sex offenders there.
Donna Noriega, program specialist with the Arizona Supreme Court's Administrative Office, said the state contract was given to The Pines when a similar program operated by Phoenix Memorial Hospital closed in 1992.
In evaluating The Pines program after the riot, Noriega said, state officials decided the program was insufficient.
``The clinical oversight of the clinicians was not up to what we believe was necessary to run a sex offenders facility with the types of kids who were in the program,'' Noriega said during an interview last week.
Noriega also said the state does not want to send juveniles out of state for treatment.
She said the state plans to build a facility to house juvenile sex offenders.
First Corrections Corp., another subsidiary of First Hospital, is one of the companies that has entered a bid to construct the facility, she said. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
A ``VOLATILE SITUATION'' IN TUCSON
The Pima County Sheriff's Department in Arizona had at least 80
contacts with the Tucson facility from Jan. 1, 1995, until it closed
last summer.
Sheriff's Lt. Mike Sacco said the calls in 1996 included
assaults, vandalisms, sex offenses and fires.
``We were happy to see it close,'' Sacco said last week. ``The
facility was a very volatile situation.''
KEYWORDS: THE PINES RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER ARIZONA RIOT