A Nashville detention center, from which nearly half of the inmates escaped on Monday night, has a troubled history that includes allegations of sexual abuse and a wrongful death lawsuit.  Eight teenagers were still at large on Tuesday, after 32 youngsters got into the yard at Woodland Hills Youth Development Center late on Monday, then escaped through a weak spot in the facility’s fence.  This breakout is the latest blemish for Woodland Hills Youth Development Center and the beleaguered agency that operates it – Tennessee’s department of children’s services (DCS).  Woodland Hills, which holds 78 teen boys between the ages of 14 and 19, has in recent years been the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit, sex abuse allegations and a smaller breakout attempt earlier this year.  “Right now, it’s not clear if this is a clear breakout, or if some kids just saw the opportunity to do something and did it rashly,” DCS spokesman Rob Johnson told the Guardian. Tennessee highway patrol and metro police helped the department of children’s services (DCS) with the the round-up, as did some of the escaped teens’ parents, who turned their children in.  Johnson said internal affairs is looking into the circumstances of the breakout.  Six or seven teenagers broke out of their bedrooms in May before staffers convinced them to return to their rooms. In May 2013, Nashville news station WSMV published videos and photos of Woodland Hills guards sleeping on the job.  Tennessee agreed to pay a $250,000 settlement in May for a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the father of Kendall Oates, an 18-year-old who died in May 2012. Oates suffered from a seizure disorder and may have lain sick or dead in his room for hours before security noticed him, according to an investigation into the facility by The Tennessean.  A 2010 investigation by the paper showed that sex abuse allegations have plagued the facility, which had some of the highest rates of sexual victimization of any US juvenile center, according to a Department of Justice 2010 report.  State lawmakers wrote a scathing audit of the DCS in January, though new hdead Jim Henry insists the agency is making tremendous progress since the former commissioner, Kate O’Day, resigned in a wash of controversy.  Attorney Everette Parrish has represented youngsters at Woodland Hills, as well as the state’s other two youth development centers, in constitutional and civil rights cases since 2008. Parrish believes DCS needs more resources to improve the juvenile justice system and said the agency is doing all it can to provide treatment and security for the teenagers.  “I know what the problem is. It is the guards, and the structure in which the guards are either not trained or insufficient or not attentive – not aware,” said Parish. “That’s obvious, it doesn’t take an attorney to figure that out. They are not mistreated in the center. If they were, that’s what I hear about and what I address.”  He said that the decades-old facility should have known how to keep kids secure in the facility. “Here are the facts: if you want to improve the system, give DCS more resources,” said Parrish.  Woodland Hills is a level four facility, the highest level of security possible for juveniles besides adult prison or jail.  Laurence Steinberg, author of Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence and a psychology professor at Temple University, said in an email that adolescents are more more focused on the immediate potential rewards of things like an escape and are less likely to think about the long-term consequences of such an act.  “I think, based on our research on risky decision-making, that adolescents would generate a much shorter list of possible risks than adults would, so their assessment is more likely to be incomplete,” Steinberg said. “Adolescents also make decisions more impulsively, so they probably would not spend as much time thinking through the risks and, more important, thinking about how best to avoid them.”
Eight teenagers still at large after 32 managed to escape Woodland Hills, the latest scandal to hit the beleaguered facility