Juvenile Custody Suicides Blamed on Apathy, Impulse, Gaps in Care : Crime: Rising rate comes at a time of growing public frustration. Some say this fuels a creeping indifference.

The boy was only 12, but he seemed even younger that day, in trouble again and locked in a jail holding cell. Curled on the floor, he cried. He begged to go home. He called for his mother.

Two days later, young John Willingham acted, tragically, more like an adult. Left unsupervised by child care workers for an hour and a half--contrary to detention rules--he tied a sheet to the frame of his bed and hanged himself.

“Sickening,” one observer called the sixth-grader’s death.

“So tragic,” said another.

What experts don’t call a death like John Willingham’s is unique--or even especially unusual.

Each year, authorities say, a troubling number of children kill themselves in juvenile custody, but the extent of the problem is shrouded by inadequate national reporting requirements and the stigma and legal liability the suicides carry.

The official death count is around 10 annually; some experts say the true number may be several times that, up to 100.

One youth was so desperate he swallowed a broken light bulb, according to Donald Devore, an investigator who worked on a study released last fall by the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The national study found that only one-fourth of confined juveniles are in facilities that meet four basic suicide prevention guidelines.

Crowding, insufficient training and lapses in screening and monitoring of youths in custody help permit more than 17,000 acts of self-destructive behavior annually, it said.

Today’s suicides in custody come at a time of growing public frustration about youth crime, and some say this fuels a creeping indifference about the handling of delinquents.

“The public doesn’t care until it’s their kid,” said James Bell, a lawyer at the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center who has challenged detention conditions in California, Louisiana and Kentucky.

What kind of conditions? The kind that can aggravate suicidal tendencies: overcrowding, untrained staffs, and “dirt, filth, roaches, rats,” Bell said.

Devore, administrator of the Division of Criminal Justice in Montgomery County, Pa., noted that 63% of those in juvenile facilities are black or Hispanic.

“When you’ve got this combination of public attitudes--apathy, a desire for a quick fix--and it’s combined with this racial issue,” he said, “I think people don’t care.”

And sometimes children die.

*

No one in the Willingham family claims “Little John,” as he was called, was an angel.

Even at his young age, he’d already had run-ins with the police in rural southern Wisconsin. It was relatively minor stuff, everyone agrees: throwing rocks, fighting, acting up in school.

“He was more of a follower,” said his uncle, Clyde Wilson, whose son often played with John. “Some of the guys with more experience on the street would use him to their advantage.”

But things escalated last April, when John was among some youngsters accused of stealing a bicycle. Police picked him up at his house April 14.

“He’d never been away from me,” said his mother, Dorcille Willingham. “This was the first time he was locked up in jail.” She said she tried to persuade authorities that he couldn’t handle confinement.

A Wisconsin Department of Corrections report after his death described John’s inability to adjust to the juvenile section of the adult county jail. “He was continually acting out, creating a disturbance,” wrote investigator Marty Ordinans.

On April 20, a crisis-intervention worker was called and found the boy “huddled on the floor, leaning against the door, looking out the glass window, crying. John repeatedly stated he wanted to go home and that he missed his mother,” wrote Ordinans, director of the state Office of Detention Facilities.

The worker concluded the boy was not suicidal.

But John continued to misbehave and, during a disciplinary hearing in his cell, was ordered “locked down”--separated from the rest of the juvenile inmates--for seven days. “John was very upset,” Ordinans wrote.

That was around 12:30 p.m., on April 22.

About 5:30 p.m., when John and another boy who was locked down could not join the other juveniles outdoors for recreation, John pounded on his cell door in protest. Guards in the adult jail were on duty, but could not see him and the other boy.

Although cell checks were required every 30 minutes, no one looked in on John until 7 p.m., when the other inmates returned, Ordinans reported.

Then came a frantic radio call.

“I have a juvenile male who is hanging himself,” a guard shouted after finding John “slouched in front of his bunk . . . a bed sheet tied around his neck,” according to a detective’s report.

“John, John!” the guard yelled, lifting the boy to relieve the weight on his neck. But John had no pulse.

At a hospital, he was placed on life-support machines; a family photo shows him swathed in sheets and connected to tubes.

He was brain-dead, doctors told his mother, but she couldn’t believe it when she looked at his eyes.

“I didn’t understand why there were tears coming out,” she said, brushing the corner of her own eye. “I was talking to him: ‘Wake up, Little John, it’s Mommy. Mommy loves you. Wake up.’ ”

Finally, the machines were disconnected.

After the funeral, children in John’s elementary school dedicated a plaque and a sapling in his memory.

His family has taken the county to court, alleging officials failed in their basic duty to protect Little John. “It’s a trust,” said lawyer Terry Constant.

The boy’s uncle agrees. “It’s supposed to be for rehabilitation,” Wilson said. “He’s in there to learn a lesson--that’s fine. But you’re not thinking he’s going to go in there to get the death sentence.”

Thomas A. Schroeder, Rock County’s attorney, said the county will argue that John’s suicide “was not a preventable incident.”

“I think if someone’s intent on committing suicide it’s--if not impossible--next to impossible to prevent them from doing it,” Schroeder said.

If John Willingham had been six months younger, his age would have prevented him from being held in the jail. If he’d been picked up six months later, he’d have been taken to a new, state-of-the-art juvenile facility, built apart from the jail.

On a tour, shift supervisor Gary Jones showed off shower fixtures designed with nothing to hang on. “Breakaway” clothing hooks support a shirt or trousers, but pivot downward with heavier weight. Shelflike bunks offer no anchor for a noose.

“You have to be aware,” Jones said, passing an activity room where youths in blue scrub suit uniforms, some with a fringe of beard on their blank faces, played cards to kill time.

*

During the same month that John Willingham’s death made news in Wisconsin, a 16-year-old hanged himself from a fire sprinkler in a Tennessee detention center and a 17-year-old committed suicide in custody in Texas.

These and many other cases, including three suicides over five years in Washington, D.C., youth facilities, have convinced some authorities that the problem is seriously underreported.

Barbara Dooley, a Jackson, Tenn., juvenile justice official who travels the country to conduct anti-suicide training, scoffed at the latest yearly figure--10 documented suicides by juveniles in custody in 1990. The annual number may be “at least four or five times higher than that,” she said.

“I think we’re talking upwards of 100 or more per year,” said Lindsay Hayes, assistant director of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Mansfield, Mass.

After a 1993 hanging in which a 14-year-old inmate used the only thing he had left--the elastic band in his underwear--Hayes was appointed by a federal judge to investigate the District of Columbia system.

The result was a detailed plan focusing on staff training, including a mandatory eight-hour suicide-prevention seminar, careful assessment of youths at the time of their arrival, and continuous monitoring of those at risk.

Nagging deficiencies in each of those areas has been blamed in part for deaths.

Inadequate training is a national problem in the decentralized world of juvenile custody, said Earl Dunlap, executive director of the National Juvenile Detention Assn., which represents more than 400 facilities.

The standard-setting American Correctional Assn. calls for 160 hours of training in the first year for those working with the hundreds of thousands of children in detention, but Dunlap estimated that 80% of facilities fail to provide it.

No statutes mandate compliance with even minimum standards, so federal benchmarks or guidelines are needed, he said.

Officials say lack of training correlates with increases in suicide.

“In most jurisdictions, we’ll spend thousands of dollars before we allow law enforcement people to go out on the street,” Dunlap said. “In the detention community, they’re lucky to get any training at all. Zero. Zip.”

Frustration sounded in Dunlap’s voice as he complained of pay scales for detention workers that start at $12,000, and blamed crowding in part on locking up truants and runaways alongside genuine juvenile criminals.

The nation’s youth detention facilities share no uniformity of conditions, Dunlap said, adding that many are frankly inhumane, with youths sleeping on cold concrete, locked down for weeks and injured in preventable attacks.

The most effective reform possible would be creating citizens’ committees to monitor and report on both juvenile courts and detention facilities, Dunlap said. “They’d scream,” he predicted.

It is undeniable that many in juvenile custody are incorrigible, surly and violent.

But officials charged with caring for these tough kids worry that that profile has begun to blind the juvenile justice system to its traditional purpose: safe custody and rehabilitation.

“What we have to come to grips with is, what are the conditions that we’re willing to subject kids to?” said Dooley, the suicide-prevention trainer. “We’re talking about the value of a human life.”

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‘I Was Me But Now He’s Gone’

This excerpt is from poem by a suicidal 16-year-old who was in custody, as quoted by detention consultant Lindsay Hayes. The youth, whom Hayes did not identify, escaped shortly after writing it. His fate is unknown.

Life it seems to fade away

Drifting further every day

Getting lost within myself

Nothing matters no one else.

*

I have lost the will to live

Simply nothing more to give

There is nothing more for me

Need the end to set me free.

*

Emptiness is filling me

To the point of agony

Drifting farther changing dawn

I was me but now he’s gone . . .

Source: Associated Press