Florida's Department of Juvenile Justice is getting cleaned out, and not a minute too soon. Top officials have been ousted, while Secretary Bill Bankhead - out on a face-saving medical leave - has been replaced, at least for now. The shakeup is good news, provided it brings to the department a new culture along with the fresh faces.
Gov. Jeb Bush last week appointed former Corrections Deputy Secretary C. George Denman to fill in for Bankhead, who, under intense fire for months, asked Bush for four months off. Bankhead himself had canned three top administrators, including the No. 3 man at the agency, just days earlier.
The overhaul - late though it is - is the most significant fallout yet over this summer's death of teenager Omar Paisley, whose pleas for help, after a burst appendix, went ignored at a Miami juvenile detention center. Paisley's death came just weeks after the fight that killed 17-year-old Danny Matthews inside Pinellas' juvenile detention center - an inmate brawl invited by agency errors - and was only the latest incident in which detention supervisors have neglected to summon medical assistance or otherwise protect young detainees.
Bankhead has taken the heat, as well he should. Despite his efforts to downplay the problems and palm off responsibility on low-level staff, the evidence is clear that his department has repeatedly fallen short in its duty to safeguard children in custody. Instead of owning up to that, Bankhead has been too quick to gloss over systemic failures and too slow to set the agency on a better course. Many, including former detainees and employees who have appeared before a special legislative panel, say the problem boils down to Bankhead's tolerance - if not cultivation - of an environment that treats detained or convicted youths as individuals unworthy of compassion or protection.
The Paisley grand jury called the problem the department's "utter lack of humanity." Rep. Dan Gelber calls it the "culture of neglect."
"Unless [the shakeup] leads to systemic changes in the department, it doesn't do much," Gelber, D-Miami Beach, who serves on the Select Committee on Juvenile Detention Facilities, recently told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "Right now, there's an institutional culture that has led to a child's death."
For months, some lawmakers, including the chair of that select legislative panel, have called for Bankhead's ouster, and his recent exit suggests they may have gotten their wish. DJJ's new leaders, interim or not, have a good opportunity to usher in a more humane culture, one that invites and expects the same respect and behavior from detention officials as from the young people they guard.
