A new report from the advocacy group Disability Rights Maine looks at numbers from the state Department of Corrections, showing about a third of the young people committed to Long Creek Youth Development Center — the state’s only correctional facility for juveniles — came directly from residential mental health treatment programs.
The organization looked at those numbers, and found a surprisingly high number of calls to law enforcement from those programs, for behaviors that Disability Rights Maine says merited the therapeutic response that staff were trained to provide, rather than a police response.
Katrina Ringrose, a children’s advocate with Disability Rights Maine, says young people in the mental health system often have behavioral issues — and that’s part of what the system is supposed to be equipped to handle.
This story was originally published Aug. 9, 2017 at 5:11 p.m. ET.
