Perhaps that’s understandable. After all, it would be another
seven years before the facts about rampant abuse at Maryville would become
public.
Less
understandable is why anyone would mourn the decision by Maryville to finally
get out of the orphanage business more than a decade after the
horrors were exposed and Maryville was forced to clean up its act. Yet some still do. So it’s worth looking back in
more detail at exactly what happened at the institution.
An institution “up for grabs”
In 2002,
the Chicago Sun-Times got hold of government
reports calling Maryville’s main campus “dangerous” and in “a state of crisis.”
After reviewing hundreds of documents, the newspaper concluded that Maryville
was plagued with “rampant violence” and “the place is often up for grabs, with
staff struggling to handle suicide attempts, sex abuse, drug use, fights and
vandalism.”
In 2001
alone, police were called to Maryville’s main campus more than 900 times.
These are some of the reasons why, according to the Sun
Times:
§ At least 40 girls and boys were
involved in what police called a “mob action” in May. One girl had a knife.
Others were wielding fire extinguishers, brooms and metal-buckled belts. Three
police departments responded.
§ A 7-year-old boy in a unit for
sexually aggressive kids was reported to have been sodomized by another boy in
June.
§ Five kids, ages 11 to 16,
attacked a 35-year-old male staff member in November. They “dragged [him]
outside and proceeded to strike him with closed fists and kicked him all about
his body,”… police reported.
§ An employee supervising a group
home in June where two girls were out of control called for help and was told,
“Lock yourself in the office and let the girls do what they will.”
§ A 14-year-old girl hanged
herself in a bathroom shower in February.
§ Two others, a 9-year-old boy
and 15-year-old girl, tried to kill themselves within a week’s time in July.
And here's what youth who came to a Chicago City
Council meeting in 2003 told Medill News Service:
“It is very unsafe,” said Ramissa Maat, 16, who said she lived at Maryville from age 10 to 13.
“There have been numerous incidents where students have been raped by staff members and other students. My friend committed suicide because she couldn’t handle the stress of living there.”
Freddie Cavin, 18, who said he lived at Maryville from 1998 to 2002, said a staff member hit his friend over the head with a garbage can.
Maryville
staff quit in droves
The staff were paid next to
nothing (despite Maryville’s huge endowment), had little training or experience, and 80 of them quit or were fired in the first
seven-and-a-half months of 2003 alone.
Eventually,
Maryville’s longtime director, Father John Smyth, was ousted (though the statue of himself he commissioned remains at
the entrance) and the state pulled all “state wards” out of the place –
returning a relatively small number in 2007.
But now, reform-minded leadership at the Illinois Department of
Children and Family Services has decided that there are better ways to spend
the huge amount of money it costs to institutionalize a child. So they decided
to pay institutions less. Rather than dip further into its own funds, Maryville
decided to stop institutionalizing children and, to its credit, turn its
attention to better alternatives.
Of course, the apologists for institutionalization would say
it’s still fine to warehouse children at places like Maryville because the
problems there are in the past. After 900 police calls, rapes, suicides
and a riot, everything’s calmed down.
There are three problems with that:
§ Maryville’s reforms were largely the result of making institutionalization a
much smaller part of what it does, even before the recent announcement. They
now put far more emphasis on family preservation.
§ Even when
institutions are not hellholes, institutions still don’t work.
§ The cycle
of abuse, reform and abuse again is never-ending. One year, the expose involves
Maryville, another year it’s institutions in Georgia, another year California.
And there’s one more cause for concern: The Maryville expose
came before the dramatic cuts at newspapers across the country. The next time a
famous institution turns into a hellhole, there may be no reporters around to
let us know.
