Nassau, Suffolk teens charged with felonies often housed upstate for lack of local facilities

Nassau and Suffolk counties have sent dozens of teenagers charged with felonies to detention centers as far away as Erie County after plans to build local facilities to segregate the adolescents from adult inmates failed to pass muster with the state, documents obtained by Newsday show.

New York's "Raise the Age" law, passed in 2017, increases the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 and requires "adolescent offenders" to be housed separately from adults.

The teenage offenders are charged with crimes such as murder, attempted murder, rape, possession of loaded handguns and gang assault, according to county officials.

The counties' failure to develop plans to build detention facilities for adolescents has forced family members to make long drives to visit them, and made it more difficult for defense attorneys to communicate with them, according to advocates and lawyers.

It's also meant that Nassau and Suffolk sheriff's deputies have had to spend hours driving adolescents to upstate facilities and bringing them back and forth to court hearings on Long Island.

The change in the way 16 and 17-year-olds are prosecuted and detained was driven by research showing teenagers are least likely to reoffend, and most likely to be rehabilitated, if detained outside the adult criminal justice system.

They also are less likely to be sexually assaulted while in detention, the research shows.

In a letter to county probation officials in September 2020, Sheila Poole, commissioner of the state Office of Children and Family Services, and state corrections Chairman Allen Riley said since October 2018, 39 adolescent offenders from Nassau and 30 from Suffolk had been housed in specialized facilities in other counties.

The offender counts in the letter are the most recent available.

Many detention centers "are far from us — Erie County, Onondaga County, Albany County," Suffolk sheriff's Warden Michael Franchi told Newsday.

"That is a burden not just on the office that has to deal with them, but also on the youth that are incarcerated," Franchi said.

"They are away from their families, and one of the purposes of doing this law was to make that less of a burden on the youthful offenders," he said.

The issue came to light in April when Nassau County probation officials asked the county legislature to approve a $100,000 contract to send adolescent offenders to a specialized secure detention facility in Albany.

The contract charged the county $1,318 per day per offender.

"We were horrified to hear that these young people, between the ages of 16 and 18, were transported away so far from their families and community," public safety committee Chairwoman Denise Ford, of Long Beach, a Democrat who caucuses with Republicans, told Newsday.

"Many of them indicated that they were poor and it might have been hard for their families to visit them," Ford recalled.

In addition, the situation, "really impacts our ability to represent an individual, especially a kid that's never been involved in the system before, who is scared, confused, doesn't have family contact, and they're hundreds of miles away," N. Scott Banks, attorney-in-chief for the Nassau County Legal Aid Society, told Newsday.

The mandate to segregate the adolescents from adult prisoners is a key part of the Raise the Age law passed by the state Legislature in April 2017.

The legislation increased the age at which children can be held responsible for criminal actions from 16 to 18.

The law required 16- and 17-year-olds charged as felons to be held in "secure and specialized detention" centers approved by OCFS and the state corrections commission.

The detention centers cannot be within "sight and sound" of facilities for adult inmates, according to state guidelines.

Counties also cannot house adolescent offenders "in existing jails that continue to serve individuals charged or sentenced as adults even if there is sight and sound separation between the populations," according to a state fact sheet,

With local beds lacking, Nassau and Suffolk County officials often have to scramble to locate secure detention facilities elsewhere.

At a Nassau legislative hearing in April, Arianne Reyer, special counsel for Juvenile and Adolescent Justice with the Nassau Department of Probation, said other counties often take hours to decide whether to accept adolescent offenders.

If Nassau cannot locate a facility right away, Reyer said, the adolescent may be housed temporarily in a "juvenile room" of a Nassau Police precinct, with a cot and meals.

Precinct rooms are "not intended for overnight detention," and sheriff's deputies must provide 24-hour monitoring, Reyer said.

If the counties do locate a spot upstate, sheriff's deputies can face drives of up to eight hours to transport offenders.

Deputies then often have to drive the defendants back to Long Island for court hearings, and transport them back to their detention facilities afterward.

Franchi said by the time hearings conclude, the upstate beds sometimes have been taken by other adolescents.

"We’ve had beds we had an AO in, and when they go to bring them back that day or that night, they’ve given the bed away," Franchi said.

"I'm paying a lot of money for my staff to do these transports back and forth," Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon, Jr. told Newsday.

"That's another cost to the taxpayers that I don't think the legislators considered when they" enacted the Raise the Age legislation, Toulon said.

The nearest possible provider, New York City, only accepts adolescent offenders from the five boroughs, Reyer said.

A Westchester County facility where state officials had considered housing Nassau adolescent offenders suffered a fire, Reyer said in April.

Nassau and Suffolk officials said they had little time or funding to implement the Raise the Age law when it went into effect for 16- year-olds on Oct. 1, 2018, and 17- year-olds one year later.

Reyer told Newsday it's been, "incredibly frustrating to try to work within the confines" of the Raise the Age law.

"It left our hands tied to transport these young people outside of our county," she said.

"Requiring that all adolescent offenders must be held in specialized secure detention without first making sure that sufficient housing could be certified was not a well-thought out part of this legislation, and leaves counties including Nassau and Suffolk scrambling each time an adolescent offender is detained," Reyer testified in April.

State officials have said Nassau and Suffolk counties had more than enough time to devise acceptable plans for housing the adolescent offenders.

In their September 2020 letter to Suffolk County Probation Director Andrea Neubauer and Nassau Probation Director John Plackis, Poole and Riley said both counties had failed to follow through with proposals they had promised to submit to the state.

"Failure to develop a plan to construct a suitable juvenile detention facility on Long Island that is capable of housing adolescent offender youth has had deleterious effects on local youth," Poole and Riley wrote.

Monica Mahaffey, an OCFS spokeswoman, said in a statement earlier this year that Nassau, "has a long-standing issue with detention capacity that was known well in advance of the passage of Raise the Age legislation."

County officials say they've tried in good faith to come up with an acceptable proposal to house adolescent offenders locally.

Reyer has said Nassau proposed 14 separate versions of plans to hold the offenders on the grounds of the Nassau County Juvenile Detention Center in Westbury — all of which the state rejected.

Nassau officials declined to provide copies of any of the proposals, citing their "draft" status. Newsday has filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the proposals.

Now, Nassau and Suffolk County officials are backing a joint plan to house adolescent offenders on the grounds of the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Yaphank.

In February 2020, state agencies gave "provisional support" to the counties' plan to build a specialized secure detention center on the Yaphank campus, Poole and Riley said in their September 2020 letter.

But Nassau and Suffolk failed to follow-up with specific proposals, Poole and Riley wrote.

According to Mahaffey, the OCFS spokeswoman, the current proposal "for the Yaphank site is to create a new facility on the unused county land near the current jail, which will be separate from the adult facility."

She said state officials are, "awaiting a final plan from Nassau and Suffolk Counties, which will be reviewed by OCFS and the State Commission on Correction," Mahaffey said.

"Once approved, the counties may move forward on facility design," Mahaffey said.

With Candice Ferrette

By Scott Eidler

scott.eidler@newsday.com@ScottEidler

Scott Eidler covers Nassau County government and politics for Newsday. Scott has worked at Newsday since 2012 and previously covered municipal government and education.