Drug, alcohol use prevalent at youth correctional facility

Kim Smith

Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001 | 11:07 a.m.

Two Summit View Youth Correctional Facility employees lost their jobs within a one-week period earlier this year after they were linked to incidents in which drugs were brought into the facility.

According to former staff members and attorneys for boys in the facility, drugs and alcohol are a problem at the juvenile prison.

The Summit View Youth Correctional Facility is a 96-bed, for-profit detention center for juvenile boys who have been sentenced to jail by Family Court. The year-old facility is operated by Sarasota, Fla.-based Youth Services International.

Allegations of sex, drug use and other troubles at the facility have surfaced since 20 of its inmates staged an uprising on June 1.

Documents obtained by the Sun under Nevada's open records laws verify that the facility has been riddled with problems since it opened its doors, June 1, 2000.

Many of the problems were documented by Susan Bobby, a state employee hired to monitor the facility to ensure its staff members are fulfilling their contractual obligation.

According to an internal memo, drug tests were performed on 15 inmates Jan. 2 after a staff member smelled marijuana in one section of the facility.

Three of the youths tested positive for marijuana. The teens told administrators they received the drug from a staff member.

The staff member refused to submit to a urine test and resigned immediately, according to the memo.

At least eight other inmates were scheduled to be tested, because family members had allegedly brought cocaine into the facility, the memo says.

The results of those tests were not available.

Additional memos from Bobby, however, express her displeasure that staff members have been slow to conduct random drug-testing as ordered.

One week after the staff member resigned after refusing the urine test, another was fired over an incident that allegedly involved drugs and an assault.

According to a heavily censored report, the youth worker allegedly let an inmate into a cell to assault another inmate.

The victim of the assault told authorities that the woman was upset that he had told others she was smuggling a powdery drug and tobacco into the facility in a lotion bottle.

The woman allegedly smuggled the drugs into the facility through her boyfriend -- the brother of another inmate. The woman met the brother at the facility, developed a relationship with him, then gave him the lotion bottles so he could give them to his brother during visitations, the boy told authorities.

When asked about the allegation, the woman told authorities she thought the bottles were filled with shampoo.

She was fired on Jan. 9 in connection with the assault, but a memo says investigators didn't have enough evidence to fire her over the alleged smuggling.

In another incident, staff members found pills and a white powdery substance during a strip search of a young man coming back from a visiting room. Another youth was caught inhaling cleaning chemicals that had been sprayed on his shirt.

Sandra Houston, a former substance abuse counselor at the facility, signed an affidavit last month in which she outlined a large number of problems within the facility. The affidavits were submitted to Family Court by attorneys of three of the youths who participated in the uprising. The attorneys have argued that the uprising was justified because of problems at the facility and asked for an investigation of Summit View.

Houston alleged that there were at least two incidents in which drugs and alcohol were shared by staff members and inmates. One of the incidents involved a party at the facility and the other involved a party at a local park attended by recently released inmates, she wrote.

Four or five inmates possessed alcohol and marijuana during a July 4, 2000, party inside the facility, Houston said. She said she had heard that the marijuana was brought in by staff members. The four or five inmates, she said, were locked into their cells for a time as a consequence of the party.

Also, she said, two former inmates reportedly participated in another drug and alcohol party with employees outside the institution around April.

Neither of those incidents appear to have been documented in the reports obtained by the Sun.