Long Creek Youth Development Center is a treatment facility, not a prison. It helps young people who are sent there, sometimes as a last chance before they reach an age of majority, when they are sent to prison. Before you say that the center should be shut down (”Our View: Complaints about Long Creek point to bigger problem,” April 26), you should have a realistic, viable alternative system in mind that doesn’t add to costs.
Your editorial brings up the case of the 16-year-old transgender boy who died by suicide while being held at Long Creek in 2016. All agree it was a tragedy; many Long Creek staffers attended his funeral. But you continue to use this as a cudgel to attack the programs that have helped hundreds or thousands of other youth in jeopardy.
Nobody wants to see very young kids in a “facility,” but a great deal of treatment takes place there, in a centralized location. It would be difficult to staff a system of group homes that could offer the same services.
I volunteer at Long Creek because I see our future in these young people, who are struggling against odds: immersed in an environment of poverty, unstable families, abuse, neglect and drugs. I would encourage anyone who feels that the system is wrong and needs to be torn down to volunteer there as well, meet the young people and the staff, and then decide whether it needs to be removed.
Parents of these young people are often grateful that their child is finally in a place where they may have a chance at change. We should work to improve Long Creek, not discard the good things it does.
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