The original plans for the new treatment facility called for a 2,000 square metre building on the grounds of Hampstead Hospital. It will now be 3,190 square metres.
-decency
Words like “institutional” and “hardened type of secure construction” set off alarm bells for Cassandra Sanchez.
When the Office of the Child Advocate sponsored a bill to build a new youth correctional facility, one of the requirements was that the center should focus on a residential therapy environment and atmosphere.
A contract presented to the Executive Board on Wednesday that increases the facility’s planning costs to $2.1 million has Sanchez concerned. In fact, she didn’t learn of the proposal until the meeting agenda was made public, even though she sits on the youth prison’s steering committee.
“That concerns me,” she said. “I will definitely continue this conversation with DHHS to understand where this is coming from and to make sure we stick to the core of the legislation, which is that this is a treatment facility and not a youth detention center.”
The contract was withdrawn at Wednesday’s Executive Council meeting after Charlie Arlinghaus, commissioner of the state Department of Administrative Services, said the request was “poorly worded.”
“This is a poorly written article,” he said. “The project is not changing.”
State officials want to build a new youth prison on the site of Hampstead Hospital that will focus more on trauma-informed care and mimic a residential environment than the current facility in Manchester.
The revised contract – which requested additional funds to build a larger facility – will not delay the project, according to Arlinghaus.
However, the content of the request was new to Sanchez and gave rise to concern.
The proposal speculated that the youth correctional facility would need to be expanded by 36 percent, from 25,000 to 34,000 square feet, due to an increase in “gang membership.” Seven additional beds for intake and medical rooms would be needed and the building would transition from the “initial residential look and feel of the enclosed construction” to a “more institutional and tougher type.”
While there has been some gang activity at the current Sununu Youth Services Center, this is not a new problem for the state, Sanchez said.
In the past, the center treated juvenile delinquents without addressing mental health and behavioral problems.
“They weren’t necessarily working with youth with complex trauma and didn’t necessarily know how to treat them, even though that was the intention, to look at it from a treatment perspective,” Sanchez said.
During steering committee meetings, the group discussed in detail the construction of the facility and how to ensure that it is a safe place, but more like a home than a prison.
Expanding the facility would not help achieve that goal, she said.
“When you talk about bigger size, you’re no longer talking about something that feels like a home, you’re talking about something that feels like a building,” she said. “I was already a little worried about the bills and the way they were handling the design. It was starting to look a little bit institutionalized.”
Lori Weaver, commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services, justified the expansion to the council by explaining that the facility needed more space to separate the young people from each other.
Some need to be out of sight and hearing of others in order to be able to intervene in a crisis. Others need to be separated after an argument. And in other cases the children belong to rival gangs.
“The room needs to be large enough to be able to pivot to suit the needs of the space,” Weaver said.
While Governor Chris Sununu warned city councilors against further delays to the project, executive councilors agreed that the proposal needed to be reconsidered at their next meeting.
In the meantime, she will have questions for the heads of state and government, Sanchez said.
“We already have a large institutional building,” Sanchez said, “and we don’t need to rebuild it and put a lot of government money into the same type of building.”
