Advocates renew call to empty Long Creek after 16-year-old contracts COVID

Advocates opposed to juvenile incarceration renewed their calls to empty the Long Creek Youth Development Center after the Maine Department of Corrections confirmed over the weekend that a young person had tested positive for COVID-19.

“We have been demanding since the beginning of the pandemic that all of our youth get released with full transition plans and financial support for their immediate safety,” said Al Cleveland, campaign manager of Maine Youth Justice, which in April initiated a youth-led online campaign to pressure Governor Janet Mills to release all youth inmates from the South Portland facility. 

“This is on the Governor,” Cleveland wrote on Twitter. “This was preventable.”

Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty said during a Monday press conference hosted by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention that a 16-year-old girl, who had been held in the facility for several weeks, tested positive for the coronavirus the day after she was released.

DOC has been testing individuals prior to their scheduled release, Liberty said. 

The girl is now self-quarantining and the DOC is currently awaiting the test results of 34 youth and 187 employees at Long Creek. All young people in the facility have been tested, Liberty said, but not all employees yet.

State Rep. Victoria Morales (D-South Portland) — a member of the legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee and an attorney who co-founded the Maine Youth Court, a diversion program for the state’s juvenile justice system — said she heard from lawyers representing youth at Long Creek that staff are isolating new arrivals for 14 days in empty units.

“I am hearing that children are quarantined in solitary for 14 days when detained,” Morales wrote on Twitter on Monday. “I am sick over this. We must do no harm!”

“And 187 staff for 34 children???? Solitary confinement for all children detained instead of universal testing???” she wrote. “This is cruel and unusual punishment of our children.”

In May, after the first positive case of COVID-19 was reported inside the Maine Correctional Center (MCC) in Windham, Liberty declined to order universal testing across Maine’s prison system, instead only testing inmates who showed symptoms of COVID-19. 

On Monday, Liberty said the DOC had still not changed its testing strategy.

Several state lawmakers and prisoner rights advocates have been calling for universal testing in all of Maine’s jails and prisons since the onset of the pandemic. 

“What we’re not hearing is the commissioner responding to the call for universal testing,” Joseph Jackson, coordinator of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, told Beacon.

Jackson noted that a key finding of the Maine Juvenile Justice System Assessment & Reinvestment Task Force, launched by the legislature to reform the state’s juvenile justice policies, is that many young people held at Long Creek are there because the state has no alternative housing options for them. 

“We’re sending young people to be incarcerated because they don’t have a home,” he said. “Young women are being sent to Long Creek because they are victims of sexual crimes and they have nowhere to put them.”

“That is unacceptable,” Jackson said. “There’s a lot of things that need to change in Maine’s criminal justice system.”

Official photo of the sign for the Long Creek Youth Development Center