MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The recent escape of three teens from the Wilder Youth Development Center is drawing eyes from state leaders and children service advocates.
Authorities said more than a dozen people broke free from Wilder in recent years, and this has people looking for solutions.
"There's a lot of work that needs to be done," said Tennessee Rep. Torrey Harris, who toured the Wilder facility last year. Harris said the building he saw felt more like a prison rather than a place to rehabilitate young people with violent track records.
"Those walls need to be repaired, there's bedroom spaces that still need mattresses, that still need places for the children to be able to [fully] feel like they're at home," said Harris.
Fayette County Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Garcia said there has been a riot and vandalism damage to the Wilder facility, and the doors to the rooms are not high enough. The deputy adds people can climb over them through a space between the ceiling and the wall.
Other juvenile justice reform advocates agree that after this latest escape, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, which runs Wilder, needs to hire more attentive staff.
"They didn't even know the kids were gone until the police called," said Johnnie Hatten, an investigator with Disability Rights Tennessee. The child services group published a report last year about Wilder called “Designed to Fail,” that reported the children at the facility were not receiving the healthcare or education they needed.
"We're concerned about how much staff is it going to take for you to care for 30 to 40 kids," said Hatten.
For some of the kids at Wilder, a phone call from their family is all they want, and unfortunately according to Hatten, some of them only get five to 10 minutes a month at most.
“A lot of them don’t get phone calls from their families if they live far out, so they feel alone,” said Harris.
The state representative hopes his fellow lawmakers will join him to make the changes needed to help those at Wilder get this crucial support.
"While we have this new DCS commissioner, we want to be able to give her the tools she needs to make sure that our children, our youth, who are in our custody, are being cared for properly and 100% adequately and being able to get the tools that they need so that their behavior can change so they can go out and be productive citizens with a clean record," said Harris.
DCS told us in an email:
"DCS does not speak specifically to the security of our facilities. But we can confirm, there are no riots at Wilder."