Rabbi Moishe Mayir Vogel, far left, responds to interview questions from a County Council committee before its vote to pick three finalists for a slot on the Juvenile Detention Board of Advisors, March 18, at the Allegheny County Courthouse in Downtown. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
The county is re-establishing a board that will guide the management of its youth detention center. Advocates say it lacks the power to hold the facility’s private operator accountable.
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Nearly a year after Allegheny County’s youth detention center reopened, a board charged with monitoring its safety and services has been assembled. County Executive Sara Innamorato announced its appointees last month — a process delayed by litigation over her predecessor’s controversial choice to hire a private contractor to run the facility.
The appointees bring a range of experiences across the legal, academic and social service fields to the board. It notably includes several who spent their careers combating the mass incarceration of Black youth.
Meet the picks for the new detention advisory board
One is a longtime violence interrupter with lived experience in the juvenile legal system. Another runs a nonprofit serving women and girls facing racism, poverty and violence. Yet another is a psychologist studying multi-generational trauma in Black youth. And one of two family court judges appointed to the board has criticized the county’s lack of diversity on its bench and done pro bono work to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
County Council must vote to confirm the eight citizen appointees. And Innamorato, or her designee, and County Controller Corey O’Connor, or his designee, will complete the 10-person board.
Innamorato said in a statement last year that appointments to the board “are the first step in ensuring that the new Shuman Center is supporting young people and setting them up to successfully reintegrate into their communities.” The reopened facility would have “excellent” staff and provide “holistic” mental health, education and workforce development services, she added.
An executive at Adelphoi, the facility’s private operator, told PublicSource it “values the board’s advisory role” and “will collaborate by providing the necessary information to support their work and maintain transparency in operations.”
Under state law, the board can only advise Adelphoi and has no enforcement power over the facility’s operations — a limitation that experts and advocates have sharply criticized.
Past failure to protect youth in custody
The specter of the county’s previous failure hovers over Innamorato’s pledges. In 2021, the state revoked the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center’s license after discovering multiple violations at the facility, including a theft, medication errors, a heroin overdose and children left unattended. The county, which had directly operated Shuman for nearly five decades, shut it down following the revocation.
After law enforcement officials complained they had no place to put youth they deemed a threat to public safety, the Court of Common Pleas and former County Executive Rich Fitzgerald decided to reopen Shuman under private management. In September 2023, the county awarded Adelphoi Western Region — part of a group of Latrobe-based youth detention nonprofits — a $73-million, five-year contract to run the facility.
The move sparked an outcry from youth advocates and some council members, who pointed to Adelphoi’s checkered record. A PublicSource investigation found lawsuits alleging negligence and physical and sexual abuse at its facilities, including two federal suits filed in Harrisburg and Philadelphia just days after the county signed the contract.
Council immediately sued to kill the contract on grounds that the court and Fitzgerald bypassed its authority to approve or deny the use of county property. Adelphoi countersued last year seeking damages for operational and reputational harm it said council had caused.
Innamorato first tried to reestablish the state-mandated board more than a year ago — ahead of the facility’s July 2 reopening under the name Highland Detention at Shuman. But council rejected all five of her picks, arguing she hadn’t sought its input while vetting nominees. A consent order settled both suits in September and stipulated Adelphoi’s reporting requirements to the board. The agreement also gave council influence over one board position: It can select three finalists for the county executive to choose from. The county executive selects four more members and the court’s president judge selects the remaining three.
Does the board have enough power?
Some experts, advocates and a council member say the board’s advisory nature — codified in state law — significantly limits its power. They pointed out that violations occurred at Shuman on the previous board’s watch.
“What’s frustrating to me is that it’s a board that could have been a great oversight mechanism,” said County Councilmember Bethany Hallam, who introduced a bill last year to create a board for youth detention that “mirrored the structure of [the county’s] Jail Oversight Board.” That board — which Hallam sits on — has some enforcement power over the Allegheny County Jail’s operations.
“Why should we have any lesser standard when we’re talking about kids?” she asked. Her bill has been stuck in the council’s Committee on Public Safety for nearly a year.
County spokesperson Abigail Gardner said the board “has statutory authority under state law,” but the county manager and the county’s Department of Human Services has day-to-day oversight of Shuman, and the state Department of Human Services “ultimately has oversight authority.”
“If anyone wants to see the powers of the board change, advocacy needs to happen at the state level,” she wrote in response to criticism from Hallam and other advocates.
The new board is “a professional group of experts” that Adelphoi agreed to collaborate with “in the best interest” of kids held at Shuman, she added. “Previous iterations of this advisory board were not staffed in the same way, the appointees were not experts, the board did not meet regularly and appointments frequently expired without reappointing new representatives — that is not the approach this administration is taking to the board now.”
Tanisha Long, a community organizer for the Abolitionist Law Center, was one of the loudest critics of the county’s decision to hire Adelphoi. She was nominated by Hallam to be council’s pick for the board, but was eliminated during a council committee’s vote for three finalists — a process Long felt was “deeply politicized.” She gave Innamorato credit for appointing “people who are really great,” but noted the board lacks the voice of a young person who was incarcerated at Shuman.
“That is an interesting suggestion we will consider for the future,” Gardner said in response to Long’s criticism over the missing youth perspective. She encouraged young people who’d like to join the next iteration of the board to also approach council or the president judge.
What experts think the board should do
Despite what they say is the board’s limited power, experts and advocates offered suggestions to the appointees.
Long panned the idea of a board “that can go [into] the facility when Adelphoi lets them, that can have access to the things Adelphoi lets them have.” She urged appointees to push for regular, unplanned inspections of Shuman and at least one board member, Gwen’s Girls CEO Kathi Elliott, said during an interview that she would.
PublicSource asked Karyn Pratt, Adelphoi’s vice president of marketing and strategy development, if it will provide that level of access. She said it expects “facility access and visits will be part of the broader conversation as the board begins its work.”
Pratt said Adelphoi has been “fully transparent” with county officials and the public. She didn’t detail how information is communicated to the public, but said the court and Juvenile Probation Office “have a consistent presence in the facility.” The county “has been complimentary” of its programs, she added. Gardner confirmed the county is satisfied with Adelphoi’s performance based on what officials have seen.
Under the terms of the settlement, Adelphoi must report detailed information to the board, including demographic characteristics of Shuman’s population. Pratt said that includes “admissions, discharges, average length of stay, race, gender, age and most serious offense at the time of admission.”
Jeff Shook and Sara Goodkind, professors at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work, said the board should ask for more granular data in light of the county’s — and country’s — history of over-incarcerating Black youth and youth with disabilities.
“They should not just be able to say, ‘This many Black boys, this many Black girls, this many white boys, this many white girls,’” Goodkind said. “Are they being detained for different types of offenses? Or are some young people having different experiences within Shuman?”
Shook knows several board members and said, “they’re a good group of folks [who are] not going to be shy to provide really strong feedback to Adelphoi.”
For now, the board will receive data about a relatively small population. Adelphoi hasn’t been able to scale up Shuman’s capacity since it reopened a year ago with 12 available beds. Pratt said it will do so as the county completes renovations to the facility. There were 16 kids in the county’s adult jail on Friday.
Venuri Siriwardane is PublicSource’s health and mental health reporter. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on Bluesky @venuri.bsky.social.
The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to PublicSource’s health care reporting.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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