The agency responsible for youth in Oregon's juvenile justice system has seen numerous complaints alleging sexual abuse in its corrections facilities. Earlier this year, the agency's longtime director was fired by Gov. Tina Kotek for a backlog of allegations, but now it has a new appointed leader, Michael Tessean.
OPB politics reporter Lauren Dake has been following the story and she spoke with KLCC’s Rachael McDonald.
Rachael McDonald: Let's start with some background. Can you tell us more about what the Oregon Youth Authority does?
Lauren Dake: Yeah, so the Oregon Youth Authority is our state's juvenile justice system. They oversee 9 secure facilities. They call them closed custody facilities, and 5 of those are youth correctional facilities, and 4 of them are youth transitional facilities, more like camps. The biggest one that people have probably heard of is MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility that is in Woodburn. And so, basically, children who have been convicted of serious crimes before their 18 years of age serve their sentences at an Oregon Youth Authority facility. Children as young as 12 can be incarcerated there, and they can be held in state custody until they turn 24. Some of the people are then transferred to the state's adult prison system.
McDonald: The agency's longtime director, Joe O'Leary, was fired in March over a backlog of abuse complaints. Can you tell us how that backlog surfaced and what the complaints alleged?
Dake: So, O'Leary was actually the person who initiated this investigation once he heard of the backlog of complaints. He did that a couple of months before the public was really aware of what was happening. He basically asked for a peer audit from the Oregon Department of Corrections, the state's adult prison system, to dig into his office of Professional Standards Office, and that's the office that oversees these complaints. So, the Oregon Department of Corrections did that. They released this report to him showing that complaints by children in the state's juvenile justice system were not properly being handled. Basically, there was a massive backlog of complaints. Some of those complaints were simply never investigated*. I think there were something like 700 that fell into that category. Some of them were investigated, but then they never received the needed sign-off to move forward by the chief investigator. There were about 3,000 of those. So basically, It just showed this general mishandling of thousands of complaints, some stretching back many years.
[*Editor's note: After the interview aired, Dake clarified to KLCC that some of the complaints were never fully investigated. A spokesperson for Oregon Youth Authority told KLCC that "all reports had an investigation begun and (were) in some state of completion. The issue was that investigations had languished beyond an appropriate window."]
McDonald: A major lawsuit was also filed against the state on the same day O'Leary was fired. What was in the lawsuit?
Dake: Yeah, the timing was really something there. O'Leary got fired. The governor fired him. And then the same day, a lawsuit was filed accusing a longtime pediatrician of repeatedly abusing boys whose ages ranged from 12 to 16 at the time. And the lawsuit alleged that they were repeatedly sexually abused by this top doctor at the facility. This doctor had worked for the Oregon Youth Authority for more than 4 decades. The lawsuit, this March lawsuit, alleged that he abused 10 boys, but that the abuse was so widespread that many people knew about it and that there was just this culture of indifference that allowed it to continue for years.
McDonald: Several more lawsuits were filed in the months after that. Around how many people came forward with stories of abuse and what else can you tell us about those?
Dake: Right. The same attorney, Peter Janci has since filed a couple of other lawsuits. And after the first one, he said his phone was ringing quite often with people who wanted to share their stories about their time in custody at the Oregon Youth Authority. His most recent lawsuits accused a group life coordinator and a former correctional officer of sexual abuse and include more allegations from more people against that top pediatrician who worked in the facilities for so long.
McDonald: Did the Oregon Youth Authority or its former director comment on the lawsuits or the backlog of complaints?
Dake: No, not really. I mean, other than to say that they were doing everything they could to keep kids safe and, and to point out that a lot of these allegations were from quite some time in the past.
But generally, state agencies and officials working for the state are not really allowed to comment on pending litigation.
McDonald: So Governor Tina Kotek appointed a new director to head the agency, Michael Tessean. Why was he picked for this job?
Dake: Yeah, so Tessean’s background is interesting. He was most recently the director of the Colorado State Board of Parole, and then before that, he worked at the Colorado Department of Human Services. So kind of an interesting background in that he has experienced both with children placed in foster care and children in the juvenile justice system, which there are at times some intersections between those two populations. So, he is just starting in that role and we'll see how he does.
