Discovering a revolving door

The federal FOIA, and many state laws patterned after it, can provide little access to a contractor’s records. But there are states where legislatures and the courts have established a broad right to see those records. That can help expose problems, lead to change, and benefit government, the public and even the contractors.

Take Florida, where, as in many places, juvenile justice is a booming industry. Most of the residential facilities for juvenile offenders are run by contractors, which range from nonprofits that manage one facility to large, publicly traded corporations.

In 2003, problems started surfacing at a privately run, maximum-security girls prison near West Palm Beach, Fla., where guards were charged with having sex with teenage inmates and several girls’ arms were broken while being restrained.

Kathleen Chapman, who covers social services for The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post, reported that a guard who was arrested for fondling a 15-year-old inmate had been fired from a previous job for using excessive force with an inmate at a boys prison. Another guard, who broke a girl’s arm, was fired from the same boys prison for slamming a male inmate to the floor.

“I started to wonder if the problem was more prevalent than just these two centers, and if people were moving between them without people knowing their history,” Chapman said.

Some officials at the juvenile centers were candid with her: Afraid of getting sued, the companies would give out neutral references for their past workers. Their past misdeeds would never come to light, and they would be hired again to work with troubled youths.

Most of the privately run centers did not know that Florida’s strong public records law applied to them. Chapman did. So late that year, Chapman began sending out public records requests to all the contractors, asking for the names of everyone who had worked at the prisons, their job titles, dates of birth, the dates they were hired and (if applicable) fired, and the reason for the termination.

Some of the private companies balked at the requests, feeling that they were intrusive.

The most common reaction, Chapman said, was surprise. Many had no idea that they were subject to the public records law. Once the state confirmed they should turn over the records, all but one eventually complied.

That company refused to disclose the information, even after the juvenile justice agency told it that doing so could be grounds for terminating the contract. Eventually the Post sued, and the documents were released.

Getting information about the state-run facilities was easier, largely because the information was centralized in one place and not spread out among several companies.

Post reporter William M. Hartnett created a database that was used to identify workers who held jobs at more than one juvenile center, and the reporters sent new requests seeking personnel records for those employees. Chapman and Hartnett’s story, which ran in December 2004, revealed how the system had created a “revolving door” for fired juvenile justice workers.

The story never would have been possible, Chapman said, had Florida courts not established that “a private contractor standing in the shoes of government and doing the same job as government, their records are as open as the government’s.”

Without that precedent, the reporters would have had to rely on the contractors to voluntarily hand over the personnel information.

That would have never happened, Chapman said, because their biggest fear was a lawsuit for disclosing that information — whether it was to a reporter or to a potential employer.

 “They were really concerned about employees suing them, and I think that was a valid concern,” Chapman said, “and I don’t know how we would have been able to do this in another state where the laws were less good.”

The juvenile centers were pleased when they learned through the Post’s reporting that the public records law would both protect them from liability for releasing a worker’s information and give them a way to check out potential hires — by using the same strategies the reporters had. Shortly after the story ran, the state put in place a database similar to the newspaper’s to screen possible workers for past misconduct.

The private centers knew there was a problem. But ignorant of the public records law, they knew of no way to get around it.

Paying only about $8 or $9 an hour for the demanding job of working with violent juvenile offenders, these companies were often faced with the choice of hiring someone with no experience or hiring someone who had worked at a juvenile detention center but left after a short period of time. They knew that hiring the more experienced person ran the risk of hiring someone with a history of abusing inmates, “and they didn’t want to hire people with that kind of history,” Chapman said.

The law’s openness that helped the press, the contractors and the public. With a weaker law, that might never have happened.