Cafety

When we discuss making changes to facilities to ensure that youth are being well treated and cared for in a humane fashion, there are two areas that we need to be concerned about, both the regulation of facilities through legislation, and the oversight of facilities usually through the actions of the executive branch of government.

Sometimes the abuse, mistreatment, or poor quality of care that goes on in facilities are completely legal, either through a lack of regulation, or through specific exemptions that have been given to a facility due to the “therapeutic nature” of the intervention as in the case of using electric shock on children. When this is the case, pressing for new legislation can be effective, either to place a facility under the auspices of a regulatory body or to ban an intervention outright. However, more often facilities are acting in violation of regulations already in place. The state departments that regulate facilities need to be made aware of these violations, and then forced to do something about them.

In the State of New York for example these regulatory bodies include the Office of Mental Health (OMH), which oversees all of the psychiatric hospitals and funds all of the residential treatment facilities (RTF) on the campuses of privately run residential treatment centers, the State Education Department which through Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities (VESID) oversees all schools which accept students in special education, and the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) which run secure and non-secure detention facilities for youth placed through the court system. As it currently stands there are some facilities in New York State that has no such regulatory body which provides oversight over the facility. This also goes for a multitude of facilities nationwide.


CAFETY takes the position that all residential treatment programs should be licensed in regards to their residential and medical components and otherwise regulated in terms of their educational services. Additionally, there must be serious consequences for violating the terms of the facilities licensure or accreditation.

Furthermore, in addition to our goal of providing accurate information about the mechanisms to report institutional abuse in each state, it is also our goal to give information regarding the regulatory bodies in each state that oversee the facilities of concern.