Patrick has been in the Loudoun County Juvenile Detention Center a dozen times for offenses ranging from being drunk in public to grand larceny. Right now he's serving a six-month sentence. He was declared a danger to himself and others last fall after taking 64 Coricidens, an over-the-counter cough and cold medicine.
This time, however, Patrick, 16, thinks he's turning around.
"I've had my bottom, I can say that," he said earlier this week as he sat in one of the detention center's two classrooms. He wore an orange sweatsuit and black sneakers with Velcro.
Unlike most of the detention center's detainees, Patrick attends school on the outside at Young Adults Project in Leesburg. When he gets out in May, he will attend Stone Bridge High School — his first time in a real public high school. And if everything goes well, he'll graduate on time.
"I've never really looked forward to going to school until I came here," he said. He hopes to attend college to study computer science or something similar, and eventually start a family with his girlfriend.
PATRICK IS AN EXAMPLE of how the Loudoun County Juvenile Detention Center caters to the needs of each teenager that finds his way — and, 90 percent of the time, it is a boy — into the center, helping make it a nationally recognized facility. The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University recently awarded the Innovations in Government award to programs like Loudoun's that participate in a program called Performance-Based Standards.
On March 1, the Board of Supervisors will present superintendent Mike Ward with an award recognizing the center's excellent work and participation in the standards program. The appropriately-named Ward have been with the center since it opened in 1986.
Ward credits the center's success to two factors: first, the highly structured day-to-day program that promotes consistency in the detainees’ lives, and second, the biannual Performance Based Standards that takes a hard look at the center's successes and failures.
Loudoun County is the only detention center in Virginia to participate.
"This is kind of a scary thing for people," Ward said. "It exposes your problems."
Every six months, the center conducts a partial survey of staff and detainees. It then compares the center to similarly-equipped centers across the country as well at national standards overall. The Leesburg-based facility consistently scores above the national average.
Using the survey helps pinpoint exactly where the center's problems rest — a tricky thing to nail down, because with teenagers staying for as little as a night or as long as a year, the center's population is unsteady. The center's capacity is 24, and it usually holds about 21 people, usually 15-17 year old boys, although the age range is technically from 11 to 17. The charges levied against them vary from violating curfew to murder.
THE RECIDIVISM rate is quite high for juvenile delinquents — Patrick said he knows just about everyone who comes into the center. Ward estimates that 25 to 30 percent of teenagers there are repeat customers. With the help of social workers and resources with the Loudoun County Department of Social Services, which oversees the center, Ward and his staff try hard to hook up releasees with community resources that will help them in the real world.
Still, Ward reports little-to-no violence among the inmates. The center will have three to four incidents a year that require physical restraint, while other similarly-sized centers will have 20 or more.
It all has to do with structure, Ward said.
"Kids respond to limits. If you present an environment that is fair and consistent, you'll get compliance," he said.
The day for an inmate at the detention center rarely varies, starting from the wakeup bell at six a.m.
"Their day starts the same the next day," assistant superintendent Michelle Smith said.
With 21 staff members, the center maintains an almost one-to-one ratio of staff to inmates. When it faces overcrowding — as it has more frequently in the last three years — another facility in Warrenton rents out beds at $100 a night.
FOR PATRICK, Loudoun County Juvenile Detention Center has been a huge part of his life. He's warned his younger sister — who's just recently started getting into the kind of trouble that led him to his current situation — and asked her to see how being separated from his family has been painful for him.
Still, he appears comfortable, even happy, in the center. He thinks the food is great. He doesn't appear daunted by the fact that he is in a locked facility. If anything, he wants the center to be even more like a jail.
When the staff changes shifts, they give detainees a break in their cells called "naptime."
"Like, are we kids or something?" Patrick said. "I think they could make the atmosphere more serious."