By The Editors

State officials expressed hope that a new agreement giving oversight of four of New York’s most dangerous youth prisons will mark the start of significant reforms of the widely-condemned system.

Earlier this month the state and the federal Department of Justice concluded a pact under which the latter will closely monitor operations at the four facilities. Thomas E. Perez, head of the Department’s civil rights division, promised his agency would take concerted action to end the abuses at the institutions and ensure that youths in them are treated properly and receive the services they need.

The agreement is the latest step in what has been a cooperative undertaking by a coalition of penal reform organizations, Governor David A. Paterson, and federal officials to remedy the problems that threatened to engulf the system of 26 juvenile-housing facilities across the state.

The problems had been rampant throughout the system for decades. They included physical abuse of youths by guards, lack of proper supervision of incarcerated youth, and lack of counseling and other services for the youth. For example, although many of the 900 youths in the facilities have been diagnosed as suffering from at least one form of mental illness, the Office of Children and Family Services, the state agency which runs the system, has not had a full-time psychiatrist on its staff to ensure they get the proper care for years.

While the prisons house youths convicted of serious and violent acts, including murder, state officials and juvenile justice experts say most of those incarcerated have committed far less serious offenses. They say that the decades-long neglect of counseling and rehabilitation services has resulted in many being sent back to their families and neighborhoods in no better – or, worse – condition when they arrived.

It was the death of a 15-year-old youth with mental problems four years ago in one of the facilities that provoked the momentum for reform bearing fruit now.

Last year the Justice Department threatened to take over the entire system unless significant steps at reform were initiated.

That threat came after it had issued a scathing report on the system’s operation. In short order, Governor Paterson, who, as a state legislator, had pushed for reform of the system, appointed a blue-ribbon commission that soon issued its own highly-critical report. The report was welcomed by the Governor and Gladys Carrion, commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services. In recent months, Ms. Carrion, who was a member of the Governor’s special task force, had ordered limits on the use of force by guards at all the system’s facilities and pledged to improve counseling services for youth.

Both also praised the new federal-state agreement. The Governor described it as “a step towards achieving true transformation of our juvenile justice system.”

Advocates outside the government said the new developments must be viewed as just the beginning of a comprehensive overhaul in the way troubled youths are treated. Gabrielle Prisco, director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Correctional Association of New York, told the New York Times that the proposed reform still “doesn’t get to the fact that any of those young people could be safely treated in their communities without ever seeing the inside of a prison cell.”