As County Council meets behind closed doors today to discuss a potential settlement in their lawsuit against the executive branch over the issuance of a $73 million no-bid juvenile detention contract, yet-unpublished documents obtained by open records request by the Pittsburgh Independent shine light on behind-the-scenes efforts by the judiciary to reopen the facility and facilitate a private operator for Shuman Juvenile Detention Center.
Last September, council voted to sue the county executive and courts over the juvenile detention contract. Adelphoi countersued county council in May.
The Latrobe-based nonprofit reopened 12 beds at Shuman on July 2, 2024, after an initial round of taxpayer-funded renovations. One week later, Allegheny County Council voted overwhelmingly to reject all of Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato’s juvenile advisory board nominations.
Four separate county sources told the Pittsburgh Independent that negotiations between the executive branch and county council to settle council's lawsuit have been ongoing, and that the Washington County senior judge overseeing the case, Katherine B. Emery, has urged council and the executive branch to reach a settlement.
All of the sources, who represent both council and executive branch but are not named due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations, told the Independent that council met in a closed session last month to discuss a potential settlement with the executive branch, but were unable to reach a consensus.
Two of the sources confirmed that council’s next closed or “executive” session will take place Wednesday, July 24.
The state Department of Human Services issued an emergency order to close Shuman in August 2021 after several incidents of detained children not receiving medication and another incident of a detained juvenile overdosing on heroin, which prompted an Allegheny County Police security review.
“Once an emergency removal order is issued, all youth are removed and the facility is not able to operate even under appeal,” said Brandon Cwalina, DHS press secretary.
With Shuman closed, Allegheny County could only detain children at a handful of beds in Steubenville, Ohio, and Adelphoi facilities in Latrobe. This bed shortage [.pdf], many argued, meant that criminal youth were not being detained despite posing a risk to the community.
“Despite best efforts, we are in a severe crisis and are struggling to keep our communities safe,” wrote Allegheny County President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark in a July 2022 letter to then Gov. Tom Wolf, urgently requesting his assistance to help with a shortage of secure juvenile detention beds in Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania.
One solution, she suggested, was “perhaps unprecedented”: have the state take control of Shuman, transform it into a regional juvenile detention facility, and “require the Commonwealth to enter into a sole-source contract with a qualified vendor such as Adelphoi Village to operate the detention center.”
Clark’s request went unheeded. Fourteen months later, in September 2023, Clark and others signed a five-year, $73 million no-bid contract with Adelphoi Western Region to manage secure juvenile detention services for Allegheny County.
Clark, who was sworn in as Allegheny County’s president judge in December 2018, retired in December 2023, three months after signing the Adelphoi deal. She remains a part of the Fifth District as senior judge and has a reputation as a highly regarded jurist.
Courts spokesperson Joe Asturi said that Clark’s letter “speaks for itself,” and otherwise declined comment on behalf of Clark and the Fifth District court for this story.
“The decision [of who should run Shuman] should have nothing to do with the courts,” said Duquesne University law professor Bruce Ledewitz, in a November interview with the Independent. “That's a decision our elected officials should make. The courts have a role to play in enforcing the constitutional rights of the inmates, and if they’re involved too closely with the company running the place, you have a potential conflict of interest.”
The Allegheny County controller’s office confirmed to the Pittsburgh Independent that the courts claimed two exceptions–one for nonprofits and another for professional services–in order to grant the juvenile detention contract without issuing a public call for bids.
Cliff Rieders, a longtime attorney and active Pennsylvania Bar Association member based in Williamsport, PA, says that “any transaction by a public entity that's not put out for bidding legitimately raises questions and raises eyebrows.”
“That, however, does not ipso facto make it wrong.”
Clark cited a state statute that allows the Department of Public Welfare to operate a regional facility if those respective counties request a regional facility and refuse to operate it themselves. Clark also noted that additional beds could be used for so-called “Act 33” cases – juveniles as young as 14 charged as adults who are detained in their own wing at Allegheny County Jail.
“Were Shuman Center to be reopened as a regional detention center, it would completely resolve the issue of sufficient detention beds in Allegheny County and for most, if not all, of Western Pennsylvania,” she wrote.
The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts declined to respond to a request for a general comment on the judiciary's role in juvenile detention in Pennsylvania. Adelphoi VP of Marketing & Strategy Development, Karyn Pratt, also declined to comment specifically on Clark's letter, saying instead that Adelphoi has been a longtime partner of Allegheny County.
Jessica Feierman of Philadelphia’s Juvenile Law Center declined to comment on the matter specifically, saying instead, more generally, that “rather than focusing on opening new detention centers, we should actively address the overreliance on detention and incarceration of children statewide.”
This is the first in a series of reports to come based on open records documents related to Shuman Juvenile Detention Center’s closure and subsequent reopening two years later. Brittany Hailer contributed to this report. This article was partially funded by the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.
