http://www.opwdd.ny.gov/
But this month, after learning of The Times’s findings, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo forced the resignations of Max E. Chmura, who led the agency, and Jane G. Lynch, the chief operating officer of the state’s Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons With Disabilities, which is charged with protecting people with developmental disabilities.
“It is a basic function of state government to protect the most vulnerable among us,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.
The Cuomo administration said it would undertake immediate and comprehensive review of the agencies and their practices. Asked about the low rate of referral of allegations of abuse to law enforcement — for example, only a quarter of sexual abuse cases were reported — officials said they were reviewing flaws in their record-keeping.
In 25 percent of the cases involving physical, sexual or psychological abuse, the state employees were transferred to other homes.
The state initiated termination proceedings in 129 of the cases reviewed but succeeded in just 30 of them, in large part because the workers’ union, the Civil Service Employees Association, aggressively resisted firings in almost every case. A few employees resigned, even though the state sought only suspensions.
In the remainder of the cases, employees accused of abuse — whether beating the disabled, using racial slurs or neglecting their care — either were suspended, were fined or had their vacation time reduced.
Most of the state-operated homes are in economically depressed areas upstate, and the jobs they provide — paying from $29,000
to nearly $62,000 with generous benefits — are sometimes among the few decent employment opportunities.
The state has no educational requirements for the positions, which involve duties like administering drugs,
driving residents to day activities, feeding them and preventing them from choking. Some of those hired have shown no previous interest or skill in caring for difficult populations.
Former regulators, employees within the system and advocates have grown increasingly dismayed at what they say is the state’s tolerance of abuse of the residents, whom the state refers to as “consumers” in its records.
“It’s absolutely staggering and shocking,” said Michael Carey, an outspoken voice for the developmentally disabled in New York. “There is massive systemic abuse and a failure to hold these individuals properly accountable.”
Mr. Carey’s autistic son, Jonathan, died in state care in 2007, in what was ruled a homicide at the hands of a state employee. His death led to the passage of Jonathan’s Law, which required the state to begin disclosing incidents of abuse to parents.
http://www.opwdd.ny.gov/regs/hp_regs_jlaw.jsp
In 1999, the state sought another eight-week suspension after Mr. Lovett spent up to three and a half hours a shift making personal phone calls. In an interview, Mr. Lovett explained that he had been going through a divorce. He was docked a week’s worth of accrued time and reimbursed the agency for his phone calls.
Jeffrey Monsour, a developmental aide, spoke out against inconsistencies he found in records regarding the disciplining of group-home workers. The matter was referred back to his superiors. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
For two decades, Clarence Sundram ran the Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons With Disabilities, taking on during his tenure broad problems in the treatment of the developmentally disabled. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
He was sometimes confrontational and made frequent use of the bully pulpit, demanding that the news media pay attention to this population. Mr. Sundram took on broad problems, like the use of physical restraint and seclusion, and the need to report serious episodes to law enforcement.
His approach did not always sit well with commissioners at the state’s Office of Mental Health and the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, who felt Mr. Sundram was always inviting more scrutiny of their problems.
But there is no doubt that after Mr. Sundram left in 1998, the attention he brought to the issue all but disappeared and the agency’s public profile collapsed.
These days, the commission is more likely to play down allegations of abuse than to root them out. And its resources are limited: in 2009, it investigated less than two percent of allegations of abuse or neglect of the disabled by employees.
The commission also appears to operate under a media blackout: Jane G. Lynch never spoke to a reporter during her nearly three-year tenure, her staff members said, and declined to comment for this article.
When you stop speaking out publicly, Mr. Sundram said, “nobody has any idea what the hell you are doing.” Given the competing demands for attention, he said, the public will simply move on.
Governor Cuomo has asked Mr. Sundram to return to Albany to help overhaul the agency.
A Variety of Offenses
The hundreds of files examined by The Times provided a disturbing inventory of offenses committed by employees — few of which ever got them fired.
Kenyetta Williams, an employee at a group home on Long Island, left a resident “soiled with feces and urine and suffering from a broken leg” on her bedroom floor for more than an hour, the records stated. Ms. Williams was suspended. In a brief interview last week, she said she was taking care of too many residents and covering for an absent co-worker at the time.
medication errors and neglect, Roger Macomber, the employee in western New York, faced charges including flinging a disabled woman across a room into a wall and destroying notes describing unexplained bruises on a person in his care.
He said that he had been turned in by a trainee who did not understand that aggressive residents could not be handled with kid gloves. He said he argued with the trainee before she made her accusations: “I called her a liar, I called her paranoid, I called her stupid,” Mr. Macomber said. “Because of that, she brought up all these different incidents that she had seen.”
Mr. Monsour believes a large part of the problem is that supervisors do not spend enough time in homes beyond weekday work hours, underscoring the challenge in managing such a sprawling network of residences.
“You can’t manage all these group homes from a telephone,” he said, adding, “there are a lot of good developmental aides who are put in bad situations by management.”
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/mentalhealthanddisorders/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
Mr. Monsour wrote to Gov. David A. Paterson’s office last year and the attorney general’s office, requesting an investigation of the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities. Along with his letter, Mr. Monsour included the disciplinary files he had obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests. The governor’s office never responded, and the attorney general’s office, then run by Mr. Cuomo, referred the matter back to Mr. Monsour’s superiors.
“I didn’t even get a call from an investigator,” he said, adding, “I was thrown under the bus.”
Mr. Monsour’s efforts appear to have had little effect on the culture inside the agency.
Employees across the capital region, the area where Mr. Monsour works, were recently warned to keep quiet about episodes inside the group homes. One handout distributed by management bluntly directed employees not to mention reports of abuse in daily progress notes kept on residents. Doing so, the handout warned, could make them subject to subpoena.
“DON’T report in your notes that an Incident Report was filled out,” the instructions said, adding: “IF IT ISN’T DOCUMENTED, IT WASN’T DONE.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/nyregion/boys-death-highlights-crisis-in-homes-for-disabled.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/asia/ship-fitzgerald-sailors-investigation.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/nyregion/20110313_home_video.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/13/nyregion/13homes-document-macomber.html
DONE.”
Russ Buettner and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting.
If you have information about abuse occurring in homes for the mentally disabled that you would like to share with The Times, e-mail tips@nytimes.com.
A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: At State-Run Homes, Abuse and Impunity. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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