By Jim Siegel
Enquirer Columbus Bureau

COLUMBUS - State budget reductions totaling $114 million over the past four years played a key role in conditions at two juvenile detention centers, including one that holds teenage girls, the Department of Youth Services director said Tuesday.

Geno Natalucci-Persichetti said budget cuts forced the department to close the Riverview Juvenile Correctional Facility in Delaware, Ohio, its only female juvenile prison, in fall 2003. The girls were moved to the Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility, which also holds boys.

After the move, fewer corrections officers, teachers, treatment staff and supervisors were assigned to work with the girls. And many, he said, had never worked with girls before.

"You put all those combination of things together, and I think it was part of a chemistry," Natalucci-Persichetti told the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee. "We walked from one institution that had a staff, and a staff that was trained, into a new environment with fewer staff" that didn't necessarily want to work with the girls.

Sen. Mark Mallory, D-Cincinnati, the committee chairman, asked Natalucci-Persichetti to testify after allegations of physical and sexual abuse of teenage girls surfaced at the Scioto facility in Delaware County.

Additional media reports disclosed sex abuse and unlicensed workers providing therapy at the Circleville Juvenile Correctional Facility's sexual offender program.

Less than a week ago, the Department of Youth Services gave a plan to Gov. Bob Taft outlining how the agency would correct problems. That plan includes a request for a new girls' prison, revised physical techniques to restrain girls, new social workers, additional psychologists and expanding the boys' units so convicted sex offenders can be placed in single cells, instead of sharing cells.

But for that to happen, Natalucci-Persichetti said, he needs more money.

"You have so many staff to work with so many kids, and you have so many needs the kids have,'' he said.

Estimates say the department will need at least another $18 million in fiscal year 2006 and $28 million in 2007, although officials say that could change.

A Taft spokesman said there is money available for "unique circumstances," but the exact amount is unknown.

The committee questioned Natalucci-Persichetti for over an hour. The harshest criticism came from Sen. Robert Hagan, D-Youngstown, who said the department's initiatives are coming too late.

"I was hoping to hear in your testimony that you would admit to some serious failings," he said. "Given the initiatives you just offered, it certainly is one way of saying that the department has failed to help many of these young kids."

Hagan also is concerned with the department's plan to hire legal consultants to help juvenile inmates file legal complaints. He said an outside agency, like the state public defender's office, should handle those matters.

Jill Beeler, head of the public defender's juvenile section, wrote a letter to Mallory on Tuesday explaining that while the office handles appeals, it has no authority to address complaints about physical and sexual abuse.

"Although the working relationship between this office and DYS has been positive ... our attorneys have been frustrated by the lack of response and communication from DYS regarding youths' grievances about conditions of confinement," Beeler wrote.

The public defender would like to hire four people - attorneys and paralegals - to handle complaints from juveniles.

The Children's Law Center, a Covington-based child advocacy group, said in a lawsuit filed last month that youth service officials ignored repeated complaints about the lack of legal services for juvenile inmates.

E-mail jsiegel@enquirer.com