Concerned about overcrowded youth detention centers, Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court officials sought safer settings and a better path forward for kids.
Apryl Gordon agreed to offer such a place at her youth care center, Life’s Right Direction. Then, her Facebook posts came.
“Free Ass Whoopins!” and “one lick from that cord” could set them straight, Gordon wrote about the kids. She also posted offers to train others to make “mega money” by housing vulnerable children.
A Marshall Project - Cleveland investigation found that youth care centers operate with lax oversight from the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court — no regular onsite inspections and no quarterly reports.
At the same time, success rates — whether a child completes the program without ending up back in some form of incarceration — for children housed in the facilities have decreased, while the detention center population surged.
The Marshall Project - Cleveland also reviewed hundreds of pages of complaints and corrective action plans on several youth care centers contracted by the court. Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court officials said they didn’t know the Ohio Department of Children and Youth had found problems because the state licenses and oversees the centers.
Court officials terminated their contract with Gordon and Life’s Right Direction a day after The Marshall Project - Cleveland raised questions about her online posts.
The Ohio Department of Youth Services in 1994 created RECLAIM — Reasoned and Equitable Community and Local Alternatives to the Incarceration of Minors — a program designed to curb overcrowding at juvenile detention centers and youth prisons, and emphasize rehabilitating children.
Cuyahoga County received about $5.5 million in RECLAIM funds for 2022-2023. It is budgeting an additional million for 2024-2025, according to court records.
Juvenile courts across Ohio receive funding from the state to pay for private placements as part of a program that provides financial incentives for courts if they keep the incarcerated youth population down.
After Ohio set aside millions of dollars to create alternatives to juvenile detention in 2020, the number of placements in youth care centers soared in Cuyahoga County from zero to 103 in less than two years.
Besides youth care centers, the juvenile court also sends children to other private centers that provide mental health and behavioral treatment as an alternative to sending them to youth prisons.
Between 2019 and 2023, the court sent about 230 children to private centers, at a cost of nearly $8 million. Of that, the court spent over a half a million dollars to house a little fewer than 100 children at three youth care centers: Life’s Right Direction, Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry and Raven House.
At youth care centers, according to court administrators and county contracts, providers work toward getting to the root of a child’s behavioral and mental health issues through programming that is supposed to be rehabilitative rather than punitive.
Kids can live in these youth care centers for days or weeks. The length of stay varies for each center, and a child’s stay can cost between $250 and $400 a day, records show.
The court uses the money to pay for “almost all of our programming,” said Timothy McDevitt, the administrator for the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court. “It really helped us divert kids away from detention.”
Despite the court sending youth to alternative programs, the detention center’s average daily population has steadily increased 38% from 2020 to 2023. The rising numbers, coupled with staffing shortages, caused a $4.5 million deficit because of overtime costs last year.
Ohio’s RECLAIM program was a flagship for reform throughout the country, said Michele Deitch, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the university’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab.
Deitch is an attorney who has worked for over 35 years on criminal justice and juvenile justice policy issues with state and local government officials.
Diversion doesn’t mean just putting someone in a different facility — it means keeping them in the community at home, Deitch said, adding that was the spirit of the RECLAIM program 10 years ago.
Cuyahoga County’s practice of placing kids in youth care centers “is effectively expanding the size of your juvenile detention center to include all of these group homes,” she said.
“They’re just effectively privatizing the beds that they have available.”
As part of their contract, youth care centers are required to undergo fiscal audits and submit incident and quarterly reports, including staffing changes or barriers to providing service.
Court officials said they had no reports to share for any youth care center because none were requested.
“Due to staffing, the Court did not request these from the vendor,” according to a Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court statement sent to The Marshall Project - Cleveland.
The Marshall Project - Cleveland then requested all complaints, inspection reports and compliance reports for all three youth care centers between 2021 and 2024 from the Ohio Department of Children and Youth.
The newly formed state agency regulates the facilities, and provided hundreds of pages of records. The department issued each youth care center noncompliance reports and corrective action plans for dozens of infractions.
A review of these records shows Raven House employed a worker for seven months in 2022, despite the staffer having a conviction for a crime that “carries a permanent exclusion from working with children.”
When kids left the facility without permission or had encounters with police at the youth care center, records show state inspectors could not confirm if Raven House notified the agency that placed the kids. Raven House also provided “misleading or false reports” in a log book that detailed fire drills.
Records on Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry and Life’s Right Direction show that on multiple occasions, both agencies failed to properly document critical incident reports, behavioral intervention and service plans, discharge records and medication logs.
Both agencies also hired individuals without first searching Ohio’s Registry on Child Abuse and Neglect and the U.S. Department of Justice sex offender website, state records show.
Gordon has been vocal on Facebook about disciplining children while making money operating her youth care center.
She described children accused of stealing cars as “heartless felons” and offered a way to discipline them.
“One lick from that cord by the parents and they be begging for you to have a heart while they washing your Kia,” Gordon posted.
Gordon reposted a sign reading “Free Ass Whoopins!” and wrote on Facebook: “I wish I could bring a line of kids and their parents to this guy.”
Gordon added that she loves the kids despite “the bulls$&/t they do” and asked for prayers “to keep my heart pure in times where it is much easier to be evil.”
She also touts an online training platform she calls Child Group Home Academy, “for anyone who wants to start this mega money business.”
She has linked to a website for Child Group Home Academy, which prompts people to sign up for consultations.
“We partner with our clients to take them through our fast-paced program to assist with the licensing process to receive approval by the State,” the website reads.
“Literally make more money than you can imagine,” Gordon added.
When returning a phone call to The Marshall Project - Cleveland, Gordon declined to comment but added that her attorney would reach out.
The Marshall Project - Cleveland then asked the court about Gordon’s practices and the terminated contract.
“The issues raised by your team were addressed with Ms. Gordon and the Court was not satisfied with the response,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement July 18.
Court officials said they did not know about the compliance issues or corrective action plans for all three vendors issued by the state until after The Marshall Project - Cleveland asked for comment.
Court officials said in a statement that the court doesn’t license youth care centers, but they are addressing corrective action plans vendors already received.
“We rely on the licensing bodies to hold agencies accountable to their standards and regulations,” court officials wrote in an email. “That is the purview of the licensing authority, not the Court.”
Despite the issues discovered by the state and The Marshall Project - Cleveland, officials said parents shouldn't be alarmed.
“They can communicate with their children and the facility staff. Court staff are assigned to the youth and family,” officials wrote in the statement. “We are not aware of any open concerns at this time.”
Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry was recertified by the state in 2023 and found to be in compliance in January, Marcella Brown, the organization’s vice president of development and communications, wrote in an email.
“Any deficiencies identified through either internal or external review, are addressed immediately when discovered,” Brown wrote.
Roshawn Sample, owner of Raven House, said all documentation issues were immediately corrected, and the organization does not currently house any youth from the court.
She said she encounters long hours and “a lot of burnout and turnover due to the kids’ behaviors.”
“The question at times should be: Is the staff safe? Many times, including myself, we have been threatened, spit on and pushed by youth,” she wrote in a statement.
“Through all of that, we remain committed to providing the highest level of care possible.”
