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Camp E-Hun-Tee gives wayward boys a second chance
BETHONIE BUTLER
05 Sep 2006 9:11 am
E-Hun-Tee is one of more than 18 youth wilderness therapy camps across the nation and one of 3 in New England, under Eckerd Youth Alternatives, which was founded in 1968 by Jack and Ruth Eckerd of Eckerd Drug Stores.
The 275-acre Camp E-Hun-Tee, which means "his growth" in the Moskokee Native American language, straddles the Exeter-West Greenwich line in the woodsy Arcadia Management Area.
Boshwitz said the outdoors is part of the "Eckerd model" -- "using this kind of environment to help treat kids . . . help them work through difficult psychological or emotional issues."
Like Nicholas, many of the young men at E-Hun-Tee have found themselves in Family Court or Training School cells.
"Most of [the campers] have some sort of criminal charges against them," Boshwitz noted. Their offenses range from truancy to robbery to drug dealing.
Help for the Hardest Part of Prison: Staying Out
ERIK ECKHOLM
12 Aug 2006 12:00 am
In April, Debra Harris took her 15-year-old son along for what she thought was a final visit to her parole officer. Instead, because of a “dirty urine” test two weeks before, proof of her relapse to crack use, state troopers led her straight back to prison for three more months.
Troopers then drove Ms. Harris’s son to the rented home on the south side of Providence where her boyfriend was suddenly left to tend to three of her children. Ms. Harris had forgotten to pay the gas bill, so service was cut and they lived through her sentence without a stove, surviving on fast food and microwave items.
Such jolting events are part of the fabric of life in South Providence, as some women and many more men cycle repeatedly through the state’s prisons. As the country confronts record and recurring incarcerations, the search for solutions is focusing increasingly on neighborhoods like it, fragile places in nearly every city where the churning of people through prison is intensely concentrated.
Now a countertrend is gathering force, part of an unfolding transformation in the way the criminal justice system deals with repeat offenders. After punishment has been meted out and time has been served, political leaders, police officers, corrections officials, churches and community groups are working together to offer so-called re-entry programs, many modest in scope but remarkable nonetheless.
R.I.'s legal system set sex offender free for 19 months
CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
08 Aug 2006 1:00 am
On July 20, the Woonsocket police went looking for two young boys, 9 and 11, who had been reported missing hours earlier; they found the children riding bicycles on a city street with Cory Pero, the subject of the high-profile child pornography case of two years earlier.
He was arrested and sent to the ACI, but why was he on the streets?
As it turns out, the state failed to take the pornography case to a grand jury within the legally prescribed time so, on Dec. 10, 2004, the charges were dismissed; Pero was released from prison the same day.
What no one realized when Pero was arrested in 2003 or, again in 2004, was that he was supposed to be registered with the local police as a sex offender. As a juvenile, he had been found guilty in Family Court of commiting a sex crime in Providence.
New bills would expand sex offender registration
Lawmakers are considering several bills that would close what law enforcement officials call loopholes in the state's sex offender registry laws.
STATE REVEALS SOME LEVEL II SEX OFFENDERS
The state parole board posted some of the state's Level II sex offenders on its Web site Friday - more than a month after a state law required officials to do so as part of Rhode Island's expanded sex-offender notification program.
But it was the loophole in the law that prevents sex offenders convicted before 1996 from being classified that brought the matter into sharp focus locally.
Orrin W. Tarbox, a 50-year-old convicted sex offender and child molester was seen parked near Dunn's Corners School in early January by a vigilant parent.
Police warned Tarbox to keep away from the school. Tarbox, of Westerly, was convicted of the rape of an 8-year-old girl in 1992.
