Halfway house attack raises concerns over security, healthcare, oversight

THE FIRST BLOW came from behind. Micheal Allen had been relaxing in bed, writing in her journal, when her head exploded with pain.

The hits hammered on, breaking her nose and ripping open her cheek. Allen rolled out of bed to face her attacker, a fellow resident of the Kintock Center, the halfway house in North Philadelphia where both women were sent last spring as parole violators.

"I could see blood pouring down my face and my body just went weak," Allen said recently, recalling the May 16 attack. "I started screaming: 'Help! Help!' But no one came."

Unarmed against an opponent swinging two metal locks in a sock, Allen figures she tried dodging blows for about five minutes before another resident pulled her attacker away, freeing Allen to stagger to an emergency phone to alert the staff to help.

That a potentially deadly assault raged unabated for minutes perhaps should have come as no surprise. Most staffers had done little to help rehabilitate residents in the two months Allen stayed at Kintock, she said, letting residents skip required anger-management and other programs and otherwise avoiding the residents left in their charge whenever possible.

Allen, 29, who suffered a severed facial nerve that left her with a scarred cheek and drooping mouth, plans a lawsuit. Her attorney says Allen's experience signals systemic problems stemming from a lack of adequate oversight.

"It's a culture of disregard," said lawyer Robert Lynch, who represents Allen. "The Kintock Group is failing miserably in providing a safe and productive environment for residents."

Allen agreed: "If I'm put somewhere to be held accountable for my mistakes, why aren't they being held accountable for theirs?"

Corey Davis, the center's site administrator, declined to speak with the Daily News and referred questions to Kintock's corporate office.

Kintock's chief operating officer, Walter Simpkins, said his agency follows all rules and standards set by the state Department of Corrections and the American Correctional Association.

"The Kintock Group is a nationally recognized innovator in community corrections solutions and is among . . . the largest nonprofit community corrections providers in the Northeast," Simpkins said in a prepared statement.

"Since 1987, when it began as a job-training initiative for former offenders, the Kintock Group has remained steadfast in its commitment to delivering evidence-based treatment programs designed to target criminogenic needs and reduce recidivism, while promoting public and resident safety alike."

The first halfway houses opened in Pennsylvania more than 40 years ago.

They were intended to save money, ease prison crowding and more effectively rehabilitate inmates through drug-treatment, anger-management and other programs, education and job training.

They also were meant to ease prisoners more gently back into the community. Corrections officials place inmates close to home with the goal of restoring family and community bonds broken behind bars.

Instead, state Corrections Secretary John Wetzel in 2013 called the $110 million halfway-house system "an abject failure." That was shortly after Wetzel announced the results of a study that found that prisoners who spent time in halfway houses were likelier to reoffend than those released directly to the street. Sixty-seven percent of inmates sent to halfway houses were rearrested or sent back to prison within three years, compared with 60 percent released to the street, researchers determined.

The findings prompted the state to require halfway houses to meet recidivism goals or risk losing their contracts. The state also offered financial incentives to firms that hit recidivism targets.

Beyond recidivism, other measures suggested concerns. Use-of-force reports in the state's 53 halfway houses, while low, are climbing, with 21 incidents reported last year, up from 12 the year before, said Luis Resto, regional director of the Department of Corrections' Bureau of Community Corrections.

With the number of people passing through Pennsylvania's halfway houses at record levels, fixing them is more important than ever, watchdogs agree. Nearly 19,200 people spent time in Pennsylvania's halfway houses in 2013, up 60 percent from about 12,000 just five years earlier. Numbers for 2014 aren't yet available, Resto said.

Mandatory sentences, a get-tough approach to crime and prison crowding have driven the growth, some experts say.

The Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which state lawmakers passed in 2012, changed the profile of those heading into halfway houses, said Wayne Welsh, a criminal-justice professor at Temple University. With prison populations and costs ballooning even as crime rates sank, lawmakers rewrote policies to keep low-level offenders out of jail, cut the backlog on inmates awaiting parole and fill halfway houses with higher-risk offenders who would benefit more from the rehabilitative programs there, Welsh said.

Still, change takes time.

The Kintock Center, a blocky yellow-brick building on Erie Avenue near Whitaker, is among the largest of Philly's 12 halfway houses, with about 350 beds. It's also proved to be among Philly's most controversial. The New York Times found in 2012 that although the Kintock Group is a nonprofit agency, its founder raked in millions in salary and benefits and gave a handful of relatives fat salaries, too. Besides its North Philly center, the King of Prussia-based agency runs five halfway houses in New Jersey.

And Allen's attack wasn't unprecedented.

A former Kintock resident sued the Kintock Group in 2008 for serious injuries he suffered when another resident attacked him in August 2006. In that case, Hector Carcana of East Falls claimed that an inmate threw a hairbrush that hit his eye, rupturing his eyeball and cutting his eyelid. Carcana complained that Kintock failed to properly supervise the dorm rooms or the inmate, despite his assailant's known history of violence. The case settled in 2009.

Police were called to the center about 90 times last year, including Mother's Day, when a resident fatally overdosed, according to police records.

Micheal Allen knows how halfway houses are supposed to work.

After serving time for a 2011 arrest for conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, she was released to the Liberty Management Service's Phoenix Center in North Philadelphia, where she had no problems. A failed drug test bounced her back into the system, this time at Kintock, as a parole violator last April.

Instead of a daily schedule packed with back-on-track programs, Allen said she and her dorm mates passed their days watching television, talking on pay phones (or a contraband cellphone someone had smuggled in), taking smoke breaks and otherwise idly counting the minutes until their release.

Staffers "sent in sheets of paper and would just have us sign the blank forms in order to get credit for programs we didn't do," Allen said. "Of course we just signed the sheets."

The day she got attacked, no staffers were around to intervene.

"I had lumps and bruises on my shoulders, down my legs. My eyes were swollen shut. It was like I had a baseball in my jaw," she said of her worst injury, a cheek gash and severed nerve that later got infected.

Eight months later, Allen, who is Muslim, wears her head scarf as much to hide her scar as for religious reasons. Her alleged attacker, Denise Dixon, 24, faces an April 8 trial on aggravated assault and related offenses.

Allen is focused on her future. The mother of five now lives in Southwest Philadelphia and studies business at Community College of Philadelphia, where she recently made honors. She aims to someday open an after-school center for underprivileged kids.

She hopes her experience at the Kintock Center will lead to improvements that ensure other offenders sent there can focus on overcoming their troubled pasts.

"If the facility is supposed to help us get back on track, why don't they?" she said.