Trouble at an Arizona residential treatment center? It must be the kids’ fault! Send in the drone!

Between January 2022 and September 2025, youth institutionalized at Canyon State Academy for boys or Desert Lily Academy for girls, adjoining residential treatment centers in Queen Creek, Arizona, ran away an average of at least once every two-and-a-half days – more than 600 runaway incidents in all, according to Phoenix television station KNXV. 

And runaways aren’t the only reason police keep showing up. In 2022 another Phoenix television station, KSAZ reported that police were at Canyon State Academy almost daily: 

From Jan. 12 to Oct. 4, officers responded to CSA 239 times. The leading type of call is a missing person, making up about 22% of the calls.  

18% of calls went for unknown trouble. 10% for follow-ups and 9% for assaults. 

The rest of the calls are scattered among several categories, including welfare checks, sexual assault and molesting. 

They were at Desert Lily Academy another 118 times. 

But the only things the state of Arizona and local authorities can think of to do about it are: 

● Blame the kids.

● Make the places more like jails. 

At no point, it seems, has anyone in power asked the obvious question: Why are so many children so desperate to leave these places? But then, given Arizona’s fondness for tearing apart families in general and institutionalizing children in particular, those are questions no one in power in the state seems to want to face. 

The two institutions are run by a nationwide chain known as “Rite of Passage.” They run an assortment of services including residential treatment facilities and juvenile prisons. In addition to Arizona, news accounts over many years have raised questions about Rite of Passage facilities in Nevada, Florida, Colorado, Arkansas and Maryland. 

Yet when asked about all those runaways, the Arizona family police agency, the Department of Child Safety, said, in effect: Well, what do you expect from such troubled kids? Or as the agency put it: 

Call-for-service data does not necessarily indicate wrongdoing by the facility or staff. Many reported incidents reflect the significant behavioral and emotional challenges presented by the population the facility serves. 

That echoes the standard party line of the residential treatment industry: These kids are sooooo difficult that there is simply no alternative except to institutionalize them. As we have documented repeatedly, that’s BS. There’s nothing residential treatment can do that can’t be done better, and at lower cost, with Wraparound programs. And the residential treatment model itself is inherently harmful to children. 

The two Rite of Passage facilities said that the high number of runaway reports is because they are such careful, responsible facilities that they make sure to report any incident that even might involve running away immediately! They said much the same in response to the 2022 story. 

They also brag about being a so-called Qualified Residential Treatment Program. That is a new category of institution created by the federal Family First Prevention Services Act.  That law was supposed to strictly limit federal reimbursement for institutionalizing children. But the institutions lobby carved out a great big loophole: so-called QRTPs are exempt from the limits. Supposedly, that’s because they have to meet rigorous standards. But the standards are a joke. 

And, of course, all this evades the question: Why do all those young people keep running? 

That 2022 story offers some clues: 

"I remember, like the staff saying, ‘It's our goal to like, make you hate it here, so you never want to come back,'" former student, Christopher Nixon, said. … "It's just not a safe environment, and they're just tired of being there. At that point, they want to go home." 

Keith Plummer was in ... Desert Lily Academy. … Plummer says the students just wanted their independence. "They want their freedom. We’re kids. I want to go ride my bike around the neighborhood, I want to take my scooter and just go to a park," she said. 

Ignoring those answers, or not even posing the question, allows one to view solutions only in terms of making the facilities more like jails. The local police chief, Randy Brice, sure sounds like he’s talking about escaped prisoners. According to KNXV: 

Brice said there are still ways to improve security, including expanding camera coverage and better tracking kids as they move from place to place. 

Brice says he’s also worked to speed up response times to missing child calls. 

“As soon as a call comes out there, the drone is en route. We have cameras all around the facility on our street cameras,” Brice said. “We're seeing about 90% of the runaways -- we're catching within minutes to maybe an hour or two.” 

If it never occurs to anyone to ask if residential treatment is necessary, and if you stigmatize and stereotype all the institutionalized kids, no wonder the only solutions you can think of are cameras and drones. 

And sadly, that kind of thinking is deeply embedded in the culture of Arizona family policing – the kind of culture in which some workers thought it would be funny to come to work wearing  t-shirts that said “professional kidnapper.” 

● Though Arizona has improved, it still tears apart families at a rate 15% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

● Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) tears apart families at the highest rate among America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties.

● Arizona takes a huge proportion of its federal funds under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) money that is supposed to help poor families become self-sufficient and diverts it to running the family policing system. Some of the money went to a huge rate increase for foster parents.

● Arizona institutionalizes 45% of the children it takes – a rate more than quadruple the national average.

● The state gave a 30% rate increase to a group home operator that donated generously to the campaign of Gov. Katie Hobbs.

● The first person Hobbs named to run the family police agency opposed the rate increase. He was fired after only weeks on the job. 

No wonder the Arizona family police agency doesn’t seem to want to even look into whether there might be problems at the two residential treatment centers from which all those children keep running away. 

And no wonder the only answer from local authorities is: Send in the drone!

Illustration by ChatGPT