The Worst City Government
The Worst City Government Stickers have sprouted on street signs and walls all over Washington in recent weeks, brightly announcing, "Barry's Back." D.C. Mayor Marion Barry Jr., arrested...
...One usually understated judge, handing down her contempt order on D.C.'s homeless services, called the city's largest shelters "virtual hellholes...
...Justice Department, which charged that residents of Forest Haven, D.C.'s central facility for the mentally retarded, are compelled to live in "filth and squalor," without adequate nursing care, therapy, or even clothing...
...Judge Pratt's recent finding marks the seventh time in the past three years that the District has been held in contempt for providing grossly substandard care to its most dependent clients...
...The bleak conditions at Forest Haven are hardly new: District officials have been under court order to close the facility for 11 years...
...The expense, incidentally, is nothing to sneeze at...
...District Judge John Pratt levied a stiff contempt-ofcourt fine on the city for its "continuing obdurate resistance" to caring adequately for more than 200 mentally retarded wards...
...Pratt sided with the U.S...
...In the past year, eight young Forest Haven residents have died of unknown causes...
...The Worst City Government Stickers have sprouted on street signs and walls all over Washington in recent weeks, brightly announcing, "Barry's Back...
...The previous contempt findings attacked shoddy or nonexistent medical care for prisoners, overcrowded juvenile detention facilities, correctional staff shortages, and inhumane shelters for the homeless...
...Recent fines alone have cost the District more than $2 million and counting...
...As Barry returned from treatment in March, U.S...
...The Forest Haven case is indisputably grim, but grimmer still is its familiarity...
...They're so retarded, he contends, that nobody wants them as neighbors...
...Characteristically, Mayor Barry blames the decade-plus delay on the victims...
...Caring for the severely retarded patients are only two staff doctors, one of whom was judged professionally incompetent by the local medical board in 1988 and is currently on a three-year disciplinary probation...
...Conditions are so bad, said one Justice Department attorney, that "people are literally dying because of a lack of medical care...
...How does the District's record compare with that of other cities...
...NW Washington, DC 20009...
...Another slammed D.C.'s "relentless recalcitrance" in failing to remedy its overcrowded prisons...
...A third judge didn't bother with showing indignation...
...Over the same three years, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, and Detroit have not once been cited for contempt of court...
...In an eighth contempt proceeding—regarding the city's failure to perform background checks on nurses' aides for the retarded and the elderly—the District was recently granted an additional 60 days to comply with its duties...
...Please send your nominations to: Worst City Government The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...Katherine Boo The Monthly depends on its readers to keep track of the breakdown of big-city government...
...Still, the mayor's long absence made no visible mark on city services...
...But today, 232 people with no real alternatives still call Forest Haven home...
...Even New York City earned only one citation— which was quickly revoked without a fine...
...These days, it's not the mayor but the courts that run the District...
...Rather, he cannily theorized that the District considered the contempt fines a sort of licensing fee—a necessary cost of continuing to do business as usual...
...Mayor Marion Barry Jr., arrested January 18 on drug charges, has returned to the helm after nearly two months of rehabbing in the South...
Vol. 22 • June 1990 • No. 5
