CHD’s Secure Residential Treatment program is funded by the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services (DYS) and provides a wide array of intensive clinical, educational, residential and prevocational services for up to 30 boys at a time, ages 14 to 21, who are committed to DYS. CHD’s Secure Residential Treatment Program will operate within a DYS continuum of services designed to manage youth risks/needs through a full array of services while protecting public safety. The goal of the Secure Residential Treatment Program is to provide those services to youth and their families that will prepare them to return to their communities having learned how to manage life circumstances without threat to self, others and the communities that they will re-enter. This will be accomplished by teaching youth how to learn to manage their emotional distress, develop strategies for academic/ vocational success, understand/implement interventions for their behavioral health/substance abuse problems, manage family issues that impact their functioning and utilize community resources to help them remain in their communities.
CHD’s Secure Residential Treatment Program will accept and provide services for all youths referred for placement and treatment by DYS, including adolescents with histories of aggressive and assaultive behavior, substance abuse, fire setting, property crimes, gang involvement, and sexually abusive behavior. In addition to providing treatment services directed toward general behavioral problems and self-regulation, as well as specific behavioral problems, CHD’s Secure Residential Treatment Program will ensure that all youth are provided with a physically and emotionally safe environment for all youth and staff, as well as the safety and security of the community.
Clinical services will establish treatment goals at the emotional, interactional, family, and psychiatric levels, as well as the clear development of social skills and social competence while also managing and treating the behavioral problems that are the source of commitment to DYS. The treatment program assumes a rehabilitative approach to the provision of all care, including clinical services, on the basis that the primary goal is not simply control, containment, and harm reduction but a change in the outlook, attitudes, social relationships and interactions, and the overall improvement in psychosocial functioning, including the development of social skills, social competence, and pro-social attitudes and values.