Georgia residents who are mentally or physically disabled, over 65, unwanted and living at a bare subsistence level on government benefits are referred to as “at-risk individuals.” Vulnerable to neglect, abuse, or exploitation, their options for where to live give them very few alternatives to homelessness and, quite frequently, their main option for having any roof over their head is an unlicensed personal care home (PCH).
So here’s the issue: The hospitals, churches or charitable organizations that refer at-risk individuals to care homes routinely struggle to find scarce housing for indigent individuals, and they don’t always have the luxury of determining if the homes are safe or licensed before referring elderly at-risk individuals to them.
Once placed at an unlicensed home, at-risk individuals often realize they have traded the nightmare of homelessness to another nightmare; an environment of systemic neglect, abuse and exploitation by criminals who prey on the weak, vulnerable elderly population. Operating under the public radar, Georgia’s unlicensed personal care home operators tend to function in a manner that is at best disturbing and, at worst, smacks of criminal racketeering and human trafficking.
Sad to say, Georgia has a long history of well documented major criminal cases showing a familiar pattern of cruel human trafficking and benefits trafficking using unlicensed personal care homes as bases of operation.
Case in point: on September 9,2022 in Albany, Michelle Oliver was convicted of racketeering including 61 counts of exploitation or neglect of a disabled person while operating an unlicensed personal care home. Oliver was sentenced to 20 years and her three co-defendants remain at various stages of prosecution or sentencing for a plethora of crimes they committed while engaged in an organized ring operating out of multiple unlicensed personal care homes in several counties. It was proven they confined elderly and handicapped at-risk individuals in squalid conditions– at times starved, deprived of bare necessities and frequently intimidated. Meanwhile, their meager government subsistence benefits were systematically misappropriated, as opposed to being used as required for basic human needs and care.
Unlike familiar types of facilities such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities and halfway houses, PCHs tend to go by a variety of names and descriptions: e.g. boarding houses, halfway houses, or veterans’ homes, etc. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter what they chose to call themselves, if they fit the following description of a personal care home (PCH): “any dwelling, whether operated for profit or not, which undertakes through its ownership or management to provide or arrange for the provision of housing, food service, and one or more personal services for two or more adults who are not related to the owner or administrator by blood or marriage.”
By law, any facility fitting the description of a PCH must be licensed by the Georgia Division of Healthcare Facilities Regulation (HFR). Licensing requires that PCH facilities meet what most would consider common-sense living standards pertaining to minimal qualified staffing, sanitary conditions, humane treatment of residents, feeding, handicap compliance, safety and access to medical services. Licensed PCHs generally comply with the standards and if a deficiency is found by HFR, corrections are made. Complaints from residents are investigated fairly and resolved as expeditiously as caseloads allow.
Unlicensed PCHs operate differently than their licensed counterparts. Case after case in Georgia courts show that unscrupulous PCH operators not only evade taxes and regulations on a regular basis, they stay below the public radar, using multiple unlicensed facilities as a bases of operations for their illegal activities. In the process, they allow the facilities to deteriorate into filthy living conditions where residents are barely fed.
When residents at one illegal PCH complain too much, or threaten to expose illegal activities, they are silenced by being moved to other homes, usually with strangers in other counties. For example, in one case that occurred in Cobb County, when state investigators started following up on reports of abuse at an unlicensed PCH, operators moved elderly residents out through a wooded area in the dark of night. Police eventually found them in another unlicensed home in Fulton County suffering in similar abusive sub-standard living conditions.
While the law and administrative regulations pertaining to care of at-risk residents are clear, resources to enforce the law and regulations are rarely adequate anywhere.
Georgia has several public health and safety agencies as well as public/private advocacy organizations staffed with caring employees dedicated to address the complex crimes that tend to occur in unlicensed care homes. While state agency employees work hard and cooperate with law enforcement, the criminal cases they deal with are difficult to prove since special victims usually suffer from diminished capacity to testify and assist in prosecutions. Even though state regulators receive assistance from Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, the investigations are time-consuming, and the number of cases usually outpace the numbers of state regulators and sworn investigators available to work them. Thus, the cases tend to stack up and investigators must use a harsh reality system of prioritization of cases. The greatest needs and most egregious allegations must be investigated first.
One of the main logistical problems investigators face when they close criminal unlicensed PCHs, is finding housing for residents they evacuate from dangerous surroundings. Under the best of conditions, there is inadequate legitimate housing available for the at-risk population. Under emergency conditions such as when an unlicensed PCH is closed, usually with the arrest of the operators, finding available beds in legitimate facilities for evacuated residents is a difficult task. But somehow tenacious state employees and advocacy groups get it done.
While no one in any state has a comprehensive solution to the homeless problem, nor the affordable housing shortage, we should never tolerate those who prey on the weak, sick or elderly. Many over-worked but dedicated state social workers and law enforcement officers fight this ugly fight daily, and deserve all the help and encouragement they can get.
Dan Flynn is a retired former police chief of Marietta and Savannah.
