Juvie was supposed to improve conditions for incarcerated youth
So how did it get so inhumane?
By Meagan Day
President Obama just announced a ban on the solitary confinement of juveniles in federal correctional centers. Obama’s decision only affects 26 youth, those held in Washington, D.C. and those who committed felonies on tribal lands. Still, it’s an important gesture in support of a crucial reform. Solitary confinement makes people suicidal and exacerbates mental illness. It provokes anger and violence, especially in vulnerable teenagers, and doesn’t make anyone safer.
But ending solitary confinement is only one improvement to a twisted system. It begs the question: Why are juvenile prisons so harsh to begin with?
Juvie was designed to protect youth from the brutality of adult incarceration. The modern juvenile facility has roots in the 1974 Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), a series of measures intended to deinstitutionalize youth, or get them out of the system, even as it cycled them through.
The JJDPA was actually pretty progressive, as far as criminal justice reform goes — it was a response to studies showing the devastating effects of incarceration on young people’s mental and physical health. The legislation aimed to decrease the number of youth in confinement, and keep the kids who were in the system out of harm’s way. But you’d never know it to look at a juvenile correctional facility today.
The original act consisted for four “core protections” meant to ensure the safety and well-being of incarcerated youth:
- Youth are not allowed to be placed in adult jails except under very limited circumstances
- In the event that they are placed in adult jails, youth are not to have contact with adult offenders
- Juvie is not intended as a convenient place to house runaways and homeless youth
- States need to address the overrepresentation of youth of color in the system
In the four decades since the passage of the act, the juvenile prison system has defaulted on each of these. It’s become easier by the decade to try youth as adults — a consequence of legislators’ efforts to appear tough on crime. This means youth are increasingly housed in adult prisons, in violation of the spirit of the JJDPA. Meanwhile, homeless youth are disproportionately represented in correctional facilities, as are youth of color. So at present, juvie doesn’t actually fulfill any of the mandates laid out by the JJDPA.
And what happens inside of juvenile correctional facilities is often appalling. Richard Ross, a photojournalist who interviewed over 1,000 confined youth for his book Juvenile in Justice, told Timeline that the conditions he witnessed ran the gamut from bleak to downright dangerous. “They don’t provide adequate mental health services,” Ross said. “I’ve been to facilities where 90% of the kids are on psychotropic medications, but they can’t get the drugs they actually need.”
Juvenile correctional centers, Ross continued, are often overcrowded and understaffed, with personnel who are inadequately trained. At the Cheltenham facility in Maryland, for instance, units designed for 24 boys each were discovered to be housing up to 100 boys. Many were sleeping in “plastic boats” instead of beds, and only three or four staff members were supervising each of these overcrowded units. (Cheltenham was in major violation of the third core protection — in 2012, 40% to 50% of its detainees were there awaiting placement in a group home, or because their guardians failed to appear upon their release.)
Violence intensifies under these conditions — not only fights between undersupervised youth, but also attacks on staff. Even more alarmingly, staff members themselves often use excessive force to control chaotic situations caused by overcrowding. To take Cheltenham as an example again, in 2009 the staff restrained youths 210 times, resulting in injury 48% of the time. “The staff often lack adequate training in how to engage with a kid exhibiting signs of something wrong,” said Ross, describing aggressive tactics he has witnessed. “When youth in these places are punished, the crime is usually POA — pissing off an adult.” Too often, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and kids get hurt.
Finally, juvenile prisons have failed miserably to deinstitutionalize and rehabilitate youth. The Justice Policy Institute’s report on the impact of youth incarceration shows that introducing youth into the criminal justice system all but ensures that they’ll go deeper into that system. “The increased and unnecessary use of secure detention,” the report reads, “exposes troubled young people to an environment that more closely resembles adult prisons and jails than the kinds of community and family-based interventions proven to be most effective.” What were intended to be alternatives to adult jails have simply become training for the real thing.
Obama is right to take a stand on solitary confinement. States and counties should follow the federal example and ban it in adult and youth facilities alike. But abolishing solitary confinement will not fix juvenile prisons. “The fact that these kids are not locked in a closet is great,” said Ross. “But they still shouldn’t be in these places.”
After decades of worsening conditions, it would take a radical overhaul to bring juvie back in line with its stated purpose of rehabilitating, protecting and deinstitutionalizing youth. And maybe that overhaul isn’t worth it. We’re learning the hard way that prison is prison — hostile, inefficient and often inhumane — whether adults or children fill the cells. The failure of juvenile prisons is an indication that we might be better off brainstorming alternatives to youth incarceration than fixing the current model.
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