Global Courant
CHICAGO — Children as young as 11 are confined in cells the size of parking lots for up to 23 hours a day at a juvenile detention center in Southern Illinois, according to a lawsuit filed by Illinois’ ACLU.
Juveniles at the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center in Benton must seek permission from staff to flush the toilet, and they can go days or weeks without access to school work. Black mold is growing on the walls, according to the lawsuit filed Friday, and there are no mental health professionals employed at the facility.
The lawsuit seeks a court order forcing the facility to immediately improve conditions, based on deprivation of their rights under the 14th Amendment.
“These are not conditions that anyone, let alone a child, should be subjected to,” said Kevin Fee, the lead attorney in the case, who described the situation as “inhumane to the level of unspeakable.”
In general, juvenile detention conditions in the U.S. have been slowly improving over the past few decades thanks to research into the harms of solitary confinement, so this case is “particularly frightening,” said clinical and forensic psychologist Apryl Alexander, who works with incarcerated youth.
“We should be using the juvenile justice system for rehabilitation, not punishment. These are young people who are capable of change – we recognize that developmentally and personally. And so we should treat them as such,” Alexander said.
Fee added that the Franklin Detention Center is used to hold children before they are convicted or found guilty by a court.
The Illinois ACLU spoke with more than a dozen youth currently detained or have been detained at the facility in recent weeks about their experiences there, Fee said.
“The idea that children would spend part of their childhood in solitary confinement is blatant abuse,” Fee said.
Solitary confinement is “extremely harmful to anyone incarcerated, but especially to children who spend so much time in a brightly lit room and can’t really sleep well,” Fee said.
The practice has been banned for juveniles detained by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice since 2015, and on Friday Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation making it illegal to use it on “young detainees in detention centers for purposes other than preventing immediate physical harm.” injury. ”
The law will take effect on January 1, 2024.
Alexander added that the majority of suicides that occur in detention occur when a person is in solitary confinement.
It’s also important to consider that many young people in the juvenile justice system have experienced trauma before they were detained, “so putting them in solitary confinement can also be re-traumatizing,” Alexander said.
Neither the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center nor the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice immediately responded to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
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Savage serves on the Corps for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a non-profit national service program that places journalists on local newsrooms to report on undercover issues.
