Report: Widespread reforms needed at Cook County juvenile center
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[March 21, 2023]
By Glenn Minnis | The Center Square contributor
(The Center Square) – A new federally funded comprehensive report
assessing practices inside the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention
Center recommends widespread reforms to the system after researchers
uncovered that staffers often use dangerous and illegal forms of
restraint and isolation, failed to keep adequate records and at times
were “entirely inhumane” to the teenagers they were entrusted with
keeping safe.
So egregious are the conditions inside the West Side facility, some are
now calling for the center to be shuttered in favor of the creation of a
more community-based operation.
Authored by the nonprofit disability rights group Equip for Equality,
the report is just the latest in a growing number of critical findings
about the facility by a number of outside groups, including a 2021
report made public by Injustice Watch after a committee convened by Cook
County Chief Judge Timothy Evans highlighted the facility’s alleged
failure to provide special education services during the COVID-19
pandemic.
“Given the long-standing, serious, and pervasive problems identified in
this report … and the profound impact they have had on the youth
committed there, broader systemic reforms are essential,” authors of the
most recent report added. “The JTDC is perfectly situated to provide
critical services to help steer these youth away from further
court-involvement and into productive lives in the community.
Tragically, not only is it failing in this regard, but it is often
making this problem worse.”
While declining to be interviewed for the report, Juvenile Center
Superintendent Leonard Dixon, whose office oversees the juvenile jail,
argued that the report “is replete with gross misrepresentations,
defamatory statements, and unsupported legal conclusions,” adding that
he views the entire situation as “an exercise in sensationalism.”
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Dixon criticized the nonprofit for failing to provide names of
individual residents to jail officials or reporting specific
allegations of abuse to the Illinois Department of Children and
Family Services, adding that authors of the report failed to
understand “the role of detention in our complex criminal justice
system.”
With the overwhelming majority of the youths housed at the detention
center and the Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative School being Black and
roughly half of them having learning disabilities or mental health
conditions, the Equip for Equality report was drafted after more
than 1,000 hours of research was conducted where at least seven site
visits were conducted and more than a dozen interviews were done
with staffers and some 30 teens residing there.
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“NBJ violates federal and state special education laws by ignoring
mandated timelines, not providing services based on students’
individual needs, and, at times, not providing any services at all,”
the report said. “This results in critical missed educational
opportunities for students who are often excluded from school and in
desperate need of educational services to prevent them from cycling
in and out of the criminal system.”
In their response letter, Chicago Public School officials argued the
school “currently has no teacher vacancies.”
Under state law, physical restraint of students is confined to times
when “the student’s behavior presents an imminent danger of serious
physical harm to the student or to others.”
Youths at the facility told investigators they witnessed “restraints
that were unsafe and entirely inhumane,” some of which caused severe
injuries, including broken bones and in one case a seizure. |