Report: Widespread reforms needed at Cook County juvenile center

[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.”

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.

“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.