Lawmakers say KY juvenile justice system is ‘completely broken’ after riots, assaults

Lawmakers on Thursday said they’re losing confidence in Gov. Andy Beshear’s ability to reform Kentucky’s long-troubled Department of Juvenile Justice following still more disclosures of assaults and riots inside its detention facilities.

“I think we have fallen so far behind and we’re seeing major, severe incidents occur now,” Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Benton, said at a hearing of the Interim Joint Committee on the Judiciary. “The system doesn’t work, it’s broken. It’s completely broken.”

Lawmakers at the hearing grilled two Beshear appointees about a Nov. 11 riot at the Adair Regional Juvenile Detention Center, where multiple people were injured and a teen girl was sexually assaulted.

The badly under-staffed facility had resorted to rotating lockdowns of residents throughout the year, causing tensions to rise, according to internal reports obtained by the Herald-Leader.

That riot was only one in a series of violent uprisings this year at Kentucky’s juvenile detention facilities, some of which left hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damages.

For the third time in 14 months, lawmakers said, Juvenile Justice Commissioner Vicki Reed and Justice and Public Safety Secretary Kerry Harvey came to the Capitol to testify that they’re aware of serious safety problems at the facilities. Reed and Harvey blame a lack of staffing and an increase in the most violent juvenile offenders, including those with gang affiliations.

But for all of their awareness, nothing gets fixed, lawmakers said. The agency reported more than 100 job vacancies on Thursday among its eight juvenile detention centers.

“Things have really kind of went off the rails in the last few years. You guys are here before us again and you’re not providing any answers, other than you don’t have staff,” said Rep. Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville.

“The people are really quite dissatisfied right now with the DJJ system,” Bratcher said to Reed and Harvey. “Are you guys the right people for this job?”

“You know I think you’d have to ask the governor that. I mean, I show up every day and do the best I can,” Harvey replied.

Thursday’s hearing came days after the Herald-Leader disclosed the existence of monthly reports to senior DJJ officials in Frankfort in which superintendents of juvenile detention facilities around the state all but begged their bosses in for help.

The local directors repeatedly complained about dangerous levels of under-staffing and, in some instances, warned about physical security flaws, such as doors that could not lock and drop ceilings with crawl spaces where youths could move undetected from room to room. They reported frequent attacks, riots, escapes and other “significant incidents,” due in large part to chronic under-staffing.

Quizzed about information in the monthly reports by lawmakers, Harvey said he has not read them.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Whitney Westerfield, R-Crofton, said he was disturbed by the alarming information those reports disclosed, as well as the fact that the state’s justice secretary is not reviewing them.

“I’ve seen those monthly reports that have been reported now by you all in the press, where the employees every month are saying morale is low, we’re struggling with this, we have problems with that, we’re detaining youth (in lockdown) because we don’t have any other place or people to watch them. The young woman who was just naked in her cell and they couldn’t go in there because she was dealing with whatever psychological issues,” Westerfield said at a news conference after the legislative hearing.

“What are they doing to fix any of that? Or respond to any of that?” Westerfield said to reporters. Harvey “is not familiar with the morale issues, he’s not familiar with the security failings at the facilities, he’s not familiar with any of the other things that are showing up in those reports. I’m very troubled by the lack of information flow to the people whose jobs it is to run this agency, to manage these facilities.”

Around the same time Thursday, elsewhere in the Capitol, Beshear was announcing more details of his new plan to change how youths are held at the state’s juvenile detention facilities.

The plan, crafted in response to the riots in Adair County and elsewhere, will separate girls from boys, sending the girls to a Campbell County facility, and it will further segregate the boys based on the severity of their offenses.

Boys charged with capital murder and the other most serious felonies will be housed in facilities in Adair, Fayette and Warren counties. Boys charged with the least serious felonies, misdemeanors and minor status offenses will be housed in facilities in Boyd, Breathitt, Jefferson and McCracken counties.

Beshear said that DJJ also will be adding “protective equipment” to detention facilities to help staff deal with assaults and riots.

“I will not sit back and allow another staff member to be violently attacked without any defense,” Beshear said at his own news conference. “DJJ facilities will now be equipped with protective equipment. We are also exploring the possibility of equipment, such as tasers or pepper spray, and are purchasing body scanners to be placed in every detention center to help eliminate contraband coming into the facilities.”

Back at the legislative hearing, Westerfield said he supports the governor’s plan to separate youths by gender and severity of offense, noting that lawmakers have recommended this move for months. Even better, the senator said, would be not locking up “status offenders,” who are in trouble for minor violations such as habitual truancy.

However, none of that solves the root problem of not enough staff to safely run many of the detention facilities, Westerfield said. If the Beshear administration wants a large sum of money to raise DJJ salaries or fix problems inside the buildings, then it should come to the legislature with a specific request, Westerfield said.

Harvey said the state of Kentucky has provided several rounds of pay raises in recent years, to DJJ employees specifically and to state workers generally, taking the hourly wage of a new youth worker up to about $22 or $23. But the detention facilities still can’t get enough people to apply for jobs or stay in jobs for long, he said.

The Justice Cabinet holds regional job fairs and works with a full-time recruiter, Harvey said.

“This is the biggest challenge we have,” Harvey told the lawmakers. “We’re open to any constructive, creative suggestions to do this.”

The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice has struggled for years, under multiple governors, with inadequate staffing and the abuse and neglect of youths in its custody. It has rotated through a different commissioner nearly every year in recent history amid a steady drum of firings and resignations in Frankfort.

In 2016, 16-year-old Gynnya McMillen died from a heart condition while being ignored in isolation at the Lincoln Village Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Hardin County. Her death went undiscovered for more than 10 hours. An investigation showed that staff falsified logs to make it appear they were checking on the girl throughout the night.

The Center for Children’s Law and Policy of Washington, D.C., later issued a sharply critical report that cited a near-total absence of mental health care in Kentucky’s juvenile detention facilities; chronic staff shortages and inadequate employee training; a lack of special education for youths who have learning disabilities; and too few opportunities for residents to file grievances that could reveal abuses.

Last year, the Herald-Leader documented a pattern of scores of substantiated incidents of abuse and neglect at the state’s two dozen juvenile justice residential facilities around Kentucky. One youth worker who quit in frustration told the newspaper he felt “set up for failure,” and he was pressured by his superiors to omit incriminating facts from incident reports.

‘Struggling to feel safe.’ Reports reveal chaos inside KY juvenile justice facilities