Fifty Years in the Fight for Children's Rights: The Long Shadow of Institutional Abuse and Strategies for Justice Today
Five decades of advocating for children behind bars have taught us that we must be unrelenting in protecting young people from harm and bold in imagining a better world. The horrors children face when incarcerated require us to uncover and confront abuse. That institutions persist, decade after decade, in harming children – primarily Black and Brown children, LGBTQIA+ children, and those with disabilities – makes clear that we must also fight for bigger wins. Children should not be placed in dangerous and discriminatory prisons at all. They deserve support in their homes and communities with the resources they need to thrive.
Shortly after opening our doors in 1975, Juvenile Law Center joined as lead counsel in Santiago v. Philadelphia, a class action lawsuit alleging horrifying conditions of confinement in Philadelphia’s detention center: racial segregation; staff beating children with chains, locking them in solitary confinement, forcing girls to undergo pelvic exams without consent, and setting children up to fight each other. Children were deprived of adequate education, nutrition, counseling, recreation, visitation, and correspondence, and endured a cramped and dirty environment with residents sleeping on the floor. Victories in that case led to a population cap and dramatically improved conditions. They also set the stage for constitutional litigation to come. Just two years later, we filed a similar lawsuit in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; our settlement limited solitary confinement and paved the way for a statewide prohibition on isolating children.
Our lawsuits also took aim at the practice of detaining children pre-trial. In Coleman v. Stanziani, our class action settlement limited the use of detention in Pennsylvania to serious cases and required judges and probation officers to explain their reasons for secure detention.
In subsequent years, we continued to represent children harmed by institutions. We filed In re A.M. on behalf of a 13-year-old boy in Pennsylvania with serious mental health problems who reported that while he was locked up, other residents had, among other things, spit on him, punched him in the arm, put his head in a garbage can, and thrown urine on his bed. We settled the case favorably for our client. We filed T.D. v. Mickens on behalf of two boys held in solitary confinement in New Jersey despite serious mental health problems and without any procedural protections. Again, we won in the courts, resulting in compensation to the young people; ultimately the state legislature banned extended solitary confinement for youth across New Jersey.
In J.J. v. Litscher, we filed a lawsuit alleging that two Wisconsin youth prisons locked youth in solitary confinement 22-23 hours a day, shackled youth to tables or belts when they came out of their cells, pepper sprayed them and subjected them to intrusive strip searches. The facilities held over 160 children, primarily Black youth from Milwaukee, in a remote, rural county far from home with a staff that was 100% white. A victory in the federal court led to a settlement banning punitive solitary confinement and pepper spray and drastically limiting restraints and strip searches.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we filed lawsuits and supported colleagues around the country in filing lawsuits to release young people from secure facilities in light of the health risk; while the lawsuits didn’t result in legal rulings on our behalf, they did push state Supreme Courts to advise local courts and agencies to release youth, contributing to a dramatic drop in the population of incarcerated youth during the pandemic.
Most recently, in Derrick v. Glen Mills Schools, we filed a lawsuit alleging that facility staff subjected hundreds of youth to extreme physical violence and psychological abuse and deprived them of an education, with an especially dire impact on Black youth and students with disabilities. We have settled the education claims and settled the abuse claims against both Glen Mills and the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services. The case sends a powerful message to juvenile facilities and state agencies that we are watching and we won’t tolerate abuse.
Our decades of victories in these cases have contributed to constitutional standards that shield young people from abuse, strip searches, restraints, and solitary confinement. in many instances, the cases have also compensated children for the harms they faced. Yet across the country, year after year, we continue to hear stories of children facing physical abuse, strip searches, solitary confinement, pepper spray, and other damaging conditions.
In the years to come, we will continue to fight for the rights of incarcerated youth. No one should be silent when young people face abuse from the very facilities purporting to serve them. But we won’t stop there. We will also work in partnership with young people, families, and community leaders for bold solutions that return young people home safely. This work is already underway in Wisconsin, where, after our litigation and pressure from community activists, the legislature passed a bill to shut down the youth facilities; while the state has repeatedly delayed closure, they have dramatically reduced the population at the youth prisons and have begun implementing plans to bring young people closer to home.
In the last 50 years, we have developed powerful tools for protecting children’s rights. In the coming years, we dedicate ourselves to using those tools for even greater gains: keeping youth out of prisons so they, and their communities, can prioritize restorative approaches that will allow them not just to survive, but to flourish.
