Teenagers in North Carolina’s juvenile justice system are routinely being locked alone in their rooms for as much as 23 to 24 hours a day, according to an ongoing federal lawsuit and advocates for young people in custody, despite state officials’ own acknowledgment of research showing that prolonged isolation causes mental and physical harm.
“Sometimes it makes me scream in my cell,” said one of the plaintiffs, a 16-year-old who has been housed at a juvenile detention center in Cabarrus County, in a statement describing his experience with isolation.
The lawsuit — originally filed in January in U.S. District Court on behalf of the 16-year-old and two other teenagers held for months in the Cabarrus facility — is seeking class-action status to represent the thousands of youth who go through juvenile detention centers every year. Attorneys argue that the state’s use of isolation violates minors’ federal constitutional rights.
“These children have suffered immense physical, social, and psychological harm from solitary confinement,” the lawsuit states in asking for a court-ordered end to the practice.
The N.C. Department of Public Safety, which runs juvenile detention facilities, has filed a series of responses categorically denying the lawsuit’s claims of any policy or practice of regular solitary confinement for young people.
However, the department has acknowledged that staff shortages have affected how much time juveniles spend outside their rooms. Deputy Secretary William Lassiter, who has overseen the state’s juvenile justice system since 2014, said in a Nov. 18 filing that “administrative room confinement” unrelated to juvenile behavior has been used — and still is in some instances — to cope with “critical staffing issues” and maintain safety.
Lassiter, in his response, acknowledged that people in entire units have had to remain in their rooms for stretches of time, particularly during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to maintain legally mandated staffing ratios between juveniles and staff. However, he said that staff policies for the Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention limit the duration of isolation.
Lassiter declined NC Health News’ interview request for this story, citing department policy against commenting on pending litigation.
But in a written response to NC Health News’ questions, DPS juvenile division spokesman Matthew Debnam said that many detention centers have been over capacity in recent years, partly because of a change in state law requiring that people younger than 18 who are charged in adult court be housed in juvenile facilities rather than in jails.
The number of juveniles sent to detention centers has been increasing, Debnam said, and they’ve been staying longer in many facilities that were not designed to provide schooling and programming beyond temporary housing — all while the division has faced historically high staff vacancy rates.
While attorneys and advocates told NC Health News they acknowledge strains the juvenile justice system is facing, they assert that it’s not right for kids to shoulder the consequences of administrative challenges.
NC Health News spoke to nearly a dozen advocates and juvenile attorneys familiar with the state’s juvenile justice system and with conditions in youth detention centers. Many said that during the COVID pandemic, young clients began telling them about being left in their rooms for extended periods and that the practice continued even after the threat of infection subsided.
“This is just like pouring fuel on a fire,” said Jake Sussman, interim chief counsel of Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Justice System Reform team, who tracks state justice issues. “We are only aggravating any existing problems by placing these very vulnerable kids in isolation. It is the opposite of taking a public health approach, the opposite of thinking about somebody’s well-being and rehabilitation.”
Risk of harm
North Carolina’s juvenile justice system is designed and intended to be more rehabilitative than punitive. Young people who are charged as juveniles go through a different judicial process from the adult criminal justice system and they are held in separate facilities from people who are older than 18. While their cases progress through the courts, some juveniles are held in secure custody in a juvenile detention center.
The Department of Public Safety oversees 10 state-run detention centers and four county-operated facilities. In 2023, 2,934 juveniles were admitted to these facilities. The population was 85% male.
State law requires juvenile justice facilities to provide educational services to detained youth. DPS policy further states that the education adheres to state education standards, comparable to what young people would receive in public schools.
In 2016, the Department of Public Safety publicly announced an end to solitary confinement for juveniles younger than 18. President Barack Obama had banned the use of solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons earlier the same year.
The decision came as a result of growing recognition of the harms of solitary confinement — defined as the placement of a person in a locked room or cell with minimal or no contact with people other than correctional staff — on an individual’s health, particularly for juveniles.
Research consistently shows that solitary confinement affects physical and mental health, increasing risks of anxiety, self-harm and suicide. Experts also say confinement in locked rooms brings a loss of interaction at a key developmental period for teens as they are working to build social skills.
Many experts and organizations — including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators — oppose the use of isolation and solitary confinement for incarcerated youth.
Lassiter himself has spoken out about the negative impact of solitary confinement on juveniles.
“We find that kids that are locked in their rooms, they’re not growing,” Lassiter told CBS17 in a 2019 interview. “They’re not getting the therapy. They’re not trying to use the skills we’re trying to teach them.”
Despite this acknowledgment, attorneys and advocates told NC Health News that juveniles are being locked in their rooms for extended periods — an uptick they say began during the pandemic.
“COVID normalized children being isolated for the system,” said Kellie Mannette, a juvenile defense attorney practicing in Chatham, Orange and Durham counties. “I think it wasn’t a normal thing that was happening before COVID. And then COVID happened, and it became, like, ‘Oh, we can do this.’
“And now it’s really hard to get them to change it back to where it should be for the children.”
‘Getting out of my cell was the exception’
The law firm Nelson Mullins and the Charlotte-based nonprofit Council for Children’s Rights, which provide court-appointed attorneys for youth in Mecklenburg County, brought the lawsuit in January after hearing repeated complaints from clients about conditions inside facilities.
The increase in complaints came after the November 2022 closure of a 72-bed county-operated juvenile detention center in Mecklenburg County. Charlotte teens were mostly moved to the detention center in Cabarrus County — the facility that is the focus of the lawsuit.
For months before filing the lawsuit, attorneys and other advocates voiced concerns — including in meetings with Lassiter, who oversees operations of the state’s juvenile detention centers, according to the lawsuit — about the lack of out-of-cell time without improvement.
Legal filings from the plaintiffs over recent months describe prolonged isolation and inadequate access to education that fall short of the juvenile justice system’s intent of rehabilitation. The lawsuit claims that holding youth as young as 10 years old in what they say amounts to solitary confinement is a violation of juveniles’ constitutional rights to due process and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
The 16-year-old plaintiff from Mecklenburg County, identified as John Doe 1, described his confinement at the 78-bed Cabarrus Regional Juvenile Detention Center in a Sept. 26 court filing. When he arrived in November 2023, he said, he was placed in a small room about the size of a closet with concrete walls, an “uncomfortable bed with a thin mattress pad,” a sink and a toilet.
And that’s where he said he spent 23 hours or more each day during most of his monthslong stay — only getting out for brief stints to shower, go outside for recreation, make a phone call or get water. He even ate his meals alone in his room.
While confined, John Doe 1 explained that he had very little to do in his room besides read and do pushups. He sometimes sought to talk to other children through the doors but said he risked getting in trouble.
“Being in solitary confinement makes me frustrated and angry,” he said in the court filing. “It’s hard to be in solitary confinement because the other kids are often screaming and yelling and banging on their cell doors because they want to get out.”
John Doe 2, a 17-year-old from Mecklenburg County and fellow plaintiff in the lawsuit, recounted in a statement filed on Sept. 26 a similar experience of extended isolation at the Cabarrus facility, including on Christmas Day when he said he was only allowed outside his locked room for a 10-minute shower and 10-minute phone call.
“Getting out of my cell was the exception, not what was normal,” John Doe 2 said in the filing.
Additionally, he said that he did not receive any mental health treatment or counseling after arriving at the detention center in November 2023 and that for long periods he did not attend school or receive educational services.
State denies practice
In response to dozens of the lawsuit’s assertions, state officials denied “embracing a policy, custom or practice of isolating juveniles for nearly 24 hours a day.”
The state also disputed the details of the John Does’ confinement in a Nov. 18 filing, asserting that while precise schedules vary by detention center, juveniles have the opportunity to participate in recreational activity and educational programming outside their room.
When juveniles are locked in their rooms during waking hours, according to Lassiter’s statement, it can be a result of either administrative room confinement — which has nothing to do with juvenile behavior — or temporary room confinement, a management tool used as a security measure when a minor’s behavior presents a threat to themself or others. In all uses of isolation, Lassiter stated, policies are in place to ensure that the length of time is minimized as much as possible and that juveniles are observed at least every 15 minutes.
The state’s response said that the John Doe plaintiffs were in isolation for various reasons, from security and staffing issues to infractions such as passing notes or “contraband.”
Regardless of whether the isolation is for administrative reasons or as a form of punishment, advocates told NC Health News, youth will experience the same negative effects.
A statewide problem
While the lawsuit focuses on the conditions at Cabarrus Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Concord and C.A. Dillion Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Butner, the attorneys contend that the practice of isolation is happening across the state, and are asking the court to prohibit the practice. U.S. Magistrate Judge Joe Webster will have to rule whether the lawsuit meets the criteria for class-action status, which the state opposes.
Juvenile defense attorneys not affiliated with the lawsuit told NC Health News they’ve heard about similar conditions from their clients.
“Some kids tell me they don’t get out of their cell at all, unless it’s to come to court,” said a juvenile defense attorney with decades of experience representing minors accused of serious crimes. The attorney requested anonymity for fears of backlash against any of their clients in detention.
“Some kids tell me they get out for like a half an hour, but not when the other kids are out,” the attorney said. “The staff is saying it’s because they’re short-staffed, so they just can’t have the kids outside. That’s not really legal, and that’s bad policy.”
Disability Rights North Carolina, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has federally designated authority to monitor the state’s juvenile detention facilities, where a large proportion of the population has intellectual and developmental disabilities. Corye Dunn, the organization’s director of public policy, said their monitoring through site visits and interviews has revealed practices in multiple facilities in which youth only get out of their cell for one hour a day, though some facilities provide more out-of-cell time than others.
Tara Muller, a policy attorney at Disability Rights NC, visited a juvenile detention facility recently for monitoring and said she could hardly sleep for three days after. It was clear the system was failing the kids, she said.
“It’s truly so sad when they are then mistreated in the place where they went because they are supposed to be getting rehabilitation and assistance. And instead, they’re locked in their room and then not even given a chance to have an education,” Muller said.
Strains to the system
The juvenile justice system has been working for years to reduce staff vacancies and deal with a shortage of beds in juvenile detention centers — factors that affect youth in custody, advocates say.
The division’s overall job vacancy rate sits at 24% as of Nov. 12, according to data provided to NC Health News, with stubborn vacancy rates persisting among direct care staff — the employees working inside facilities to counsel, support and supervise youth every day. The largest vacancy rate — 40% — is among youth counselors, the individuals responsible for supervising juveniles’ movement, providing behavioral intervention and evaluating treatment progress.
“The inadequate staffing problem is real, but the result of that, or the consequence of that, cannot be ‘We are going to reduce the very limited rights that people have and mistreat and mishandle these young people in these facilities because we don’t have the staffing,’” Sussman from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice said.
The pandemic spurred an exodus of staff, plunging the division into historic vacancy levels that have affected operations. Lassiter stated in his response to the lawsuit that staffing was stretched so thin that he and Department of Public Safety Secretary Eddie Buffaloe picked up shifts at detention centers to keep operations going.
Slowly, the division has been able to fill some vacancies — fueled by salary increases approved by the legislature and implemented in October 2023 — but gaps remain.
Lassiter’s statement outlined steps taken to improve staffing levels, including offering sign-on and retention bonuses, re-assigning employees in roles such as juvenile court counselors from their regular duties to take on shifts in juvenile detention centers, and hiring security guards through temporary staffing agencies at several juvenile detention centers.
At the same time as the division has grappled with serious staffing challenges, the number of juveniles moving through the juvenile justice system and housed in youth facilities has swelled after Raise the Age legislation, which took effect Dec. 1, 2019. That was an expected result of North Carolina raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction for nonviolent crimes, placing 16- and 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system rather than the adult system.
Driven by this and the legislative mandate that juveniles be housed separately from adults, the number of juveniles admitted to detention centers has increased 33% since 2020, according to the division’s 2023 annual report.
In addition to more juvenile placements in detention centers, the average length of stay has grown to 35 days in 2023 — up from 15 days in 2015.
These factors led the number of juveniles housed in detention centers to exceed capacity for a large portion of the year, according to the division’s most recent annual report. In 2023, the average daily population at juvenile detention centers was 363 — up from 137 in 2019.
As of Nov. 13, there were 382 juveniles housed in detention centers, two more than the number of available beds.
Of the 382 juveniles currently in detention, 124 of them — roughly a third — either are transfers to adult court or began their cases in adult court. In 2023, the average length of stay for young people being tried as adults was substantially longer at 177 days, compared with 27 days for those in juvenile jurisdiction.
That puts a strain on the system, Debnam said in a statement to NC Health News, noting that the majority of the division’s juvenile detention facilities were not built for such long periods of confinement. He said many of the facilities lack designated programming space and formal classrooms.
The opening of two facilities this year has provided 48 more detention beds, though capacity challenges persist.
Despite efforts to plan and implement Raise the Age effectively, juvenile justice experts said the policy change was never fully funded, which led to capacity issues and administrative pains faced today.
“If we know that we’re not adequately funding [the juvenile justice system], then we shouldn’t be terribly surprised when the outcome is not what we had hoped,” said Dunn of Disability Rights NC. “It seems there’s a little bit of magical thinking going on that we can change the policy but not provide the appropriate resources for things to get better.”
Jessica Feierman, senior managing director at the national Juvenile Law Center, who follows and has led litigation challenging juvenile justice systems’ use of solitary confinement, said concerns about overcrowded and understaffed detention centers are prevalent in states across the country.
“That’s leading to more use of solitary confinement, worse conditions of confinement, less programming and reduced access to positive interventions that young people need.”
‘Isn’t a therapeutic practice’
Ashley DiMuzio, an attorney in Winston-Salem who works with young clients, said prolonged isolation takes a toll, particularly on youth. She described the deterioration of one client who spent weeks in solitary confinement.
“You could tell that he wasn’t eating as much,” she said. “He wasn’t getting as much sleep. He was more irritated, more frustrated, and just wanted to get out. The conversations I had with him changed, where it was a little bit harder to have a substantive conversation with him about his case because his number one focus wasn’t handling the matters. It was he wanted to get out no matter what.
“He was pretty much counting down the days until he turned 18 so that he could be transferred to an adult facility because from what he had heard, it was just better.”
The juvenile defense attorney who wished to remain anonymous represents clients accused of serious crimes who often spend months in detention as their cases progress. The attorney said they often see depression start to creep in, leading some clients to threaten or attempt suicide.
In one case, the attorney recalled a client who threatened suicide on multiple occasions because she was so desperate to get out of her locked room.
“After the second or third time she did it, I think it was because she knew that she didn’t want to be in her cell 24 hours a day. And if she said ‘I’m gonna kill myself’ convincingly enough, the staff would have to commit her, and she would rather be in the psych ward where she gets to walk around the ward than be locked in a cell 24 hours a day,” the attorney said.
Apryl Alexander, a health and policy professor at UNC Charlotte who previously worked with youth in custody, said children in the juvenile justice system are especially vulnerable to lasting harm from solitary confinement. That’s because they have higher incidences of trauma, mental illness and developmental and learning disabilities than the general population. Often, it’s these factors that contribute to youth committing crimes and landing in custody in the first place.
Alexander, who served on the task force that created the American Psychological Association’s February resolution opposing youth isolation in juvenile justice settings, said solitary isn’t a therapeutic practice.
“It’s all counterintuitive,” Alexander said. “We need to be thinking about ways that we are truly supporting these youth so that when they do come back to our communities, they can thrive — not by continuing to evoke potentially traumatic situations on them.”
This story was produced with support from the Investigative Editing Corps through a partnership with Report for America and NC Health News. Melanie Sill was the story editor.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
