Hundreds of Illinois kids are held in county juvenile detention centers while they wait for their court proceeding. In annual inspections, the state has found several don’t meet state health, safety and quality standards year after year. Whose job is it to get them into compliance? WNIJ’s Peter Medlin reports…
This spring, Knox County’s juvenile detention center, known as the Mary Davis Home, shut down after a multi-year legal case. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Illinois accused the center of punishing kids with solitary confinement, locking them up in small cells for 23 hours a day with bright, fluorescent lights that never go out, making sleep close to impossible.
In sworn statements, teenagers described constant isolation and strip searches that made them feel hopeless and suicidal.
Just a few years earlier, in 2023, across the state, Franklin County’s juvenile detention center also closed down also as a result of a similar ACLU lawsuit into solitary confinement.
In both cases, state audits first called out these dire conditions. Every year, reports from the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, or IDJJ, marked them non-compliant with state standards and listed recommendations. But, every year, the problems persisted.
“It's strange the way the laws in Illinois [work]," said John Albright. He's with the Department of Juvenile Justice and the person who prepares those annual reports. "We conduct these inspections of the detention centers, but we really don't have any formal authority to enforce any improvement."
Kevin Fee is the legal director for the ACLU of Illinois.
“The state does have the ability statutorily to bring suits in court to challenge conditions of these facilities," he said, "but it, for whatever reason, has elected not to do so. It's kind of fallen on groups like ours to step in and bring suit when we find, through our investigation, the conditions are unconstitutional.”
![Sworn statements from teenagers alleging misconduct at the Knox County Juvenile Detention Center. The statement reads: "J.B.H. is a naturally high-energy person and sitting in his cell for hours 'messes with [his] head.' He feels that his extended isolation is really hurting his mental health; he sometimes cries when he is alone in his cell and feels hopeless and depressed, like there is no escape. J.B.H. says that the facility is making him go crazy."](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/560e108/2147483647/strip/true/crop/651x150+0+0/resize/840x194!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F62%2Fcb%2F4745110c4710a9fb3b4222b7597e%2Fknox-law.png)
J.B.H. v. Knox County
Attorney Complaint — Document #1
County juvenile detention centers are, oddly, not part of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. They’re operated locally, by a combination of the county board and the chief judge of whichever circuit court holds jurisdiction — some of whom don’t have much previous experience with juvenile detention. At the end of the day, it’s mainly up to them to ensure compliance.
It also means, technically, county detention centers are part of the judicial system in Illinois, which makes them exempt from public oversight through the Freedom of Information Act. Fee says there’s no reason for that exemption.
“You combine it with the appropriate privacy concerns like confidentiality," he said, "which makes it even more difficult to get information about court cases, the reasons for confinement, and even the identity of the youth. You have these facilities that are basically turned into kind of black boxes that are shut off from the outside world, from outside scrutiny."
The Administrative Office of Illinois Courts also oversees the facilities. They visit monthly and publish reports based on a different set of standards than the IDJJ. They also can reimburse counties to help pay for detention center staff. The Illinois Supreme Court can sanction centers when they're out of compliance. Yet another state office, the Office of the Independent Juvenile Ombudsman, investigates complaints filed by kids. It has only held jurisdiction over county detention centers for a few years.
Fee says this is not how the system works in other states.
“It's somewhat unique for the oversight to be quite as decentralized and fragmented as it is in the state of Illinois," he said. "In a lot of states, there's more uniform oversight by a state agency."
Hundreds of kids — sometimes as young as 10 years old — are locked in these facilities at any given time. Through 2024, the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission published monthly reports showing how many youths were housed at county centers, for how long, and why they were there.
In the last report, from December of that year, there were over 400 youths across 16 centers — now 15 after the closure of the Mary Davis Home in Knox County. The majority of youths were there fewer than three days, but many stayed longer than a month. The most common reason was a failure to appear in court or violation of a release condition.
The total number of kids in county detention centers has gone down in recent years. Patrick Keenan-Devlin has seen it as a youth defense attorney. He’s the executive director of the Evanston-based Moran Center for Youth Advocacy.
“It's important, obviously, for the mental health of the child," he said. "It's critical to their outcomes, because we know children that spend time in detention have much higher recidivism rates."
In last year’s IDJJ reports, most facilities were non-compliant in at least one area like discipline or education. Eight of them had been non-compliant in the same area for multiple years running.
LaSalle County has been non-compliant in education every year since the state started publishing reports online in 2022. Every year, the reports say they’re required to hire a special education teacher.
Chuck Goodwin is their director of court services. He says just this month, they were finally able to hire someone — after at least four years.
“It is frustrating, I mean, for all of us," said Goodwin.
He says staffing is always a challenge.
“You have to have someone with the right aptitude," he said, "that is able to work with kids, that has patience and is able to communicate."
In Will County, every year IDJJ recommends the detention center change policies to mitigate their use of "chemical agents" — meaning pepper spraying kids at the center. The most recent state report says they’re an outlier, using them 29 times in 2024, when most centers in Illinois don’t use chemical agents at all.
Their director of court services says they comply with IDJJ standards. But IDJJ lists chemical agents under its “Areas of Non-Compliance and Recommendations” section.
In Winnebago County, every year the center’s been deemed non-compliant in discipline for confining youth due to low staffing, although it notes they’ve made substantial improvements.
Debbie Jarvis is the Director of Court Services in Winnebago County. She says every center is unique, so it’s hard to say why centers are non-compliant, but there are issues they all face.
“When I speak to superintendents statewide, staffing has been one of the biggest struggles that all of them have had," she said. "There is high turnover and there are gaps.”
Jarvis says it’s improved recently. The Administrative Office of Illinois Courts has approved more positions, which allows counties to front the cost of a new hire’s salary, then get reimbursed by the state. She says starting pay has also increased in many facilities.
Kevin Fee with the ACLU of Illinois says confining kids is always extremely fraught.
“When you have lack of staffing, when you have lack of funding," he said, "it just exacerbates the problems I think you often see in attempts to incarcerate kids at this crucial stage of their development."
And Fee says it’s vital to consider child development. He says these kids are often talked about as if they’re adult prisoners.
“It's almost always lost just how young these kids are," he said. "In many cases, when you sit across the interview room from an 11- or 12-year-old, it's brought into very stark relief really quickly the gravity of the situation that you're dealing with."
Regardless of staffing, Fee says it’s fair to question if these centers should be used at all.
“Listen to them talk about their lives," said Fee. "Listen to them talk about their challenges. Listen to them talk about the circumstances that led them to be incarcerated in these facilities. If folks could do that, I believe these facilities would likely cease to exist very, very quickly.”
But, he says, since they do exist, detention centers have to take their responsibilities seriously and put youth in a position to thrive, not just while they’re locked in the facility, but when they go home.
