Incident at KY juvenile justice center in Bowling Green causes ‘significant’ damage
A violent incident involving a group of youths at the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Bowling Green last weekend caused “a significant amount of damage to the facility,” state officials confirmed Friday.
The incident was only the latest problem for the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice, which struggles to find enough employees to safety run its facilities. In 2020, the McCracken Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Paducah had two youth riots within three weeks of each other that required police to be called.
In the most recent episode, up to 10 youths housed at the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center climbed on toilets or sinks around midnight Aug. 20, after lights out, to reach and damage the ceiling, and then they committed “random acts of vandalism,” Justice and Public Safety Secretary Kerry Harvey said in an interview.
Kentucky State Police were summoned to the center but did not confront the youths, Harvey said. Nobody was harmed during the incident, he said.
The state police referred questions about the incident to the Justice Cabinet.
“Ultimately, they disengaged from the activity and the matter ended peacefully without any violence on the part of the youths or without the need of physical force on the part of our staff. But obviously it’s the kind of incident that’s very unfortunate and we’re unhappy that it occurred,” Harvey said.
“I don’t know what was in the minds of these young people,” Harvey added. “I don’t know what their motivation was.”
Three employees were on duty at the center as the incident started, with four additional employees arriving afterward to answer the call for help, said Justice Cabinet spokeswoman Morgan Hall. About 30 youths were housed at the center.
Harvey said he did not know if any of the youths will face criminal charges as a result of the incident.
The Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center is a maximum-security facility with 48 beds for youths awaiting trial. It has a staff vacancy rate of 50 percent, Hall said.
The Department of Juvenile Justice, which operates juvenile detention centers around the state, has suffered from frequent turnover in agency leadership, severe under-staffing among the rank-and-file and related safety problems for employees and youths.
Last year, the Herald-Leader published a series of stories that disclosed serious incidents of physical abuse, inappropriate sexual contact and neglect inside the juvenile detention centers.
One youth worker who quit the Warren Regional Juvenile Detention Center after more than two years inside the facility told the newspaper, “It just felt like it was getting more unsafe and more unsafe and more unsafe.”
