KY lawmakers want reforms from juvenile detention centers, ‘Bill of Rights’ for jailed kids
House Democrats are calling for better treatment of the youths housed in Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers after years of news stories revealing abuse and neglect inside the facilities.
Fourteen lawmakers on Tuesday filed House Bill 228, a proposed “Incarcerated Children’s Bill of Rights,” aimed at the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice.
Among other things, the bill would write into state law that youths in the juvenile detention centers must be free from physical and psychological abuse; they must receive educations appropriate to their individual needs; and they must be free from unreasonable use of seclusion and restraint.
Apart from codifying the rights of children in custody, the legislature should hold hearings this winter where state officials testify about what they’re doing to fix the juvenile detention centers, said the bill’s lead sponsor, state Rep. Lisa Willner, D-Louisville.
“Horrible things have been reported, and as far as I can tell, there’s not been a lot of resolutions,” Willner said in an interview on Wednesday.
Willner said she toured one of the juvenile detention centers two years ago and saw many problems herself, including staffing shortages that led to youths being forced to spend most of their time alone in cells instead of taking part in classroom education or recreational activities.
“Aside from what we’ve read in the paper, we were concerned with what we had seen with our own eyes,” she said. “Just because kids are in trouble, just because they’re being detained, they don’t cease to be human beings.”
The Lexington Herald-Leader has reported extensively about the mistreatment of youths in state custody.
Most recently, the newspaper reported Jan. 27 about two teen-aged boys at the McCracken Regional Juvenile Detention Center who had their arms broken on the same day by a correctional captain, according to state records.
The captain was fired as a result of the incidents, as were two managers in charge of the facility.
The Herald-Leader reported the next day about an autistic and suicidal teen boy at the Adair Regional Juvenile Detention Center whose genitals were pepper sprayed and who was forced to take a 104-degree shower to wash off the burning chemicals, causing him to scream in pain and cry.
One of the guards, a lieutenant, later acknowledged to investigators that they laughed about the boy’s anguish.
In part because of the news stories, the U.S. Department of Justice last year opened a civil rights investigation of Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers. That investigation is pending.
