KY senator again pushes to improve mental health care for youths in state custody
A Republican state senator is renewing his effort to provide better mental health care to Kentucky youths in state custody for the third year in a row.
Sen. Danny Carroll, R-Paducah, is the sponsor of Senate Bill 125, which would create a structure of evaluation and placement of “acutely mentally ill” children and teens in the criminal justice system.
The legislation would also build two girls-only detention centers for the Department of Juvenile Justice, with one in Western Kentucky and one in Central Kentucky, as well as a mental health juvenile detention facility.
The bill unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
During the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions, Carroll’s proposals advanced through the Senate but died in the House. Carroll said last year that he suspected his bill’s price tag, which was $90 million for the two girls-only detention centers, might have contributed to its demise.
This year, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s budget proposal includes $90 million to build the two girls’ detention facilities and $35 million for the mental health juvenile detention facility. The current iteration of the Kentucky House GOP budget, however, doesn’t designate any money for the three proposed facilities.
The Department of Juvenile Justice has struggled to keep youths segregated by gender and severity of their alleged offenses because of infrastructure that needs millions of dollars in improvement. In 2022, a girl held at the Adair County facility was raped during a riot there.
The Adair County facility is one of more than a dozen run by the Kentucky Department Juvenile Justice, which has experienced scandals and systemic failures, including chronic understaffing, youth riots and drug use.
The Herald-Leader has previously reported on youths held in Kentucky’s scandal-ridden juvenile detention centers who suffered from poor mental health but did not receive adequate care, including one girl reportedly left naked in her own filth in a cell during the summer of 2022.
Mona Womack, the Deputy Secretary of the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet said during Thursday’s committee meeting the department does not have the resources to provide treatment to youth who have mental illness that renders extreme violence, and the mental health juvenile detention facility proposed in Carroll’s bill would help fix that issue.
She also added the facility is needed because private psychiatric hospitals are not required to accept youths from the department or prematurely discharge them from their care.
“The facility would serve youth who have been determined by a clinical professional following a behavioral assessment to need a secure treatment environment and specialized services,” Womack said. “These are kids who are a safety risk to themselves and to others in detention, and they, as I said, require a high level of psychiatric care.”
Sen. Phillip Wheeler, R-Pikeville, asked what the predicted operating budget for the facility would be. Rebecca Norton, budget director for the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, said it would be an estimated $12 million for annual operating costs.
“The hard part that we can’t really predict at this point in time is what would maybe be recouped through offsets from Medicaid for the medical care.,” Norton said. “We’re estimating just based on if we were paying essentially a contracted provider for that additional medic medical care, and what that additional cost would be.”
Womack, meanwhile, said the department is advocating for two female-only detention centers because they can’t currently maintain separation for male and female offenders who require a high level of psychiatric care. She also said the number of females entering juvenile detention has steadily increased since January 2024.
Additionally, the bill sets up a system where the Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the court can coordinate a treatment plan if a youth in custody or under a court order for psychiatric treatment is evaluated and qualified as a “high acuity youth” by a licensed clinician.
“It sets up a continuum of care, how to move the kids up and down the system based on their need,” Carroll said. “It sets up a system where both cabinets are involved, and if there are discrepancies on the placement, a judge would be involved to make the final decision.”
The bill now heads to the Senate floor.
