‘Alarmed’: What Happens When Juvenile Detention Centers Don’t Have Enough Staff

Filed
12:00 p.m. EST

02.21.2026

From California to New York, juvenile detention techniques battle to guard the youth they home.

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On a sunny day in late January, Choose Peter A. Hernandez briefly interrupted testimony in his Los Angeles County courtroom, sounding genuinely baffled.

Within the case earlier than him, the state of California was arguing that the Los Angeles County Probation Division, which runs the county’s juvenile detention halls, had executed such a poor job, and for therefore lengthy, that the courtroom ought to authorize a management takeover — known as a receivership.

The lawsuit over detention circumstances, first filed in 2021, was assigned to Hernandez in the summertime of 2024. And regardless of dozens of hours of prior testimony in his courtroom on the trivia of every day operations, Hernandez mentioned it was the primary time he’d been briefed about how the division had didn’t grasp essentially the most primary of office capabilities. Probation Chief Guillermo Viera Rosa testified that till lately, “there was no database by which individuals had been being scheduled,” no reliable solution to monitor which workers had been supposed to point out up, who known as out, and the place employees had been posted as soon as a shift started. Viera Rosa mentioned in some circumstances, between callouts and employees medically unable to carry out important capabilities, as a lot as 85% of workers had been successfully unavailable.

“I’m a bit troubled and alarmed,” Hernandez mentioned. “It is form of exhausting for me to grasp how this saved going with nobody saying something.”

Whereas scheduling databases might sound banal, lots of the scandals which have long-plagued juvenile justice — not simply in LA County, however throughout the nation — activate these sorts of dry, administrative questions. Fundamental staffing issues have led to violations of requirements and security in juvenile detention facilities in lots of states.

When extreme callouts result in understaffing, different workers name out too, afraid that they are going to be left weak to violence. Then others name out to keep away from being “held over” previous their shifts to cowl for his or her colleagues’ missed shifts, LA County officers have mentioned. It’s the very definition of a vicious cycle, and it has devastating results on youth within the care of the county.

With out ample employees, youth miss college, recreation and medical appointments. They spend extra time caught in cells, which breeds frustration and typically violence, once more feeding again into the loop, in response to the testimony of Michael Dempsey, the impartial monitor who was employed in 2025 to supervise youth detention within the county. On the finish of final yr, the division had a 36% emptiness fee for sworn officer positions, with 70% of all new hires leaving inside their first yr. The union that represents corrections officers says the churn is a operate of untenable work circumstances, together with mismanagement.

Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice system is hardly alone. New York Focus reported earlier this month that understaffing in New York’s state-run amenities has grown so extreme that one website was working with roughly one-tenth of the employees it was presupposed to have. In interviews with the information outlet, employees members mentioned the persistent shortages pushed them into 24-hour shifts and compelled them to go away youth locked in cells for lengthy stretches. Like in Los Angeles, these lengthy spells of confinement typically left younger individuals with no different possibility than to alleviate themselves in bottles, baggage and trash bins when nobody is obtainable to allow them to go to the lavatory, in response to employees.

Requested in regards to the circumstances, one pissed off worker mentioned to a reporter, “Why are we right here? We’re a part of the issue,” earlier than breaking into tears.

New York laws typically prohibit youth isolation and require further approval when confinement extends past a day. A federal class-action lawsuit filed earlier this yr alleges {that a} form of de facto solitary confinement ceaselessly persists just because there may be not sufficient employees to run the ability safely.

In Tennessee’s Shelby County, dwelling to Memphis, unchecked youth isolation has additionally been a central scandal. An investigation by the information group MLK50 final yr discovered that youth held within the county’s detention middle between 2023 and 2025 had been typically saved in “23-and-1” circumstances — confined of their cells for 23 hours a day. In response, county leaders have floated a brand new native ordinance to restrict juvenile isolation. However some youth advocates are pushing again on the proposal, arguing that it incorporates no means for the county to implement the boundaries, and no impartial oversight.

A number of detention facilities in North Carolina have additionally routinely held youth of their cells from 22.5 to 24 hours a day, in response to a report launched Thursday by a neighborhood advocacy group. The findings observe a federal lawsuit filed in 2024 that claimed that youngsters held at Cabarrus Regional Juvenile Detention Heart, close to Charlotte, endured this stage of isolation for weeks and even months, let loose primarily for transient showers, restricted recreation and brief stretches of college. State officers denied the report’s findings to NC Newsline.

Staffing shortages additionally performed a key position in different North Carolina juvenile detention amenities. The state’s largest detention middle in Mecklenburg County, which incorporates Charlotte, was closed in 2022 resulting from inadequate employees, and the youngsters who had been housed there have been transferred to different amenities. Final month, North Carolina Well being Information reported that some advocates for youth need the ability to reopen, arguing that sending youngsters lengthy distances away from their households is damaging to their psychological well being.

“At a extremely important level of their progress, they must be shipped away, they usually don’t have entry to these individuals which might be central of their lives,” Mecklenburg County Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell instructed the outlet.

Whereas officers and consultants fear in regards to the psychological well being toll of long-distance placements and extended isolation, detention is more and more serving as a backstop for the youth mental-health-care system.

A survey launched final week by the workplace of Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff discovered that, throughout 25 states, 75 juvenile amenities reported incarcerating younger individuals who had been eligible for launch to psychological well being packages as a result of precise programming was not obtainable. As well as, 20 amenities surveyed reported holding youth past their anticipated launch date or the period of their sentence, resulting from an absence of appropriate psychological well being placement.

“This could shock America’s conscience,” Ossoff mentioned. “Kids with particular wants, locked up for prolonged time, as an alternative of getting the psychological well being care that they want.”