The first time L.J. was sent to the juvenile detention center outside of Philadelphia, he’d been caught hanging out with friends in an abandoned building. After that, he went in and out of custody for minor offenses throughout his teenage years.
Detention was a challenging place to grow up.
“It’s like a little jungle,” he said. “Everybody wants to be tough. Everybody wants to fight. It’s a lot to go through.”
One particularly long stint lasted about six months before he was sent to a state facility in southern Pennsylvania for boys in the delinquency system.
But more than half of the 11 months he spent locked up didn’t count toward any kind of sentence. It was “dead time.”
“It is just time that they are essentially being warehoused,” said Amy Borror, a policy strategist at the Gault Center, a national advocacy group working on juvenile justice issues. “It really is a waste. It’s a waste of their time. It’s a waste of a lot of resources that the city or state are putting into the detention facility. Time that kids spend locked up has an extraordinarily negative impact on them.”
“Damn, where was I at five Christmases ago, five Thanksgivings ago?” he said. “Time where I should have been with my family and out with my friends for birthdays and stuff like that, I’m still here because of time that they didn’t count.”
The juvenile justice system is, in theory, markedly different from the adult one. When a minor breaks the law, it’s a delinquent act, not a crime. Youth aren’t found guilty; they’re adjudicated delinquent. They aren’t sentenced to prison; they’re committed to the state’s custody or to a secure facility, often for an indeterminate period while they receive services meant to help turn their life around. If the adult system is meant to be punitive, the juvenile system is supposed to be rehabilitative.
“The juvenile legal system is quasi-criminal, quasi-civil. It’s intentionally separate from the criminal system, which is, at least in theory, a good thing. We don’t want to be criminalizing children,” said Borror.
But policy experts and juvenile defense attorneys argue it has also led to a lopsided application of fundamental rights, created disparities between how young people are treated in different states and allowed kids to languish in detention without access to services or proper education.
Detention isn’t without a purpose. Often, when a kid is detained pre-adjudication, it’s because the court has decided they are a risk to the community, explained Sam Abed, the director of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services in Washington, D.C.
“We need to remember that a young person was assessed by a justice agency as being a public safety risk and deemed that we need to hold you there because of the risk that you pose to the community safety,” he said.
“People might think that kids are more likely to be more protected and to potentially spend less time incarcerated. And it’s actually the opposite,” said Borror. “It’s one of those weird negative impacts of the fact that we don’t consider the juvenile legal system to be punishment. It is only quasi-criminal, quasi-civil. Because of that, kids don’t have the same level of constitutional protections that adults do in the criminal system.”
In Washington, D.C., for example, the law says the juvenile justice system is meant to “treat children as children,” “place a premium on the rehabilitation of children” and “hold the government accountable for the provision of reasonable rehabilitative services.”
As a result, minors in many states aren’t sentenced to a set amount of time. Instead, they’re in custody until they’re deemed ready for release. Typically, this means completing a program.
This is the case in D.C. where young people who break the law are committed to the custody of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services. For kids who the agency determines need to receive services at a secure facility, they work toward their release by progressing through a program at that institution.
They can’t do that in the city’s detention center, argues Abed, the director of DYRS.
In most places around the country, detention centers don’t offer the types of programs youth need to complete to earn a ticket home. The facilities are only designed to be a temporary stop while a young person’s case is in court or while they wait to be transferred somewhere else.
“ The detention facility, by definition, is not a treatment and rehabilitation facility. We are responsible for young people while they go through the court process,” said Gary Williams, the deputy commissioner of Juvenile Justice Services, which oversees the Philadelphia juvenile detention center. “We’re not responsible for the treatment and rehabilitation.”
Because young people aren’t receiving extensive services in detention, those weeks, months or even years aren’t contributing to their rehabilitation, in the eyes of the system. So the time doesn’t count.
“I think the time that kids are spending in detention is almost worthless. They’re not really getting any benefit from it,” said Anne Marie Ambrose, who oversaw the juvenile justice agencies in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania and now works on alternatives to detention. “They’re languishing in detention because they’re getting the same thing over and over and over and over again.”
That’s what it felt like to L.J.
During the six months that he was sitting at the detention center in Philadelphia, sometimes he’d ask the staff when he’d be leaving. He knew there was a list of kids who were about to get transferred out.
“When I’d go see my counselor I’d remember telling them, what’s up with the list? They’d be like you not on it,” he said. “So you just waiting.”
Back to his unit and his cell, back to the same rote day. He knew none of the time counted and that even when he got out of the detention center, he still had months of incarceration ahead of him.
“Sitting in the youth [detention center] gonna make you so mad cause you just there,” he said. “It’s stressful. You don’t know when you’re going to come home because you still have to factor all this time … just waiting here.”
Tyler McDaniels spent 16 months locked up, and a quarter of it was dead time.
“It felt like I was just existing,” said McDaniels, who was 17 when he was arrested about four years ago for charges including gun possession. “No backwards, no forward, I’m just here.”
Spending so much time in detention that didn’t count made him feel “like a battery getting used,” he said. “Like [they’re] draining us. They drain all our energy by putting us inside a cell or inside the jails, period.”
The number of minors in detention has been steadily declining around the country for years. But in some places, those who remain are spending long stretches and collecting extensive dead time, according to records and data reviewed by NPR. For kids in more than half of states around the country, NPR found that dead time extends their stay behind bars, sometimes by months or even years.
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This became a crisis in Philadelphia in the wake of the pandemic, driven by long waitlists for beds in state facilities for kids adjudicated delinquent. Most of the private centers in Pennsylvania that offer rehabilitative programs closed, while staffing shortages meant state-run lockups weren’t operating at full capacity. Young people on time-specific sentences took longer to go through programs, leading to slower turnover of spaces.
The problem was even more severe for minors who were originally charged as adults. It can take more than a year for a case to be transferred to juvenile court. In the adult system, that time would be subtracted from their sentence.
This was the situation for Mario Torres. When a judge brought his case back down to the juvenile court, it meant his sentence would be shorter. But it also meant that the nearly year and a half he was held in detention didn’t count.
Overcrowding at the Philadelphia detention center became so severe that in 2022, Philadelphia sued the state, imploring the Department of Human Services to pick up the kids the court ruled should be in its custody. Court records show that dozens of kids slept on mattresses on the floor of the admissions area and the gym. They couldn’t go to school or receive non-urgent medical care because there wasn’t enough staff.
As the amount of dead time kids collected went up in Philadelphia, so did the cost, NPR found. Detention is the most expensive option for dealing with youth who break the law. Records show it costs around $600 to $800 per night to keep one kid in the city detention center.
“It’s incredibly expensive. We invest way more in locking kids up than we do in educating them. I often wonder if we made different policy choices, how much better off kids and society as a whole would be,” said Ambrose, the former director of the juvenile justice agencies in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. “I really think that detention is an outdated form of punishment. We know better. We should be doing better.”
The price tag for McDaniels’ four months of dead time was around $80,000. To him, it felt like a waste.
“I’m getting all this time taken away from me and I’m not benefiting from it,” he said. “I put myself inside the predicament, but y’all supposed to be here to help me.”
With no rehabilitative programming and no sense of when he would start working toward his release, McDaniels said he started acting out.
“I went in there, and I got worse,” he said. “I started getting madder fast. I start getting exposed to all these other different types of personalities on top of dealing with my own stuff, so it’s like I’m taking in streets.”
Research shows that detention has a negative impact on young people. Kids who spend time in detention are less likely to graduate high school and less likely to participate in the labor force. It pulls young people further into the justice system and increases the likelihood that they’ll reoffend, according to research by the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit working to reduce incarceration.
The people in charge know it’s not working.
“If the status quo approach to juvenile justice in Philadelphia measures success by the system’s ability to prevent future arrests, said system is succeeding in less than half of all instances, and spending large amounts of money to achieve said outcome,” a study commissioned by the District Attorney’s office stated.
The crisis appears to be easing in Philadelphia. Kimberly Ali, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, which oversees juvenile justice, said young people are transferred more quickly now. In response to longer stays, Ali said they added more services at the detention center, including vocational training, anger management and grief counseling.
“ We had to learn to adjust to the young people that we were servicing. As their needs grew, we had to pivot to make sure that we met their needs,” said Ali.
D.C. is in the middle of a similar crisis. The district’s goal is to move kids out of detention and into a rehabilitative program within 30 days of their disposition in court. The juvenile justice agency failed to meet this target in more than half of cases in 2023, according to data obtained by NPR from the Office of Independent Juvenile Justice Facilities Oversight.
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About one in five youth were held at the detention center for more than three months after their court case had finished, according to data from the first half of last year. Six were there for more than four months.
Abed says his team at DYRS works hard to find the program that will be the best fit for a young person’s needs, but it takes time to complete the required assessments and find a spot at a compatible facility.
“We want to place them as quickly as possible. No two kids are going to be the same. It’s not a cookie cutter approach,” he said. “It can be frustrating for a young person to await placement for a long period of time. But that’s why we’ve prioritized it, and the length of stay has declined and we will continue to push it down.”
The problem is improving slightly. At a council hearing last September, Abed told lawmakers that the average length of time youth waited to be transferred to start their rehabilitative program had decreased from a peak of 102 days that May to 63 days last August. But in the last three months of 2024, the wait time had increased slightly to 71 days, according to DYRS.
Some states have found a way to deal with kids languishing in detention after the conclusion of their court case while they wait to go elsewhere for treatment. Several years ago, Utah passed a law that requires kids to be transferred within 72 hours. Maryland created specialized units for youth who are waiting to be transferred to the facility where they’ll serve out their commitment, so they can start working toward their release.
Abed says that DYRS has created a unit where kids who are waiting to be transferred can receive additional services, but that time still doesn’t count because kids go to different facilities, each with their own program.
“We can’t start a treatment program at a detention center that doesn’t match up with what they’re doing at the treatment program they’re going to eventually do,” he said. “It’s not going to be something that’s compatible.”
When Eduardo Ferrer talks to the kids he represents in D.C., the impact of extended stays in detention is clear.
“Time in detention is not just dead time. It’s harmful time,” said Ferrer. “It’s dead time because the young person’s making no progress. They’re not building the skills that they need in order to be rehabilitated, to not re-offend. But it’s also causing a lot of harm because it’s taking them away from positive, productive, pro-social relationships and services that they could be getting in other programs around the community.”
Ferrer says that for an adult, a couple months more in jail may not feel like a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of their life. But for a kid, it does.
“One of my clients said it best when we were talking one time about his sentencing. He said, when do I get to be a kid? And that’s really what is at stake,” said Ferrer.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Supreme Court recognized kids are entitled to due process, the protection of an individual’s liberty that encompasses everything from the right to a fair trial to the right to an attorney. Still, children have a diminished right to liberty compared to adults. There is, for example, no right to bail or a jury trial in juvenile delinquency proceedings in many states.
“I think this is one of the big failings of the juvenile court over time. As the Supreme Court said in the sixties, it really has evolved to be the worst of both worlds. Young people get neither the rehabilitation that they’re promised nor actual protections and due process rights that they would if they were in the adult system,” said Ferrer.
Public defenders in D.C. filed a lawsuit in October alleging that the district is violating kids’ due process by detaining them in the city’s Youth Services Center for long periods without credit or access to rehabilitative services.
Not everyone agrees. “It is a huge due process question, compounded by the fact that we know young people at YSC are not receiving services,” said Zachary Parker, a member of the D.C. Council who chairs the committee that oversees DYRS. “It’s not a matter of legality alone. It is also a question around humanity. It’s inhumane to keep a young person that may be 12 years old in a cell for months on end without services with no real plan or concern for their future.”
Even when the law requires that time in detention count, attorneys told NPR they often have to push for it to be applied properly. Public defenders in Ohio had to file a lawsuit to ensure that was happening.
“It is not fair,” she said. “It’s not just. And even though we say that the system is for treatment, rehabilitation and supervision, it’s not going to feel like that for a kid.”
Research shows that kids often age out of delinquent behavior. The young men who spoke with NPR said they’re turning their lives around despite their time in detention, not because of it.
McDaniels is finishing high school. He spoke with the governor about his experiences and says he wants to start a community center for kids in his neighborhood. Torres, who graduated high school while locked up, is working toward a college degree in IT. He has become a mentor for the other kids at a state facility in southern Pennsylvania, where he’s being held.
L.J. is working in construction and pursuing his commercial truck driver’s license. But that doesn’t mean his time locked up felt rehabilitative, especially when the stay in detention didn’t count for anything, he said.
“I really did not know it wasn’t a punishment, I thought like, you did what you did, this is what comes with it,” he said. “I really thought that’s just how it was. It’s news to me that it’s not.”
Source: www.npr.org