Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting (https://kycir.org/tag/juvenile-justice/)
Our investigations seek to protect society’s most vulnerable citizens, expose wrongdoing and increase transparency. Amplify brings you the voices of the Kentuckians who feel the effects of the failures we reveal and secrets we expose.
Though black youth are less than 27 percent of Louisville’s youth population, they represented more than 75 percent of the youth bookings in Louisville’s secure detention center last year.
When a youth is accused of a crime in Kentucky, an adult has to make a choice in nearly every step that follows.
Allow the youth to avoid a formal charge, or bring the case to a judge? Send him home or to sleep in a cell? Put another way: Offer another chance, or deny it?
Disproportionately, the Kentucky youth denied that second chance are black.
The consultants raised questions about whether the detention center’s understaffed school violated federal laws, and said having no qualified mental health professional on staff “jeopardizes the safety of young people with mental illness.” A physician is only on site two mornings a week, and nurses give most of the medical care.
Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers overuse isolation rooms and lack basic mental health care for the thousands of youths that cycle through the system each year, a state consultant has concluded after an eight-month review.
Two former employees of the juvenile detention center where Gynnya McMillen died in 2016 pleaded guilty Wednesday to official misconduct. Victor Holt and Reginald Windham were each sentenced Wednesday in Hardin County District Court to pay a $200 fine, plus court costs. Judge John Simcoe did not assign any jail time, although the charge could have brought up to 90 days. Holt and Windham were indicted last March on the misdemeanor charge after investigators determined that they and other Lincoln Village Regional Detention Center employees skipped bed checks and falsified logs. Gynnya, 16, was found unresponsive in her room at Lincoln Village on the morning of Jan.
Recent reforms have lowered the number of youth in facilities like Lincoln Village, which is operating with less than half of its 44-bed capacity.
Many agree: children shouldn’t be locked up for behavior problems. But they still are in Kentucky. Despite successful reforms, Kentucky detained kids more than 550 times in 2016 for minor offenses.