Conditions of Confinement

In the United States, approximately 24,000 youth are locked up in secure detention on any given day. In many cases, these youth spend time in facilities where they are subject to physical and emotional abuse that threatens not only their immediate safety, but their long-term well-being. Media coverage and lawsuits have highlighted ergregious abuses in facilities throughout the country. In response, a number of organizations and projects such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, work to provide suggestions on how to reform conditions of confinement. These resources identify problems with conditions of confinement in secure detention facilities and present strategies for improvement.

CCLP Publications

• An Overview of the JDAI Facility Site Assessment Process: Guidelines for Planning, Conducting and Reporting [Download]
  To ensure a level of protection for detained youth and provide necessary feedback for officials responsible for the operation of juvenile detention facilities, staff of the Youth Law Center and the Center for Children’s Law and Policy have developed an extensive set of materials to facilitate a facility site assessment. This overview document provides a summary of the entire facility site assessment process from start to finish.
  
  
• JDAI Standards [Download]
  This document contains the extensive set of standards contained in the JDAI Facility Site Assessment Instrument. The document is commonly referred to as both the “standards” and the “instrument.”

• JDAI "How To" Tools [Download]
  This document contains a set of “How To” documents that provide suggestions for assessing each major issue area involved in a facility assessment.

CCLP Presentations

Other Resources

• Improving Conditions of Confinement in Secure Juvenile Detention Centers [download]
  This JDAI Pathways report provides strategies to assess and improve conditions in juvenile detention facilities, based on the initiative's experience with detention reform.

• Youth Law Center [link]
  The Youth Law Center litigates on behalf of children in the nation's foster care and juvenile justice systems, and the public interest law firm has pursued a number of cases addressing conditions of confinement. To browse their work, click the link above and select "Conditions of Confinement" and "Crowding/Detention Practices" from the Topics menu at left.

• United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Special Litigation Section [link]
  The Special Litigation Section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division has investigated conditions of confinement in more than 100 juvenile facilities nationwide. Their website contains a list of complaints, briefs, settlements, court decisions, and other resources from those efforts.

• Posttraumatic Stress as a Mediator of the Relationship Between Trauma and Mental Health Problems Among Juvenile Delinquents [Download]
  This October 2009 study from the Journal of Youth and Adolescence investigated the relationship between trauma exposure, post-traumatic stress disorder, and mental health problems among a sample youth in juvenile corrections, finding that females scored higher than males on measures of exposure to trauma and symptoms of PTSD.

• Conditions of Confinement: Juvenile Detention and Corrections Facilities: Research Report [link]
  This report, prepared in 1994 for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, remains the most comprehensive study of detention conditions in the United States to date.