By John Cheves
Lexington Herald-Leader
ADAIR COUNTY, Ky. — At the state’s long-troubled juvenile detention center in Adair County, recently called “a nightmare for its kids” in a pending whistle-blower lawsuit, youths sometimes ask to remain in their cells because they fear being attacked by other youths if they emerge.
At least 17 times over 90 days from March through May, teen-aged boys held at the Adair Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Columbia requested what’s known as voluntary protective custody, according to incident reports obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader under the Kentucky Open Records Act.
In lieu of their regular daily activities, such as attending class, taking a shower and communal recreation time, these youths are offered a DVD player or a video game but are otherwise left alone, according to the reports.
“Youth does not want to come out of his cell,” read one report from March 7.
“The youth stated that he does not feel safe and wants to remain on PC,” read another report two days later.
“Youth feels that several peers may attempt to assault him,” read another report five days after that.
Under state regulations, youths in juvenile detention can be ordered into protective custody, also called isolation, for limited periods if officials believe they pose a threat to themselves or others.
But youths also can ask to be left in their 80-square-foot cells — the size of a typical garden shed — if they fear they’re at risk of harm and the security staff isn’t capable of protecting them. Or, they worry about getting in trouble for fighting if they’re forced to defend themselves.
In some cases, youths requesting protective custody already have been beaten up at least once.
For example, on March 28, one teen-aged boy watched another do a card trick during their leisure time in the detention center’s recreation room, according to an incident report. When the first boy looked down at one of the cards, the boy doing the trick suddenly kicked him in the face and then repeatedly punched him in the face.
A couple of correctional officers managed to wrestle the attacker back to his cell.
The injured boy was put in mechanical restraints and driven to the hospital, where doctors treated his broken nose. The next morning, correctional officers agreed to place him in protective custody “to prevent another assault during recovery,” according to an incident report.
‘A bleak existence’
Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s commissioner of juvenile justice, Randy White, and the interim manager of the Adair County facility, Greg Lundy, declined requests to be interviewed for this story.
“The safety of our youth is our top priority, and when a youth feels unsafe, we take that seriously,” Lundy said in a written statement provided to the Herald-Leader.
“No youths are mandated to be placed on protective custody,” Lundy said. “It is at their request and is not a form of punishment. Protective custody is one of many tools available to ensure safety, treatment needs and rehabilitation of a youth in our custody.”
Advocates for youths in Kentucky’s juvenile justice system say it’s unacceptable that a secured state facility staffed by correctional officers carrying pepper spray can’t protect the people for whom they’re responsible.
Teenagers in detention centers because they’ve been charged with an offense aren’t supposed to spend their days languishing in a cell, said Rebecca Ballard DiLoreto, a defense lawyer who has worked with juvenile clients since the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice was created in the 1990s following a series of scandals.
“It’s a bleak existence. It leads to depression. It generally reduces their ability to understand their cases, or anything else, because it turns their brains off,” DiLoreto said.
Juvenile detention centers are supposed to divide youths into manageable groups of five or six individuals, with each group moved through their daily activities apart from other groups to minimize the risk of conflict, DiLoreto said.
“I don’t know if they have been cut so severely that they don’t have the staff to do that work, to supervise the kids appropriately,” the lawyer said.
“But there’s certain standards in the consent decree that led to the creation of DJJ,” she said. “It included exercise, mental health care, schooling, and it doesn’t — you know, they’re not living up to those if they have kids just sitting in their cells all day.”
This is a sensitive subject for the Department of Juvenile Justice, which has a history of leaving youths locked in their cells for extended periods because it’s easier to manage them that way, DiLoreto said.
A state audit last year confirmed Herald-Leader news stories about “the overuse of isolation and room confinement” at juvenile detention centers.
In 2016, 16-year-old Gynnya McMillen died from a heart condition while being ignored in room confinement at the Lincoln Village Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Hardin County, now closed.
“I’ve had clients they’ve kept in their cells 24/7, and the clients did not want to be in their cells 24/7, right? But they weren’t allowed to leave,” DiLoreto said.
Dangerous youths, fight risks
The state Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, which oversees the Juvenile Justice Department, provided a written reply to the Herald-Leader in response to questions for this story.
Dangerous youths are held at the Adair County facility, creating the risk of fights, Morgan Hall, spokeswoman for the state Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, said in the statement.
“Adair Regional Juvenile Detention Center is the maximum secure detention center in the commonwealth and houses the largest number of violent offenders, and on any given day, new juveniles with high-level offenses are sent to the Adair detention center and oftentimes include rival gang members of those who are already in custody,” Hall said.
A total of 12 youths asked to remain in their cells in Adair County from March to April, Hall said, although some made that request more than once. Their lengths of stay in protective custody varied from case to case.
Youths make these requests for a variety of reasons, including mental or physical disabilities that make them vulnerable; certain criminal charges that make them unpopular with their peers; rival gang affiliations that make them a target; or past conflicts with other youths at the facility that created ill will, Hall said.
Hall denied that staffing is a problem in Adair County.
The facility has 72 employees, 54 of whom are correctional officers, she said. Staffing levels allow the detention center to meet the federal standards required under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, of one officer for every eight youths, she said.
Adair County’s troubled history
The U.S. Department of Justice announced in May 2024 that it’s investigating Kentucky’s eight juvenile detention centers for possible civil rights violations, including the 60-bed detention center in Adair County that, as of July 18, held 49 youths.
The Justice Department has refused to comment on the status of that investigation since Republican President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20 and scaled back many of the agency’s civil rights cases.
Separately, at least three pending lawsuits allege serious mistreatment of youths in the Adair County facility, which was the scene of a 2022 riot that led to the rape of a teen-aged girl who was housed there at the time.
Two of those suits this month survived the state’s attempts to have them dismissed by judges.
One was filed by a social service worker who says he was fired for reporting the physical abuse of a boy. The other was filed by a mentally ill teen girl who says she was physically and emotionally abused in a filthy isolation cell.
“The Adair facility has long been a nightmare for its kids,” Louisville attorney Thomas Coffey said in a court filing in March for David Richardson, the former social service worker who claims whistle-blower status over his 2023 firing by the Department of Juvenile Justice.
The longtime manager of the Adair County facility, Tonya Burton, resigned last November, just ahead of getting fired, after state officials said she failed to conduct important mental health assessments of youths in her custody and wrongly accused a teen boy of getting a handcuff key from one of her guards.
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