By John Cheves
Lexington Herald-Leader
LEXINGTON, Ky. — A rookie correctional officer who was fired from the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice last month for threatening to pepper spray a teen boy while he was locked in his cell says she regrets her actions, but she was overworked and not given the necessary training or supervision to do a difficult job.
Nickie Jean Terry, a former dietary aide at a nursing home, lasted less than two months at the Adair Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Columbia.
“I wasn’t properly trained,” Terry told the Herald-Leader in a phone interview last week. “I wasn’t properly mentally prepared for everything.”
That 60-bed facility has been one of the state’s most notorious in recent years — the site of a riot and sexual assault in 2022, and more recently, youths who have refused to leave their cells for fear of being attacked. A mentally ill teen girl said she spent much of a summer locked — sometimes naked — in a filthy isolation cell inside the detention center, alternately mocked and ignored by staff.
In recent years, due to under-staffing, the Department of Juvenile Justice has sent new hires to work on the floors of detention centers without the preliminary security skills training that it once provided them at its DJJ Academy in suburban Louisville.
Terry was still on probation as a trainee when she was fired on July 24 because of an incident the previous day outside a boy’s cell.
The boy in the cell told officials that Terry, who is white, used a racial slur by threatening to pepper spray his “n----r ass” after he cursed at her through his cell door.
The boy remained locked in his cell and was not sprayed, according to a department incident report obtained by the Herald-Leader through the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Terry’s superiors, after reviewing security video footage, said in an incident report that she told the boy she would pepper spray his “miserable ass,” without the use of the racial slur. Terry also denies using the slur.
Juvenile Justice Commissioner Randy White fired Terry by letter the next day.
The Department of Juvenile Justice would not answer a question last week as to exactly which words it ultimately determined that Terry said to the boy.
But in a written statement, the department told the Herald-Leader that Terry acted improperly.
“Racial slurs, physical and verbal aggression, not adhering to policies and procedures, mistreatment of youths, among many other things will not be tolerated or accepted by the administration,” spokeswoman Morgan Hall said in the statement.
Long hours, high stress
In hindsight, Terry said last week, she should not have responded to the boy who angrily cursed at her, because he was locked in a cell where he could not have harmed anyone at that moment. Another boy in a nearby cell, a known troublemaker, got the boy agitated by shouting across to him, she said.
“I hate the way that I acted, and I honestly can say that I acted that way because I was overworked,” Terry said in a choked voice.
Terry said that when she lost her temper, she was exhausted by long hours — including mandatory daily overtime and six-day weeks — and overwhelmed by how often she was left alone to deal with the youths housed in her assigned unit.
“They had rules that were supposed to be put in place that ended up being broke because they were so short-staffed,” she said.
“Half the time, we would find ourselves by ourselves. The people that were licensed, the COs (correctional officers) that we were supposed to report to, we couldn’t find them, because they had just stepped out of the facility on a smoke break,” she said.
Employees aren’t the only ones stressed by the facility’s short-staffing, Terry said. Youths are sometimes kept in their cells not as punishment but because there aren’t enough officers to escort them to their daily activities, she said.
“There was even some times where we didn’t have enough staff for them to have recreation,” Terry said. “So they couldn’t go to the gym, or they couldn’t go outside, which would cause them to be even more agitated, because they would feel like, ‘OK, well, you know, now we’re just stuck in our cells again.’”
“At the end of the day, there would be a pod that didn’t have showers done, or they didn’t get proper leisure. The boys, I kind of feel like were constantly — I don’t want to use the word neglect, but they were not getting everything that is on their schedule,” she said.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced last year that it’s investigating Kentucky’s eight juvenile detention centers for possible civil rights violations. Herald-Leader stories have documented repeated problems with abuse and neglect at the juvenile detention centers, which has also prompted a number of civil rights lawsuits.
The Justice Department has refused to comment on the status of its investigation since Republican President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20 and scaled back many of the agency’s civil rights cases.
Learning on the job
The Department of Juvenile Justice offered Terry a job as a correctional officer in Adair County on May 28 and told her to report to the detention center four days later, on June 1.
For years, the department sent rookie officers like Terry to spend their first several weeks of state employment at the DJJ Academy to learn the basics of their demanding new jobs.
But in 2021, struggling with a staffing shortage, the department scrapped that educational requirement. Instead, it started to put new hires to work, saying they will learn what they need on the job with close supervision from experienced colleagues. Trainees will not interact with youths by themselves, state officials said.
Some rank-and-file employees warned four years ago that this change would put people at risk.
“That’s not gonna work,” Michael Ross, a youth worker supervisor with eight years experience, told the Herald-Leader at the time. “They’re just basically trying to get bodies in there as fast as they can because we’re so low-staffed. This is not going to go well for anyone.”
“If they have never worked in a corrections setting, if they have never dealt with kids — especially the kids we have in our facilities — this can only go badly. This is not the place to learn on the job,” Ross said.
Terry said her experience as a new hire was being rushed onto the floor of the Adair County detention center faster than expected to perform the duties of a correctional officer.
“Because they were so short-staffed, when I came in with my group, it was literally a few days of paperwork, and then it was ‘OK, well, we need you on the floor.’ Once we moved to the floor, it was ‘OK, this is how you do checks.’ And then we were told, basically, you know, ‘OK, go ahead and do checks,’” she said.
Terry said she was told that she would get to attend the DJJ Academy in the future, once she had been “seasoned on the floor.” That hadn’t happened by the time she lost her job, she said.
“We went into it being told by people that had already went through Academy, ‘Oh, when you guys, you know, go to Academy, it’s going to get better,’” she said.
‘It’s very heartbreaking’
Terry said her weekday schedule of 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. quickly got extended into the evening because the staff on duty were not sufficient to complete the necessary work. A sixth-day shift on weekends was added to the mix, which meant she — and most of her colleagues — had a single day off each week, she said.
Dealing with juvenile offenders behind bars is a high-stress situation, she added. Some youths facing serious charges don’t feel like they have anything to lose, and given their age, they know there are restrictions on what the correctional officers can do to punish or restrain them, she said.
“It’s very heartbreaking there,” she said. “It’s not for everybody. It can get the best of you.”
Terry described the tension of operating the facility’s control room when, on occasion, the wrong button was pushed and the wrong cell door was buzzed opened by mistake.
She said the mistake happened to her once. But the boy on that occasion was a “model” resident who agreeably walked back into his cell and closed the door after she called his name and asked: “Can you please just go back in yourself?”
On other occasions, youths in the cells mistakenly buzzed open were considered less friendly. Then the race was on, she said.
“It was, ‘OK, well, let me figure this out — I just heard this door click. Let me see if I can go get over there fast enough to close the door before this inmate realizes that his door is now open,’” she said.
Two weeks before the incident that got her fired, Terry said, she went to one of her superiors for guidance. She told him that she felt exhausted by the long hours and overwhelmed by her duties, she said.
“He said, ‘You need to seriously think about whether or not you want to be here, and if you want to be here, put on your big girl panties and get back out there and show us that you want to be here,’” she said.
Asked if the Department of Juvenile Justice was concerned that Terry wasn’t adequately prepared for her job, spokeswoman Hall responded by saying that new correctional officers must complete six weeks of training.
That includes one week of computer-based staff training and orientation, followed by in-person and on-the-job training, Hall said. New hires are paired with experienced employees and provided with “continuous oversight,” so that “at no time are they left unsupervised or alone with juveniles,” Hall said.
Officially, rookie officers — referred to as OJTs, for on-the-job training — are never left alone in a juvenile detention center, Terry agreed.
But reality is another story, she said.
“They want to have two staff members to a pod for the whole entire day. That never happened,” she said.
“It seemed like, you know, HR (human resources), the front offices would be staffed,” she said. “But physically on the floor, there would be times where one of the COs is running two pods, and maybe another CO would be running another pod. Either way, the staffing was so short that an OJT would be forced to be doing checks by themselves.”
—
©2025 Lexington Herald-Leader. Visit kentucky.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
