A novel report from Congress details how children with mental health needs are being held in juvenile detention facilities due to a lack of available mental health care, rather than receiving appropriate treatment.
The report, “Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages,” released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff and Republican Representative Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey of public juvenile detention facilities nationwide. According to the findings, approximately half of the facilities that responded reported instances of holding youths in detention beyond what was necessary because of the unavailability of offsite mental health services.
“This should shock America’s conscience,” Senator Ossoff stated. “Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need.”
The survey revealed that 75 juvenile detention centers across 25 states reported holding young people for days or even months while awaiting placement in long-term psychiatric residential treatment facilities. One respondent from North Dakota wrote that the facility often serves as a default placement option because “There [is] no secure and safe public placement option for mentally ill youth who have violent outbursts in North Dakota, and so they arrive to corrections.”
Linda Teplin, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Medical School, who has studied youth detention for three decades, noted that the findings are not new. “We’ve known for years that the prevalence of psychiatric disorder in juvenile facilities is extremely high – far higher than in the general population. And we know that few kids receive services, whether in detention or, particularly, when they go back to their communities,” she said.
Teplin emphasized the detrimental effects of detention on mental health. “Being in a detention center can only worsen your psychiatric problems,” she explained.
The survey, prepared by congressional staff with input from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was distributed to 355 juvenile detention centers. A total of 157 facilities responded, with 75 confirming that they had held children due to a lack of mental health care access.
Recent reports indicate broader issues within the juvenile justice system in Georgia. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has stated that “tough-on-crime” policies are disproportionately impacting Black youth in the state. Nine juveniles recently escaped from a detention center in Pennsylvania, and were later apprehended by police.
Senator Ossoff stated, “The crisis in juvenile mental health and juvenile incarceration is decades old and we have failed to fix it. The way we fix it is by bringing Republicans and Democrats together to initiate the process of legislation.”
