Watchdogging to protect vulnerable youth at Wayne County juvenile detention facility

The Wayne County Juvenile Detention Center is one step closer to losing its state license . Reports of incidents including overcrowding, sexual assaults, and a recent physical altercation between two juveniles has led to state officials putting the facility on a provisional license for the second time in less than four months.

The facility is undergoing a corrective plan. It’s unclear what would happen if the state were to revoke the license, as the county operated a juvenile detention center without a state license in the 1990s.

We spoke with Detroit Free Press reporter Christine MacDonald who, alongside reporter Gina Kaufman , has been keeping an eye on operations at the facility about why they have stuck with this story and what she hopes will change.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Outlier Media: How did conditions at the juvenile detention center first cross your radar?

Christine MacDonald: My colleague (Kaufman) and I had gotten a series of tips mainly about medication problems from a family whose kid wasn’t getting her medication in the facility. At the same time, a private facility (Detroit Behavioral Institute) had shut down. (Editor’s note: DBI was abruptly shut down in July 2022 following multiple allegations of abuse including bullying and excessive restraint).

(DBI) was a treatment facility that kids were transferred to once their court cases were done and judges ordered them into some kind of treatment. So after that shutdown, it seemed that overcrowding got worse and poor conditions escalated at the juvenile detention center. So that’s how things started.

Then in May, there had been a riot in that facility, and it had gotten coverage by Ross Jones and WXYZ , and we ended up following up on some of his work and getting a report that outlined what had happened in the facility.

The report mentioned kids complaining that they had been in the rooms for long periods of time and hadn’t gotten showers or recreation time. So it was really that report and the tips coming at the same time that led us to delve into it.

What challenges do officials at the county and state level point to in explaining the poor operation of the facility?

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The county has had trouble hiring enough staff and has had more kids than they normally do because of the lack of private long-term treatment centers. There’s also a new law called Raise the Age that requires anybody under 18 to go through these facilities, rather than going into the adult system. Juvenile justice reformers wanted those youth in youth facilities, but it did create a situation where there are more kids than normal.

The state also talks about employee turnover and how difficult it is to hire people. Employees complain that they’re restricted in a lot of ways from preventing youth from hurting each other or hurting them. There was the death of a youth at a private facility in Kalamazoo in 2020 , where he was restrained by several employees and went into cardiac arrest. After that the state instituted reforms and banned seclusion of kids and restraints. So employees complain that the state has gone too far to the other side and that it’s very difficult for them to manage and control youth because they fear violating those rules and being fired.

How hard is it to find out what is really happening in the facility, and how do you overcome that?

We don’t have a real time sense of conditions at the detention center, so we have to rely on the state investigations to give us some details on what’s happening at the facility. And those investigations take time, so we don’t find out about things until months later.

Otherwise, juvenile records are sealed for the young people’s protection, so we’ve been attending court hearings as a way of monitoring conditions at the jail. We also speak with families of and people who were formerly at the facility, but it’s not always accurate to current conditions.

Why are you and Kaufman continuing this reporting?

These are really important issues to the core of how we treat our children, and it’s our most vulnerable population. It’s important to hold government accountable for how youth are being treated.

These systems are difficult to watchdog, but it’s important because there is less scrutiny. They’re designed to protect youth, but sometimes it makes it more difficult to point out problems because a lot of this information is shielded to protect the youth.

Keep up with MacDonald and Kaufman’s reporting on the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Center at freep.com .

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