Federal investigators will examine whether the detention centers use excessive force and punitive isolation, if youths are adequately protected from violence and sexual abuse, and whether the commonwealth provides sufficient mental health care, education and services for children with disabilities.
The Lexington Herald-Leader has reported extensively for the past three years on chronic abuse and neglect of youths held in facilities operated by the state Department of Juvenile Justice. Its coverage has examined the assaults, riots, escapes and other longstanding problems at the troubled agency. Its reporting triggered an independent audit from state Auditor Allison Ball’s office that was ordered by Kentucky legislators in March 2023.
In some cases, teenagers have been held in isolation for extended periods because of under-staffing, not because they posed a safety risk. In other cases, employees have used excessive force on youths, including pepper spraying them in their cells as a form of punishment. A former youth worker the newspaper wrote about in 2021, Nathaniel Lumpkins, pleaded guilty last month to breaking a 15-year-old boy’s arm out of anger at one of the Department of Juvenile Justice’s facilities.
Earlier last year, the state’s independent audit confirmed many of the newspaper’s findings. Former employees and youths held in the detention centers also have filed multiple lawsuits to protest the living conditions inside the facilities. “Confinement in the juvenile justice system should help children avoid future contact with law enforcement and mature into law-abiding, productive members of society. Too often, juvenile justice facilities break our children, exposing them to dangerous and traumatic conditions,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement Wednesday.
