NEAR WEST SIDE — Cook County officials plan to drastically reduce the size of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, the nation’s largest juvenile jail, long criticized for its inhumane treatment and ineffective care of vulnerable kids, and replace it with community-based treatment centers.
The plans, which have the backing of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans, call for downsizing the five-story detention center on Chicago’s West Side and replacing it with “centers of care,” which would be semi-secure facilities to house youths who judges deem can’t be released to their homes, according to a proposal submitted for a federal grant to support the effort.
Officials plan to repurpose the JTDC, which currently houses nearly 200 teenagers in single-occupancy cells, into “less traumatizing dormitory-style conditions” for the fewer than 50 youths expected to require secure detention. By the end of next year, the footprint of the more than 600,000-square-foot detention center is expected to shrink by 60 percent, according to the plans, which Injustice Watch obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The move would be the most significant reform to juvenile detention in Cook County since the JTDC was released from federal court oversight nearly a decade ago and would put Cook County at the forefront of a nationwide push to reduce the incarceration of young people.
It follows years of critical reports from advocates and outside experts about the conditions inside the JTDC, including extended room confinement, inappropriate strip searches, and a lack of educational and rehabilitative programming. Experts say detaining young people in those conditions can traumatize them and lead to further involvement in the criminal legal system.
In March, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded Cook County $450,000 to support the proposal to build alternatives to the detention center. Separately, the Cook County Board of Commissioners last week approved a $836,862 contract with Chapin Hall, a policy institute at the University of Chicago, to provide data research and oversee the planning process for developing the centers of care and new assessment centers, where youths who are arrested would be evaluated.
But many of the same child welfare advocates who have been pushing for reforms for decades said they are skeptical of the current plans, which lack a clear budget or a plan on who will be running the proposed new facilities.
Briana Payton, who until last month served as an appointed member of the JTDC Advisory Board, said the board had received conflicting reports about the plan from the chief judge’s office. She said it wasn’t clear how officials would decide where a kid gets placed post-arrest and for how long they would be detained.
“Anything that would involve new places where more youth are still being detained, we are alarmed about. We do not want to see new jails in Cook County, even if they’re smaller,” she said.
Evans, through a spokesperson, said he “and a team of juvenile justice experts and stakeholders have been exploring alternatives to the detention center since 2021.”
In a statement, Preckwinkle said her office “is committed to transitioning away from a single, large-scale youth detention facility toward community-based options that are more conducive to stability and rehabilitation for the limited number of young people that are detained while awaiting trial at any given time.”
“We commend the Office of the Chief Judge for working toward our shared, long-standing goals of reducing youth detention and incarceration rates and eventually replacing the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center,” she added.
But other public officials questioned whether the current leadership of the detention center is prepared to make the drastic changes called for in the proposal.
At the Cook County Criminal Justice Committee meeting, where the Chapin Hall contract was approved, Commissioner Bridget Degnen questioned whether the JTDC’s leadership would follow through on the recommendations made by the University of Chicago researchers.
“My concern is that despite your best efforts that, again, you’re going to recommend all of these great things, and we’re going to spend a ton of money on it,” Degnen said. “But at the same time, it’s going to be thwarted because the leadership at the JTDC refuses to implement common sense, pragmatic, expert-related initiatives.”
Plans call for a ‘continuum of care’ for arrested youths
Officials in Evans’ office have outlined what they called an “aggressive” timeline for standing up the new assessment centers and centers of care by next year to create what they called a “continuum of care” for youths arrested in Cook County.
Currently, when a youth is arrested, the law enforcement agency contacts the Cook County Juvenile Probation Department, which uses a point-based detention screening system to determine whether the youth should be taken to the JTDC or released at the police station. All youths detained at the JTDC are required to have a detention hearing before a judge within 40 hours.
Under the grant proposal submitted to the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, starting by Sept. 30, youths will be brought to centralized assessment centers, where they will be screened for a number of risk factors. These assessment centers will initially be run by existing nonprofits, with the county building or leasing its own assessment centers starting in 2025.
“We envision that this continuum of community-based care will support these young people to remain safely in the community through the pretrial stage,” said Miquel Lewis, Cook County’s acting director of juvenile probation and court services, in a recent presentation about the plan to the JTDC advisory board. “And then only those who remain a danger to the community or as a flight risk after our attempts are made to connect them to the appropriate services, reducing those potential risks, might — after a hearing before the court — be held in secure custody.”
Once the assessment process is complete, officials may determine that a youth has to be held at one of several centers of care. According to the proposal, these facilities will be located on the North, West, and South sides of the city and in the suburbs. One of the facilities is required to be a secure facility, while the others will have protocols in place to prevent children from leaving on their own but with unlocked doors and some supervised activities outside the building.
Like the assessment centers, county officials will contract with community organizations to open centers of care by Nov. 30 and plan to design permanent, county-operated centers next year. Evans said the total cost for building and operating the new centers had not been determined yet, but the federal grant would assist with construction costs.
The $450,000 federal grant will cover costs to hire a project manager who will convene a planning committee of government officials and community organizations. The committee will also recruit affected youths and their families, who will be paid a $1,000 stipend to participate in meetings and working groups. The county also said it will host four community meetings in neighborhoods where many of the youths admitted to the JTDC reside: Auburn Gresham, Little Village, Lawndale, and Roseland.
The Chapin Hall contract will focus on “supporting both the chief judge’s office, as well as the (Cook County board) president’s office, as they move to try to reimagine what the juvenile justice system will look like in Cook County in the future,” said Bryan Samuels, Chapin Hall’s executive director.
Their work will include identifying potential nonprofits to run the assessment centers and centers of care, Samuels said.
Because the population at the JTDC is expected to drastically decline once the centers of care open, officials said they plan to downsize and repurpose the 489-bed facility. By the end of 2025, county officials hope to complete a new design for the JTDC and begin reconfiguring the remaining space.
The plans don’t currently include closing the JTDC altogether. But, officials wrote in the proposal, “while currently county leadership plan to maintain some youth in detention within the juvenile center, which also houses juvenile court, they recognize that this setting, even if redesigned as dormitory residences, is not ideal for rehabilitation.”
Officials acknowledge there may be challenges ahead, including getting local law enforcement, judges, and employee unions on board with the plans. The juvenile detention center currently employs 560 people. Staff may be offered an opportunity to work at the alternative centers, officials wrote in their project proposal, but the county will have to negotiate with labor representatives.
In a statement to Injustice Watch, Anders Lindall, a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents intake and social workers at the JTDC, said they were concerned about the proposal to contract with private nonprofits, adding that for the last 30 years, Illinois has banned private prisons under state law.
“The chief judge’s office has indicated to us that no privatization and no layoffs would result,” Lindall said. “Even so, we question whether the chief judge and staff have been transparent about their plans and motives.”
The president of SEIU Local 73, which represents 30 mental health specialists, medical assistants, janitors, and others at the JTDC, said they learned about the proposal from Injustice Watch.
In her statement, Preckwinkle said the county is committed to “maintaining public administration and staffing of all detention facilities.”
Questions about detention center leadership
Advocates and experts have been calling for the closure of the JTDC for years, saying fewer kids should be detained pretrial, and those who are should be held in smaller, more rehabilitative facilities.
Earl Dunlap, who ran the detention center from 2007 to 2015 as a federal court-appointed administrator, said he often argued for the enormous jail to be replaced with smaller centers.
“Several times I suggested that the best thing that could happen to the JTDC was to implode the building,” Dunlap said in an interview with Injustice Watch. “The JTDC is a dangerous building. And as a result of it being a dangerous building, you had to overcompensate by the number of staff you had in that facility, and as a result of that, it cost the county much more money than it actually needed to.”
But advocates have questioned whether the current JTDC leadership is capable of making large-scale changes to the way youths are detained in Cook County. Since federal oversight ended in 2015 and Evans appointed Leonard Dixon as superintendent, advocates have criticized the JTDC for its jail-like conditions and punitive practices, particularly room confinement, use of force and lack of mental health and special education services.
Last year, the disability rights watchdog Equip for Equality published a 96-page report slamming jail officials for utilizing disciplinary practices it described as “entirely inhumane.” That report followed one the previous year by a blue ribbon committee convened by Evans, which described the JTDC as “isolating and deprivational” and found kids were often confined to their rooms for 13 hours per day. Both reports recommended replacing the detention center with community-based facilities. In the county’s grant proposal, officials cited these reports as evidence of the problems with the current detention center.
But Dixon has strongly disputed these characterizations of the JTDC, responding to the critical reports with line-by-line rebuttals. Gene Griffin, a child psychologist who chaired the blue ribbon committee, wrote a separate letter to Evans in May 2022 saying one of the “top priorities” for improving conditions for detained youths was “appointing a new JTDC superintendent who has experience with rehabilitative programming and is committed to transforming the JTDC from simply housing youth within its charge to safely developing youth competency.”
The plans to replace the JTDC have brought to the forefront the contentious relationship between outside advocates and the JTDC leadership.
In a meeting in late March, the JTDC advisory board released its annual report, which highlighted lingering concerns identified in inspections of the detention center by state monitors. Samuels, who was supposed to give updates on Chapin Hall’s previous work related to the JTDC, declined to present, saying he couldn’t respond on behalf of the chief judge’s office. Lewis described the centers of care proposal, but the meeting was tense, and advisory board members said they left with more questions than answers.
A week later, Dixon wrote a letter admonishing the advisory board for presenting the annual report without first providing the JTDC with a copy and refuting claims the detention center failed to meet state detention standards. In response, the advisory board said the issues it raised still lacked clarity and resolution, and it hopes “transparency and accountability remain paramount in the management of the JTDC.”
Advocates expressed concerns about Dixon’s role in the smaller detention center. Evans said Dixon’s role in the new plans was “not yet fully defined,” but said the superintendent “recognizes the current JTDC is inadequate and that an alternative is necessary.” He also said the juvenile probation department would oversee the new care centers.
Payton, the former advisory board member, said it remains to be seen whether the new plan represents a fundamental change to the county’s approach to youth incarceration.
“I do think there is some intention to do that here. But there are some key questions about what would change and what would remain the same that will determine whether that promise can actually be lived up to.
“I really hope that the spirit of finding a more rehabilitative and humane way to engage with our young people will be the outcome of everything that’s happening, but it should not come in the form of new jails,” she said.
This article first appeared on Injustice Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Eva Putnam contributed reporting.