New York City’s juvenile detention centers are so overcrowded that about 100 young people have been sleeping in classrooms and common areas, according to a government document and attorneys who represent the young people.
State law requires youth in secure detention facilities to have access to a "pleasant, comfortable and secure atmosphere” with their own room, bed and space to store their clothing. But state officials have given the city’s Administration for Children’s Services permission to skirt the law because the agency doesn’t have enough room to properly house the growing number of youth in detention, according to a government waiver Gothamist obtained.
Gothamist first reported in June 2023 that teens in detention were sleeping in classrooms. The city received permission that fall, for the first time, to circumvent state law and house 19 additional young people.
The state Office of Children and Family Services signed off last month on the city’s request to house 96 additional young people in “non-traditional sleeping accommodations,” the waiver states — a significant jump from two years ago.
The overcrowding has caused many kids and teens at Crossroads Juvenile Center in Brownsville and Horizon Juvenile Center in Mott Haven to sleep in cramped conditions and miss school classes because staff aren’t escorting them to school, according to a letter the nonprofit Legal Aid Society and pro bono attorneys sent to the commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services last week. The surge in detained youth has also exacerbated violence in the juvenile detention centers, the attorneys said.
“They have no place for their personal belongings, no privacy or a place to find solace from the noise and chaos of the facility,” Emma-Lee Clinger, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Juvenile Rights Practice, said in an interview. “With the large influx of young people, it’s just a powder keg — constant pressure, constant stress.”
Marisa Kaufman, a spokesperson for the Administration for Children’s Services, said in a statement that the city is building a new annex at Horizon Juvenile Center with 48 additional bedrooms and 10 more classrooms. Officials are also exploring other ways to add capacity, she said.
“ACS is committed to nurturing a safe environment in our secure detention centers, where young people can learn and develop life skills to successfully navigate their futures,” Kaufman said. “With the help of our hardworking staff, community partners, these young people and their families, we’ve decreased violence over the last three years and increased graduations from our programs, despite an increased level of youth in our care.”
Kaufman said the city is also working to support young New Yorkers in their communities to prevent violence and keep them out of detention centers.
A spokesperson for the state Office of Children and Family Services said safety is a top concerns for the facilities it oversees and that it is working with local officials to ensure they meet their obligations. State officials also said if New York City can’t find other ways to increase capacity in its juvenile detention centers, the only other location where young people could be detained would be on Rikers Island.
The waiver sought permission for young people without their own rooms to sleep in a contraption called a “BarkerBunk,” which resembles a shallow plastic tub with a mattress in it. The bunks are about 7 feet long, 3 feet wide and 8 inches high, according to a link for the product included in the waiver. Legal Aid’s letter argued these low-to-the-ground bunks provide little protection from mice infestations in the detention centers.
The Legal Aid lawyers said their clients’ struggle to sleep in these crowded conditions. They said young people who are housed in classrooms and other common areas are taken to their quarters late at night and woken early in the morning, giving them only five or six hours of sleep.
”We're talking about young people whose brains and bodies are developing, and young people who are supposed to be in this setting for rehabilitative purposes, yet we're stripping them of the very basic right of sleeping,” Clinger said.
She said attorneys have noticed their clients deteriorating between visits and court appearances when they don’t have their own assigned bedrooms for days or weeks at a time.
In addition to lack of sleep, the Legal Aid lawyers said, their clients often miss school because staff don’t take them to their classrooms. The lawyers said a shortage of mattresses recently caused two young people to fight over a bed.
Youth-on-youth assaults rose slightly last fiscal year, according to last month’s Mayor’s Management Report, an annual compilation of city data. The Administration for Children’s Services said the uptick was tied to “a significant increase in population in a limited space, which presented additional stressors on the detention environment.”
The agency said it has bolstered its training and support for staff to de-escalate tense situations. City officials also said the increase in youth detention is likely due to “systemwide pressures related to court volume.” Young people have been staying in detention centers for longer as they await outcomes in their court cases, the report said.
Jeffrey Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said it’s difficult to tell from the numbers alone what is driving the increase in youth in secure detention centers. He said a host of factors could contribute to the trend, including how police make arrests, the types of charges prosecutors file and how officials decide whether a young person should be detained in a secure detention center.
”What we never do is reflect back on ourselves to think, ‘Why are we having these problems and what do we do to prevent them from occurring in the future?’” Butts said. “Because politically it's more gratifying to say, ‘Look what I did. I put these kids in a facility.’ And then [officials] turn around to the public and complain about resources and space, and they're rarely held accountable for all the factors that led up to those decisions.”
