By Ned Loughran
Executive Director of The Council
of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.
Guest Blogger
Is it possible to end the use of isolation for punishment and administrative convenience in youth detention and correctional facilities in the next three years? The Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators (CJCA) answers emphatically, yes and is committed to doing just that!
Ever since Office of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) administrator Robert Listenbee met
with the CJCA Board of Directors in his first session with us in August 2013
and delivered the challenge “if not isolation, then what”, we have responded to
his urging.
We chose “Reducing the Use of
Isolation” as the theme of our Second Leadership Institute in 2014, which
featured a keynote address by Administrator Listenbee, panel discussions,
breakout groups and a concluding roundtable on the topic. In 2015, CJCA created
a Toolkit for Reducing the
Use of Isolation, a publication intended to
guide youth correctional administrators and their directors of institutions and
secure facilities in changing cultures that rely on isolation as a behavior
management tool.
CJCA also recently joined the Children’s Center for Law and Policy (CCLP), the Center for Juvenile Justice Reform at Georgetown
University (CJJR) and Justice Policy Institute (JPI)
to launch a campaign to end the solitary confinement of youth. Launched this
spring, the Stop Solitary Confinement
for Youth (SSK) Campaign has already garnered the support of
more than thirty national organizations such as the American Correctional
Association, American Psychological Association and the Performance-based Standards Learning Institute (PbS LI).
The campaign will provide support to state and local agencies working to end
the use of isolation. The Crime Report, an online criminal justice resource
from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, recently published and OP-ED piece I
wrote on ending solitary for youth and the work of the campaign.
And just a little over a month ago,
OJJDP hosted a national convening: “Eliminating the Use of Solitary Confinement
in Juvenile Justice Facilities: A Multi-systemic Approach” for more than 60
juvenile justice professionals from across the country. Advocates, juvenile
justice administrators, and high level officials from the White House and the
Department of Justice came together to review data around solitary confinement
and discuss best practices. You can read more about the OJJDP convening here.
And finally, President Obama himself
has weighed in on this issue, authoring an Opinion piece in the
Washington Post urging the criminal and juvenile justice systems to rethink the
use of solitary confinement, particularly for young offenders and those with
mental health problems. A day later, he followed up and banned the use of
solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons. Although
his ban does not affect youth in locally run pre-trial detention centers or
long-term youth correctional facilities, he appealed to those system’s leaders
to end the use of solitary confinement. Between the President’s Executive
Action, the leadership of OJJDP, and the Stop Solitary for Kids campaign, we
are excited to see so many forces coming together to end this harmful and
counterproductive practice. CJCA, more than any other organization in the
country, has the ability and capacity to end solitary/isolation for youths in
state youth correctional systems!
