How We Can Stop Solitary For Kids

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!