This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary Confinement
Mother Jones
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“They left me in that little room with nothing,” Kenny said. Maddie McGarvey
One night in March 2013, a 17-year-old named Kenny was walking with a friend through farm country in Reilly Township, Ohio. The boys had been drinking and were checking car doors in the hope of finding a little money when they came across a pickup with keys in the ignition. They decided to take it for a spin.
If you hadn’t guessed by now, Kenny wasn’t exactly thinking straight. He was just three weeks out of court-ordered rehab for marijuana possession and public intoxication, and his dad had just caught him stealing his anxiety medication. The pair drove a few miles to the home of Kenny’s girlfriend, whose mother saw the purloined truck and called the cops. The boys bolted, spent the night in a shed, and the next night were arrested while partying at a frat house. A judge found Kenny guilty of receiving stolen property worth less than $7,500, a low-level felony. He deemed Kenny, who had some pot on him when he was caught, a “delinquent child,” and sentenced him to six months at the juvenile correctional facility in Circleville.
But Kenny’s sentence wound up being rougher than the judge had perhaps intended. While the Circleville facility’s website boasts rehabilitative programs such as music, worship, woodworking, and education, he didn’t have much of a chance to take advantage of them. Shortly after arriving, Kenny landed in solitary confinement for fighting. Over the next six months he spent nearly 82 days in the hole—locked in his own room or an isolation cell—once for 19 days at a stretch, according to court documents.
I learned about Kenny’s case from legal filings in a lawsuit brought by the Obama administration against the state of Ohio. They make for some chilling reading. For years, the Department of Justice has pressured Ohio and other states to fix widespread problems in their juvenile prisons. In the fall of 2013, the department learned that some facilities were punishing kids like Kenny with long stretches of solitary. It investigated and filed suit the following March, asking a judge to immediately intervene because children would continue suffering “irreparable harm” if the practice wasn’t stopped. Kenny’s case was cited as a key example of the damage solitary could do.
While in isolation, Kenny—who was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder prior to the sixth grade—wrote to his mother, Melissa Bucher, begging her to make the two-hour drive to visit him. “I don’t feel like I’m going to make it anymore,” he wrote. “I’m in seclusion so I can’t call and I’m prolly going to be in here for a while. My mind is just getting to me in here.”
Bucher, a warm, lively woman who at first glance could be mistaken for Kenny’s big sister, insists that forced isolation turned her teen from a social kid with some mental-health issues into a depressed young man who shies away from others and experiences panic attacks at night. “Other inmates would call me a lot and tell me he was not doing good and hearing voices,” she said. When she visited Kenny, she noticed “he had scratch marks all over his arms. He was just digging into them.” Alphonse Gerhardstein, an attorney representing Kenny and others in a separate lawsuit that was eventually consolidated with the Justice Department’s case, noted in an email to the state attorney general’s office that the boy “bangs his head frequently” and “had fresh injuries.”
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This Is What Happens When We Lock Children in Solitary Confinement
