By Eli Hager, The Marshall Project, May 12, 2020
They’re locked in cramped isolation cells 23 hours a day. They eat meals by the toilet and shout to their friends under the cell door. They interact only with corrections officers.
It sounds like what happens to adults behind bars, but these are the conditions now facing many of the 44,000 youth incarcerated across the country. In the age of COVID-19, juvenile detention—required by federal and state laws to rehabilitate, not to punish—has become more like grown-up prison than in decades, according to interviews with incarcerated teens, their lawyers and family members, and corrections officers and staff in more than a dozen states.
To slow the virus’s spread, youth lockups nationwide have shut down school programs. Solitary confinement and other forms of isolation, which in recent years had largely been eradicated in juvenile jails, have resurged in an effort to socially distance, according to lawsuits in five states, interviews with staff and statements from youth. In most facilities, with family visits canceled and only “essential” employees—typically just guards—on the job, teens are increasingly alone.
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