Critics: Juvenile Prisons Becoming New Asylums

As states continue to reduce spending, many are cutting mental-health programs in communities and relying on the juvenile-justice system to care for a growing number of young offenders with psychiatric disorders, the New York Times reported Aug. 10.

Some two-thirds of juvenile inmates in the nation’s youth prisons have at least one mental illness, according to researchers. Increasingly, inmates are on multiple medications, including powerful psychotropic drugs. 

Critics say that young offenders would benefit more from therapy than from being sent to juvenile prisons where they could experience neglect, violence, and a possible decline in their mental health. Lawsuits and federal investigations in Indiana, Maryland, Ohio and Texas have found that juvenile-justice systems have failed to stop cruel and unusual treatment of inmates.

“We’re seeing more and more mentally ill kids who couldn’t find community programs that were intense enough to treat them,” said Joseph Penn, who works at the Texas Youth Commission as a child psychiatrist. “Jails and juvenile-justice facilities are the new asylums.” 

California is under a 2004 federal mandate to improve conditions in youth prisons, including services for mental illness. Los Angeles County is also under a federal order to improve mental health services for juvenile offenders.

Critics such as Joseph Parks, M.D., the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s medical director, are concerned that young offenders are prescribed a cocktail of different psychiatric drugs as they get shuffled from detention halls to juvenile prisons. 

“If you just give a kid a pill, the prison administration doesn’t have to do anything differently,” said Parks. “The staff doesn’t have to do anything different. The guards don’t have to get more training.”