NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A juvenile detention center in Shelby County has reduced the use of solitary confinement among children in its care, according to a new report from the Center for Children's Law and Policy and other organizations.

In 2012, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that youths detained at the Shelby County facility were discriminated against, held in unsafe conditions and subjected to solitary confinement.

Mark Soler, executive director of the Center for Children's Law and Policy, points out that confining children to their rooms without anything to do for long periods of time is an abusive practice.

"When the U.S. Department of Justice did its investigation into the Shelby County juvenile court, they found a number of serious constitutional concerns,” Soler points out. “What was happening in Shelby County is that young people were being disciplined for getting into an argument, and they were being put into their rooms for many hours at a time – long past the time when they had calmed down."

As of 2018, records show a sharp reduction in the use of room confinement, and detention center staff must now obtain permission before putting a child in confinement, according to the report.

Soler says Shelby County undertook a variety of reforms, including transferring operation of the juvenile detention center to the Shelby County sheriff, adding new programming and group activities for youths, hiring a full-time counselor, and extending visitation and phone call times.

Widespread research shows that solitary or room confinement can cause serious physiological harm to both adults and youths.

Soler says that youth, whose brains are still developing, are especially vulnerable. He also points out that flaws in the juvenile justice system mostly affect black children.

"Most of the arrests that are made of young people for allegedly committing crimes are made in a limited number of neighborhoods, and those are neighborhoods that are highly populated by African-Americans,” he states. “So, the majority of young people at the detention facility, the majority of young people in the juvenile justice system in Shelby County are African-American."

Last year, state legislators passed HB 2271, also known as the Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018, which, among other reforms, aims to limit the use of isolation as a tool of punishment for youths in the system.


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By Cid Standifer for Eye on Ohio.
Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan for Ohio News Connection Collaboration reporting for the Ohio Center for Investigative Journalism-Public News Service Collaboration

An ambulance was already outside the East Side Cleveland home, its lights flashing, when the police officer arrived one evening in December 2020. According to body camera footage from the incident, the aunt of an 8-year-old with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder said the boy was "acting crazy." At one point, she said he had climbed out a window onto the house's roof.

"In some cases, the kid was probably traumatized," forensic psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Aaron said. "Not only is that bad for the kid in that moment, that leaves a kid with worse mental health problems, more animosity toward police, more likely that they're having behavioral problems down the road."

Rebuilding a crisis response policy

While studies estimate that only between 33% to 68% of 911 calls need to be handled by an armed officer, in Cleveland, officers are routinely summoned to deal with behavioral health crises. The city has joined a growing list of others experimenting with having social workers help respond to mental health crises. Sometimes, they accompany officers to emergencies, but more frequently they follow up with subjects later on.

Cleveland's police department has drawn national condemnation for deadly incidents involving both kids and people with mental illness. The 2014 fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland officer made headlines across the nation and dragged the department into a costly wrongful death lawsuit. The same year, Cleveland officers handcuffed Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old woman having a mental health crisis. She suffocated while in police custody.

Under a 2015 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice, department officials overhauled policies on use of force and crisis intervention, which went into effect two years later. They require officers to respond to people in crisis "in a manner that promotes the dignity of all people while reflecting the values of protection and safety," and outlined steps officers should take to deescalate situations. That includes: "Demonstrate empathy, concern, respect and a better understanding of the situation."

The new policies came with new training as well. According to the department's 2021 training report, 99% of the department's officers received basic eight-hour crisis response training. The training slides and instructor manual cover the crisis intervention policy, basic information about mental illness, and guidance on active listening and deescalation.

The department has also submitted curricula for in-service training, including one on traumatized youth that covers how teen brains react to trauma, and the best ways to interact with traumatized youth. While department officials didn't provide lists of training sessions and officers who attended them, a Case Western Reserve University assessment said 1,375 officers took the training in 2019.

In 2021, the department also implemented a new policy on dealing with young people. It calls on officers to take into consideration the child's age and developmental capacity, and warns that kids may react to police by running, not responding or being verbally abusive.

Experts: Some police escalate crises

Videos obtained by The Marshall Project - Cleveland and Eye on Ohio show that the new guidelines, for both people in mental health crises and children, weren't always put into practice.

Experts who watched the video of the 8-year-old said that the way the officer talked to the child may have escalated his distress.

"These (are) really kind of provocative baiting comments like 'You ain't no big man,'" Aaron, the forensic psychologist, said. "I would assume that part of that is an idea that, if you're going to be oppositional with me, it's with intent; 'You know what you're doing, and I'm going to win, and I'm just going to make that really clear.' But to an 8-year-old distressed boy, it's not going to come through that way."

Experts pointed out other instances where officers' behavior ramped up a child's stress.

In the footage of the 10-year-old girl, an officer can be heard questioning the girl in the same room as her mother and uncle, even though department policy states they should have been interviewed separately.

"Do you wanna see your mother die or something?" the girl's uncle interrupts. "You want to see something happen to your mother?"

Soon he is screaming at the girl. "You only get one mother. Do you hear me? You only get one fucking mother."

Eventually, the girl tries to cut herself, according to a conversation caught on body camera that included responding officers.

"Now you done did it," the officer said as the little girl wailed. "You're going to the hospital, little girl."

Jennifer Johnson, executive director of the Canopy Child Advocacy Center, which works with child abuse victims, said that the officer's words and tone as he cuffed the little girl were "definitely not OK."

"Saying it in that way comes across as a punishment or a threat, which escalates a crisis situation," Johnson said.

Lisa Thurau, the director of Strategies for Youth, a nonprofit which designed the department's training on how to interact with youth with mental illness, was alarmed by some incidents where officers seemed to rush toward grabbing or subduing a child.

"He went from arrival to (saying) 'Grab him' in a matter of seconds," Thurau said of the incident involving the 10-year-old hiding under the trampoline. "There was no introduction. There was no effort to establish rapport. ... There was simply a move for what would appear to be expedience to put him in cuffs and get out of there."

"Force is NOT to be used for expediency," the department's policy states.

In other cases where officers kept talking to kids, Thurau said she noticed initially hostile children opened up. Responding officers asked the 9-year-old with autism what was wrong for about eight minutes. Eventually, the child disclosed that he felt suicidal.

"It took them 20 minutes, but they really were able to engage in an actual conversation with that young man because they were so patient," Thurau said. "I mean, that was a tour de force."

In January 2022, when police were called about a boy who was menacing family members with a knife, the boy slipped out of handcuffs while in the back of a squad car and shattered a window, getting glass in the eye of one of the responding officers.

The officer struck by glass seemed unrattled, even as the boy screamed that he wanted to murder his mother.

"You can do all that another time and date, OK?" the officer said. "Listen, I need you to relax while we're here, OK?"

The officer calls for a shirt for the boy and speaks to him for the next hour as he is placed in an ambulance and taken to the hospital, encouraging him to take deep breaths with her and talk about why he was upset. Eventually the child began crying, asked for his mother, and said he needed help.

"I thought this officer was so wonderfully patient," Aaron said. "I thought she cared, and you could hear it, and I don't doubt that the kid heard it."

Handcuffing can be traumatic, psychologists say

In the video involving the 8-year-old boy being carried out of his home, he continues to resist after the officer tells him he's not a "big man." Three minutes later, inside the ambulance, the officer says to another adult that they'll need to handcuff the child to the gurney.

"Do you want to go in handcuffs?" he says to the child. Then, a moment later, "You gonna calm down, or do you want the other handcuff?"

The video provided by the police is almost completely blurred out, but a few seconds later, the child begins screaming. He keeps screaming and groaning for at least the next 15 minutes, the remaining duration of the video, until police leave him at the hospital.

Cleveland police department policies explicitly allow officers to handcuff juveniles when it's "objectively reasonable," even if they are only being detained for a psychiatric evaluation, not for any crime. The policy doesn't include any minimum age for a child to be handcuffed.

That's not the case in every jurisdiction. In Washington, D.C., there was an uproar after video came to light of police handcuffing a 10-year-old initially suspected of participating in a robbery. Department officials later changed their policy to say children under 12 should only be handcuffed if they were a danger to themselves or others.

In Kentucky, a federal judge ruled that a school resource officer who handcuffed a boy and a girl with ADHD was unreasonable and violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, even though the children hit and kicked teachers.

Cleveland police's crisis response policy warns that "handcuffs may trigger a traumatic response." It calls on officers to explain why they're handcuffing a person in crisis "in a tactful manner," and to use "age-appropriate language" when handcuffing children.

In the body camera video where officers pulled a boy from under a trampoline, police then walked the compliant, crying 10-year-old to a police car in the dark outside his home. One officer says to the other, "Just handcuff him. We can't have him going crazy in the back seat."

The police then struggle to lock handcuffs onto the boy's wrists as he stands still, quietly sobbing.

"Over two minutes, at least two minutes and 15 seconds - that's a long time - they didn't say a word to him during all this," Aaron said, "And to me, from the perspective of the kid, that could easily have been a very traumatizing event for him. It was dark. There were people he didn't know putting their hands on him."

Officers similarly ignored the 10-year-old girl who tried to harm herself as they drove her to the hospital, refusing to take off her handcuffs and then not answering when she asked why, body camera video shows.

She asked again for them to remove the cuffs 12 minutes later. The officer acknowledged her, but didn't answer when she said the cuffs were hurting her hands.

According to crisis response report data from 2020 through early 2022, Black girls were about 70% more likely to be handcuffed than White girls. After spotting the trend in 2021, the Mental Health Response Advisory Committee asked the Cleveland Police Monitoring Team to review body camera footage for all crisis response incidents where girls were handcuffed in 2021.

Each of the 26 videos was reviewed independently by two people. In most cases, reviewers thought the girls were treated with respect and courtesy, and that there was a good reason the child was handcuffed.

But half the reviews found officers did not explain why they cuffed a child. In eight reviews, they felt the handcuffing violated Cleveland Division of Police policy. Specialized Crisis Intervention Team officers were only summoned in five of the incidents reviewed. The officers volunteer for a 40-hour training course and are supposed to respond to crisis incidents wherever possible, according to Cleveland Division of Police policy. The report says officers' failure to call for the special units "is of particular concern given their enhanced training and critical importance to the effectiveness and success of the CIT Program."

There was only one crisis response report from 2021 where a 10-year-old girl was handcuffed. The report commissioned by MHRAC stated that in that case, an officer at the scene "did not seem to take the subject's complaints (of child abuse) seriously and had to be asked by the 10-year-old to listen to her side of the story."

The report also quoted the officer saying the girl was "acting like a jackass."

"The actions and comments of the officer are not consistent with the principles of (the crisis intervention team) or deescalation techniques and indicate a negative bias toward youth," the report concluded.

By contrast, Thurau said the officers who handcuffed the 9-year-old with autism did so as compassionately as they could.

In that case, the officers refrained from handcuffing the boy for about 20 minutes, even after he tried to climb over a fence to get away. When he tried to push past officers and run toward the street, they restrained and handcuffed him, then put him in a squad car to transport him to the hospital.

The officers let the child's mother sit in the back of the squad car with her son to calm him, and took the pair to their apartment so the mother could retrieve a few items. As they waited for the mom to return to the squad car, one of the officers removed the child's handcuffs.

"I'm sorry I had to put these on you to begin with," the officer told the child. "I'm not doing it to hurt you. I don't want to do anything like that. I'm not here to be your enemy."

Thurau said the interaction demonstrated how officers could make a crisis less traumatic.

"I'd love to meet that officer and shake his hand," Thurau said, "because he could teach others quite a lot."

Crisis intervention specialists

In the videos where young children in crisis were handcuffed, while they had likely been through the basic 8-hour crisis response training, none of the officers who were first on the scene had been through the 40 hours of training required to become crisis intervention team specialists.

The Marshall Project and Eye on Ohio requested one video where the child hadn't been handcuffed, and both the supervisor and one of the first responding officers on scene was a crisis intervention specialist. In that instance, officers didn't handcuff the child.

After a 10-year-old girl who'd been trying to harm herself storms out of her foster mother's house, screaming and overturning objects on the lawn, several officers follow her down the street at a distance for almost four minutes.

"This is ridiculous," grumbles Chris Eaton, the officer whose body camera footage was provided, out of ear-shot of the girl. "She should be grabbed, put in the back of the car and that should be that. Take her to the freakin' hospital."

It's not clear why from the video, but the girl is on the ground when Eaton reaches her. Officers are standing around her at arm's length.

"Young lady, my name is Chris Eaton," he says. "I'm a sergeant with the Cleveland Police Department. What's going on today?"

The 2017 Crisis Intervention Team policy suggests officers "Introduce yourself and seek to establish a rapport" as one de-escalation tactic.

After a brief exchange with Eaton, another officer offers to take the girl to the hospital.

The girl tells officers not to touch her, and says she'll get up by herself. The officer agrees.

"Have a seat in the car and we'll take you somewhere else," he adds. "Thank you."

She then gets in the car without the officers using handcuffs or physical force.

The slides for the Crisis Intervention Team officer training unit about youth with mental health problems advises, "Try to avoid touching an angry and potentially violent person." The training says that touching someone angry may trigger them to violence, while giving them space can let them cool down.

The week-long training schedule for Crisis Intervention Team specialists includes units on understanding schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other common mental illnesses; site visits to places like the psychiatric emergency room at St. Vincent's Hospital and community mental health providers; and one hour dedicated exclusively to youth and young adults' mental health.

There are currently 92 officers in the department who have completed the full training, and department policy calls for them to be deployed to crisis situations whenever possible. But only 17 percent of crisis response incidents said that at least one responding officer or a supervisor was a Crisis Intervention Team specialist.

Of the seven crisis response incidents where footage was provided, specialized Crisis Intervention Team officers were only requested in two, according to officers' reports.

The consent decree between Cleveland and the Department of Justice says that it should be the norm for Crisis Intervention Team specialists to respond to all calls where someone seems to be in crisis.

Cleveland Division of Police "policies and procedures will make clear that specialized Crisis Intervention Team officers, when available, must be dispatched to all calls or incidents that appear to involve an individual in crisis," the decree reads. "CDP will identify any barriers to ensuring that specialized Crisis Intervention Team officers were dispatched to these calls, and will include steps to overcome these barriers."

But, under the consent decree, the department is only required to have four training sessions for specialized Crisis Intervention Team officers.

Aaron, who frequently runs training for police officers, said that many are excited about training in understanding mentally ill kids, and are eager for more.

"I've trained many hundreds of police officers, and they get into policing I think by and large because they care about people and they want to help people," Aaron said. "Tools that help them do that should, I would think, be consistent with their personal and professional goals."

Reporting by Ohio News Connection in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.



Cid Standifer wrote this article for Eye on Ohio.



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In the coming months, Wisconsin residents will hear plenty of arguments before they vote on a constitutional amendment to change state policy on cash bail.

Some say there is a need to protect the public, while others say it is simply time to end the practice. The Republican-led Legislature recently approved putting the question before voters in April.

Under the plan, judges would be required to consider a larger set of factors in deciding whether to grant bail to violent offenders.

Marianne Oleson, executive assistant to the directors for EX-incarcerated People Organizing of Wisconsin, said the conversation should be about eliminating cash bail.

"A bail system that is based on cash is based on what you can afford; where is the community safety in that?" Oleson asked. "Where is the justice in that?"

Her group believes the practice contributes to Wisconsin leading the U.S. in incarcerating Black defendants.

She argued cash bail also disproportionately affects women and their families. Currently in Wisconsin, bail is only tied to court appearances. The amendment's sponsors contended judges should base decisions on more information, including a person's past criminal record, to keep the public safe.

Oleson countered other approaches, such as ending the cash bail system, also keep public safety in mind.

"If an accused came before a judge, accused of a violent crime, there would be no cash bail, that person would stay," Oleson explained. "But a nonviolent offender would be able to be released, continue working, continue being part of their family."

Efforts to eliminate cash bail have surfaced in states like Illinois and California, but the plans have run into obstacles. Sponsors of the Wisconsin amendment have suggested they will introduce language to make it clear only certain types of violent offenses should be applied to a judge's decision-making, if the ballot question is approved.

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The Virginia Parole Board has issued a report that outlines its past problems and the steps it could take to rebuild public trust. The work began in 2021, when Governor Glenn Youngkin issued an Executive Order firing the previous parole board and requesting a review of its duties, procedures and administration.

Chadwick Dotson, Virginia Parole Board chair and report author, said the biggest issue is the parole board's lack of transparency in decision making - in part because other reports about its investigations had been heavily redacted by the State Inspector General's Office.

"If we could make the process more public and if we can provide better feedback about each of our decisions - those decisions to not grant or not parole and the decisions to grant parole - people will still disagree, that's going to happen," Dotson said. "But if they can see the decisions were made soundly, based on evidence and with full justification, it provides a little bit more comfort that will hopefully help people accept our decisions."

The report said parole hearings should be open to the public, more staff should be assigned to assist the board in preparing for hearings, and more funding should available to help carry out those hearings.

Dotson noted challenges to implementing these changes, most notably working with a mostly part-time board and staff.

Some recommendations have already been adopted, including revising policy manuals that had not been updated since the 1990s, and improving how parole examiners make recommendations. Dotson said the groundwork has been laid for a better future at the Virginia Parole Board.

"I think we have put together a system that makes sure that everyone has an opportunity for input, and that we're considering all of the things that need to be considered before making any decision," he said. "I think we've really smoothed out the rough edges of the system as well as we can, with our current board composition."

He added part of the responsibility for improvement lies with the General Assembly. The report recommended legislation to require that the parole board seek input of the Commonwealth's Attorneys, and that the governor be required to seek victim input on pardons.

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