By Rachel Crumpler
Teenagers in some North Carolina juvenile detention centers are spending nearly the entire day locked in their cells — sometimes allowed out for only one or two hours — according to a yearlong review of the state’s 13 juvenile detention centers by Disability Rights North Carolina.
In a 52-page report published Thursday, Feb. 19, the nonprofit legal and advocacy organization outlined wide variation among the state’s juvenile detention centers — three of which are county-operated — all overseen by the N.C. Department of Public Safety Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Differences ranged from the amount of time spent inside locked cells to disciplinary practices, education services and recreation time. The report alleges that most detention centers violate state policies governing their operations, including the use of solitary confinement-like conditions — defined as more than 22 hours a day of isolation — with what it describes as “frequency and normalcy” in five of the facilities.
The monitoring initiative began in July 2024 after the organization received an uptick of complaints about conditions in certain facilities, said Cari Carson, supervising attorney on Disability Rights NC’s education team. What started as a plan to review a couple of facilities expanded to all of them, Carson said, after early visits revealed wide variations in policies and living conditions from one center to another.
In one case, the organization’s findings prompted almost immediate action. During a late 2024 visit to the juvenile detention center in Madison County — a facility run by the local sheriff’s office — Disability Rights NC found conditions so “egregious,” Carson said, that all the youth were moved within roughly one month, and juveniles are no longer placed there.
Youth who were detained at the facility reported prolonged solitary confinement — up to 120 days or four months of back-to-back stints of isolation — and abusive discipline practices, including the use of pepper spray and tasers, according to the report.
“You walk into one and you have no idea what you’re going to see or learn or hear,” Carson said. “How you are treated and the opportunities that you have should not depend on which facility you happen to be assigned to.”
As North Carolina’s federally designated protection and advocacy organization, Disability Rights NC has the legal authority to monitor facilities where people with disabilities live or receive services, including the state’s juvenile detention centers, where a significant portion of the population has intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The report comes as admissions and lengths of stay in detention centers have increased in recent years.
North Carolina’s juvenile justice system is intended to be more rehabilitative than punitive, with an eye toward preparing young people to return to their communities. Detention centers are supposed to provide education, treatment and programming.
But the new report raises questions about whether that mission is being met.
Limited time out of cells
Disability Rights NC’s yearlong monitoring revealed stark differences in how much time detained youth spent outside their locked rooms, which average about 8 by 10 feet.
Carson said time out of cell — for school, recreation, therapy and other programming — is a key measure of whether facilities are providing opportunities for rehabilitation.
In only three facilities — Richmond-Jenkins, Rockingham and Alexander — youth reported spending all day or nearly the entire day outside their rooms. At those facilities, youth reported a greater sense of well-being and safety, according to the report. The Richmond-Jenkins Juvenile Detention Center is the only facility without traditional cells or room doors, and youth spend their days in a communal pod.
“By having youth out of their cells for a majority of each day, these facilities are taking meaningful steps towards building a therapeutic environment for youth detained there,” the report states, calling them a model for other detention centers.
In contrast, youth in the state’s other detention centers reported being confined for long stretches of the day — in some cases reporting conditions that rise to being akin to solitary confinement, which is generally defined as being locked in a cell for 22 hours or more per day.
The issue of prolonged isolation in juvenile detention centers has drawn scrutiny before. A federal lawsuit filed in January 2024 against the N.C. Department of Public Safety on behalf of three teenagers alleged that they were routinely locked alone in their rooms for as much as 23 to 24 hours a day. The department denied the lawsuit’s claims of regular solitary confinement for young people, but it acknowledged that staff shortages have affected how much time juveniles spend outside their rooms. The lawsuit is ongoing. Disability Rights NC, for their part, referred to the youths’ rooms as “cells,” noting with one exception, “all of the ‘rooms’ in [North Carolina juvenile detention centers] are actually what a member of the general public would refer to as, and see as, cells.”
Research has consistently shown that prolonged isolation harms physical and mental health, increasing risks of anxiety, self-harm and suicide. Experts also warn that such confinement deprives teenagers of social interaction during a key developmental period.
Carson said she saw the toll firsthand, as an “alarming number” of youth expressed suicidal ideation or thoughts of self-harm from the conditions they experienced in detention.
“North Carolina cannot normalize having its kids locked in cells during the day,” Carson said. “We would walk onto a pod and the youth would be in their cells. That is not meeting the mission of [the juvenile justice system], and we, as a state, can’t get used to that.”
The report identified three detention centers — Guilford, Cumberland and Durham County Youth Home — as standing out for repeated findings of extended confinement over consecutive monitoring visits.
During a July 2025 monitoring visit to Cumberland Regional Detention Center, youth again described regularly spending 22 to 23.5 hours a day in their cells, rarely going outside and thus experiencing declines in their mental health. Multiple youth cried during interviews, the report states, and several reported suicidal ideation or self-harm while detained at the facility.
In response to Disability Rights NC’s findings, juvenile justice officials disputed such short time spent out of cell.
“The use of solitary confinement is not practiced within any North Carolina juvenile justice setting,” Deputy Secretary for Juvenile Justice William Lassiter wrote in a Dec. 18 letter to Disability Rights NC. He’s led North Carolina’s juvenile justice system since May 2014.
“We do acknowledge that our policy does provide a provision where a youth may be placed in their rooms for a period to regain composure, following an incident that jeopardized the health and safety of themselves or others, and this time is carefully monitored by facility leadership, behavioral health, and medical staff,” Lassiter continued. “Also, while a youth is in their room, they must continue receiving living conditions approximate to those youth in the general population.”
In a statement to NC Health News, Division of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention spokesman Matthew Debnam said officials are reviewing the report’s findings and recommendations for North Carolina’s juvenile detention centers.
Carson said the report’s conclusions are based on 398 separate interviews with detained youth, each of whom chose whether to participate. What youth repeatedly described made it into the report, she said.
“If they’re consistently saying it, I believe that it is true,” Carson said.
“We went back to some facilities in part to see if there had been improvements,” she said. “We saw a lot of facilities that were using solitary confinement on one visit and were still using it on another visit.”
Increased admissions and length of stays in NC juvenile detention centers
In 2025, the facilities recorded 2,876 youth admissions, representing 2,186 people, according to department data provided to NC Health News. The vast majority were between the ages of 13 and 17.
Juveniles spent an average of 39 days in detention in 2024 — more than double the 15-day average stay in 2015, according to the most recent Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention annual report. Young people being tried as adults stayed for a substantially longer time, at an average of 200 days, compared with 27 days for those in juvenile jurisdiction.
Confinement in “the Hole”
Carson said Disability Rights NC heard from juveniles about the regular use of solitary confinement as discipline across most facilities, which could last from several hours to several days. Behaviors resulting in cell confinement ranged from major infractions such as fighting to — in some facilities — minor infractions that included using profanity.
The report states that youth placed in disciplinary confinement are typically isolated in their cells for 23 to 24 hours a day, often without access to school, recreation or phone calls. The report notes that at Alexander Juvenile Detention Center, teenagers in disciplinary cell confinement even had books removed from their cells. Some facilities also use flaps to cover the windows of youths’ rooms, blocking their view into the pod.
At Durham County Youth Home, a 36-bed detention center opened in February 2024, youth reported that they could be placed in “the Hole” — a bare room with a hole in the floor reportedly for defecation and urination — as a disciplinary measure. While placed there, they told Disability Rights NC, they only sometimes were provided a mattress, the lights stayed on constantly and stays ranged from two days to two weeks. The room was also used for suicide watch, according to the report.
In a January letter to Disability Rights NC, Durham County Youth Home Assistant Director Sheila Bratts denied the finding, writing that staff do not “place residents in any form of solitary confinement or ‘hole.’” She did note the presence of “Special Observation” rooms that are designed for and used as mental health observation rooms in which placement occurs in consultation with mental health providers.
“It is just not a trauma-informed response to behavior — whether you call that discipline or call that mental health crisis,” Carson said, noting that multiple youth detained there referred to the room as “the Hole.”
State juvenile justice system policies say that cell confinement as a behavior intervention should be used only after all less restrictive measures have been exhausted or deemed ineffective, and only for the time necessary for a youth to regain control and return to the general population.
However, the report states that monitoring found that disciplinary cell confinement was often for a predetermined duration, rather than confinement tied to the time needed for youth to regain control.
“It’s expensive to keep kids locked in their cells all day and then discharge them to a community without any skills and being traumatized,” Carson said.
Disability Rights NC found that some facilities instead relied on verbal de-escalation strategies and a positive behavior incentive system that allowed youth to earn privileges — practices advocates say are more therapeutic and better prepare teenagers to return to their communities.
More restrictive than prison
Carson said detention conditions matter not only for the young people inside the facilities, but for the communities they will be returning to.
“These are North Carolina’s kids,” Carson said. “The opportunities that we give young people who are in juvenile detention centers are the opportunities that they’re going to have to build on when they get out and they’re back in the community.”
Eileen, a mother in central North Carolina whose 17-year-old son spent a couple of months in a juvenile detention center in Butner in 2023, said she was horrified by the conditions he described. She asked NC Health News to use her middle name out of privacy concerns for her son.
During their roughly 10-minute phone calls, she grew increasingly worried. He told her he was spending all day in his locked room, leaving only to take a quick shower and to make his phone call home. Education worksheets were slid under his door for him to complete but without teaching.
“It was just a terrible experience,” she said. “The times that we visited the facility, someone had to walk us to him, to the dorm he was in, and the kids were just all at the window, banging on the windows like they were some animals… Even going away, leaving the facility, the kids would go to the windows and they would tap. They would stand on the bed because the window was up high and they would wave. It was so heartbreaking, like they were desperate for interaction.”
Eileen had been a correctional officer at Warren Correctional Institution. Even so, she said, the conditions at the Butner facility shocked her by being more restrictive than her former workplace.
“Inmates that I worked with at prison actually had more freedom,” she said. “They could go out in the yard. They walked to the canteen and bought little snacks. Some of them were out in a big room together doing each other’s hair, and one old man was making pocketbooks. They were not even as locked up as my son was at a juvenile detention center.”
‘Something needs to change’
Eileen’s son’s experience mirrors findings found in the monitoring report — conditions Carson said must change to improve outcomes for young people. The report outlines dozens of recommendations, including increased internal oversight, limits on isolation and expanded access to education and therapeutic programming.
Debnam, the division spokesman, noted that in the department’s December response letter to Disability Rights NC, Lassiter outlined potential solutions and additional resources needed to address many of the concerns raised, including:
- Salary increases for frontline facilities staff and compression relief for managers, which will aid in recruitment and retention efforts. As of Feb. 16, 2026, Debnam told NC Health News that the division’s vacancy rate overall stood at 24 percent, with direct care staff vacancy rates much higher, including 52 percent of youth counselor and 40 percent of youth services behavioral specialist positions going unfilled.
- Funds for construction of a 48-bed juvenile detention center, which will alleviate capacity strains on the system. The General Assembly has provided $1 million for initial planning of this facility.
- Funding for the establishment of a 20-bed medical/mental health crisis unit.
- Inflationary increases and additional funding for community-based alternatives to detention.
Carson acknowledged that more investments are needed in the juvenile justice system — which is increasingly under strain from capacity challenges and stubborn staff vacancies — but she emphasized that resource constraints cannot justify keeping young people isolated or not providing rehabilitative services.
Disability Rights NC plans to continue monitoring conditions inside these facilities, Carson said, and hopes to see improvements. The report also noted some already positive practices in certain facilities.
“We have to keep working and fighting to make sure that all youth in juvenile detention centers have the opportunity to be out of their cells in school, recreation and mental health care access,” Carson said.
The mother whose son went through a detention center is desperate for that to happen. “Something needs to change,” Eileen said.
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