The State Is Locking Kids in Solitary Confinement Without Toilets, Lawsuit Alleges

The detention centers, known as secure placement facilities, are operated by the state Office of Children and Family Services, which also runs New York’s foster care, adoption, and child protective services systems. The facilities, which hold young people ages 12–21 who are convicted of crimes in family or youth criminal court, are supposed to focus on rehabilitation and treatment. OCFS policy requires that they offer seven to eight hours of daily educational, vocational, and recreational activities. Instead, according to the lawsuit, they’re frequently locked down, and some have provided little or no classroom education in the last year, even when they haven’t been on lockdown.

“If [parents] were doing the same things these facilities were doing to their children, they would have their children removed from their care by the same agency,” said Emma-Lee Clinger, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society. Clinger began visiting the youth facilities roughly a year ago and has spoken to dozens of people who are incarcerated in them. “Nearly all of our young people had faced these barbaric conditions,” she said.

A law that went into effect in 2022 limits the use of solitary confinement in state prisons and local jails and prohibits it for those 21 years old or younger, but the law doesn’t apply to OCFS facilities. State regulations allow OCFS staff to isolate young people for short periods if they deem them to be a danger to themselves or others. But they bar OCFS from keeping youth confined to their rooms or cells for more than 24 hours without the approval of agency administration. They also prohibit using isolation as punishment.

“OCFS does not endorse or condone the use of isolation for punishment,” an agency spokesperson said in response to a detailed list of questions. “We have clear protocols that are designed to ensure the safety of youth, and staff, while incorporating trauma-informed and mental health-responsive practices. We will continue to work diligently to ensure the safety and well-being of all those under care of our facilities.”

The lawsuit includes the stories of four young people who’ve endured regular solitary confinement at four of OCFS’s five secure placement facilities. Altogether, the five facilities held over 300 children and young adults as of September. As of December 2024, 63 percent of those incarcerated in the facilities were Black, a percentage three and a half times higher than the Black population of New York state.

Conditions in the facilities are so bad that the incarcerated youth are yearning for adult jails and prisons. Christopher, one of the suit’s named plaintiffs, said that Rikers Island — the notoriously dysfunctional New York City jail complex ordered to come under federal receivership — was “significantly better” than his current facility, according to the lawsuit. While at Rikers, where the 20-year-old was incarcerated before he was sentenced, he said he had access to daily schooling and telephones and took part in a basketball league. (The lawsuit uses pseudonyms to protect the young people’s privacy.)

Now, at Goshen Secure Center, where he has lived since June, Christopher is subjected to solitary confinement almost every week, the lawsuit claims. Staff regularly lock down his entire housing unit, letting the young people out of their cells for roughly 30 minutes a day — the only time they’re allowed to use the telephone, shower, and bathroom. In the meantime, youth in his wing urinate in whatever containers they can find in their cells.

The repeated bouts of isolation have taken a toll on Christopher’s mental health. In September, staff placed him on suicide watch after he threatened to kill himself if the facility kept him in solitary, according to the lawsuit. He’s considering requesting to transfer to the adult prison system, which is struggling with what the prison agency administration describes as its own staffing crisis.

“Solitary confinement is devastating for youth,” said Jessica Feierman, chief legal officer of the Juvenile Law Center, noting that it can cause irreversible psychological damage and lead to self-harm, psychosis, and a heightened risk of suicide.

“They’re at this moment where their brains are developing, they’re learning social skills and how to problem-solve, and when we cut them off from peers and supportive adults … we’re just adding layers upon layers of harm and deprivation,” Feierman said.

Isaac, also at Goshen, has been trying to stave off that psychological damage. The frequent isolation has given him anxiety attacks, his mother told New York Focus.

“I told him, ‘Whenever you feel that way and you’re on lockdown because of lack of staff, just think of my voice, hear me talking to you, pray, reread my letters,’” she said.

Isaac excels academically, his mother and lawyers said. While awaiting sentencing at a city-run juvenile detention center in Brooklyn, he attended regular schooling, earned academic honors, and completed a restorative justice program that involved group readings, discussions, and writing projects. The 17-year-old wants to finish high school classes and begin college coursework — but has had no classroom time since he arrived at Goshen in February, his mother said. Instead, staff come by roughly once a week to give him worksheets to fill out with no instruction.

Shortly after he arrived at Goshen, staff placed Isaac’s entire unit in solitary for roughly a month, the lawsuit alleges. They were locked in nearly around the clock, let out only for brief individual bathroom trips and occasionally to use the telephone. Since then, his wing has continued to go on regular lockdown.

“All we hear from staff is, ‘We’re short staff, we’re short staff, we’re short staff,” said Isaac’s mother, who also requested anonymity to protect her son. “They’re always short-staffed. What’s going on?”

OCFS did not respond to questions about staffing issues. They may represent an extreme version of a national trend: During the Covid-19 pandemic, youth detention facilities across the country saw a sharp dip in both staff and the number of incarcerated youth, according to Feierman. While the incarcerated populations have ticked back up, staffing levels haven’t kept pace, she said.

OCFS’s secure placement facilities, as well as their five less strict “limited secure” facilities and one “non-secure” facility, saw a 13 percent decrease in full-time employees between 2019 and 2022, according to numbers compiled by the New York State Public Employees Federation, which represents some OCFS workers. Agency-wide spending on overtime tripled over the same timeframe.

“The trends across the facilities are very similar: staff burnout, resignations,” and forced overtime, said Randi DiAntonio, vice president of the Public Employees Federation. Counselors who are supposed to be offering programming are often forced to do the jobs of security staff, she said. “If you don’t have the staff for security purposes, you can’t move people to the proper areas for programs. It really affects the entire system.”

The rise in the incarcerated youth population has also hit OCFS particularly hard. In 2017, the state passed the Raise the Age law, which mandated that courts try most 16- and 17-year-olds accused of crimes as minors rather than as adults. The law diverted youth from adult prisons to OCFS facilities: The secure placement facility population nearly tripled between 2017 and 2025, according to OCFS data. But the state didn’t dedicate enough resources to fund recruiting initiatives to help address the dual crises of increased populations and decreased staff, DiAntonio argued.

In June, the Public Employees Federation penned a letter to state lawmakers outlining a post-pandemic staffing crisis at Industry Residential Center, near Rochester, whose campus contains both a secure placement and a limited secure facility. Since 2022, facility workers have complained of chronic understaffing that has led to “unsafe conditions” and “decimated essential youth programming,” the letter said.

As of September 2024, only 17 percent of the nearly 250 required support staff were available to work across the two facilities, and less than half of the needed counselors were available, the letter said. Eight months later, the number of available staff had decreased by roughly half. As a result, “youth were reportedly confined to their rooms for up to 23 hours a day, often denied basic access to restrooms and served food in unsanitary conditions.” One tried to commit suicide that month, the letter said.