Hennepin Juvenile Detention Center vows to boost staff, retrain officers to fix violations

Operators of the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center (JDC) have agreed to consolidate housing units, create a new programming schedule and retrain correctional officers in an effort to satisfy state regulators, who rebuked the downtown facility last month for violating resident rights.

The changes will follow a scathing inspection report that accused the center of placing minors in seclusion without good reason to compensate for ongoing staff shortages. An annual audit by the Minnesota Department of Corrections found that teens were frequently locked in their rooms for long stretches because of the shortages and not bad behavior.

In response, county officials vowed to bolster staffing and retrain all officers tasked with performing wellness checks. Last week, the facility closed its “orientation mod,” typically reserved for new admissions, and combined male age groups to reduce the number of living units and provide heightened supervision.

The moves, including a new schedule, are expected to help prevent the undue cancellation of recreation, parental visits and other privileges for juveniles in the center’s custody.

“[Previous] staffing levels did not allow for all units to run programming simultaneously while having sufficient staff available to respond to incidents and emergencies in the building,” JDC Superintendent Dana Swayze wrote in a seven-page letter to state inspectors.

“Programming is only canceled on an as-needed basis based on the JDC’s ability to safely accommodate [it].”

Mary Ellen Heng, acting director of the county Department of Community Corrections and Rehabilitation, assured the County Board in a Dec. 4 email that corrective actions had begun. But she asserted that some of the report’s findings lacked context.

Heng pointed to a violation where teens were allegedly confined without cause, even when correctional officers were in a nearby office. She explained that during the dates of the inspection this fall, several officers in the office were still in training — and therefore not permitted to interact with the youths alone.

She said that while programming has been modified because of staffing limitations, “this additional room time is not reflective of punishment, disciplinary techniques or restrictive procedures.”

“We have made every effort to ensure that residents in our care are engaged in meaningful programming and are receiving positive and proactive adult guidance, support, and supervision,” Heng wrote in the email obtained by the Minnesota Star Tribune.

County Commissioner Angela Conley expressed frustration because of Heng’s defensiveness to the state report and questioned why corrections officials lacked a sense of urgency to find “tangible solutions.”

She gave the officials a week to develop a detailed plan to address the issues raised in the inspection.

“Real, substantive change needs to happen within the JDC or we need to shut it down,” she wrote in a fiery Dec. 7 email. “We are contributing to lifelong damage to the brains of young children by subjecting them to extended periods of solitude because we don’t have the staff.”

In an interview, Conley said she was disturbed by the report’s findings, especially since she had recently met with top county public safety staff to discuss the facility and none had mentioned the reported violations.

“It’s not something you want to learn about in the news media,” said Conley, who represents District 4, which covers much of Minneapolis, including the downtown detention center.

She said isolating kids was “cruel and unusual punishment” and needs to end.

“Anytime kids are left in their rooms for extended periods of time, as a means of discipline or because there is no staff, is unacceptable,” she said Thursday. “It is dangerous.”

Although Conley acknowledged that phasing out the use of seclusion may take some time, she hopes county officials will urgently work to examine the hiring and retention of staff to curb its reliance on such measures.

The county employs 69 full-time officers to staff the JDC, yet only 53 are active because of medical leave or training restrictions. While state licensing requires the facility to maintain a 1-to-12 ratio of staff to minors, the center upholds a 1-to-8 ratio for compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act.

The three-story juvenile detention center is part of a larger $13 million complex on Park Avenue between S. 5th and 6th Streets in downtown Minneapolis that includes juvenile courts and offices. The center, which has an 87-bed capacity, currently holds 25 teens.

Public defenders and their young clients have long complained about worsening conditions at the JDC, where juveniles are temporarily housed as they await trial or placement in a secure residential treatment center.

Conley said she’s had concerns about the center since she was sworn in for her first term in 2019 and toured the facility. She said she is planning another visit to see how conditions have changed.

The rest of the County Board shared her concerns.

As pressure mounted this fall to help treat young people with complex mental health needs who were languishing in emergency rooms and detention centers, Hennepin County fast-tracked the creation of a $15 million youth behavioral health crisis stabilization center in Minneapolis.

County commissioners unanimously signed off on the plan, which included a $7 million annual agreement for provider Nexus Family Healing to operate the 10- to 15-bed crisis residential program.

Rising youth crime and mental health challenges have remained persistent issues in Hennepin County in recent years. Commissioners played a key role in a 2023 state legislative working group on how to best intervene with troubled youth, but lawmakers did not act on a list of their recommendations offered during the 2024 Legislature.

County officials continue to lobby state lawmakers to provide more local funding to address the growing mental health needs of young residents.

Last week, the County Board agreed to spend $5.3 million to move adult inmates out of the county jail to comply with a state order requiring Sheriff Dawanna Witt to reduce the population. The board has yet to spend any money to improve the conditions at the JDC.

Conley acknowledged that finding appropriate staffing was a major barrier — one that is increasingly difficult not just in Minnesota, but nationwide.

“It’s not easy to work as a juvenile corrections officer. They’re working with kids who have high needs, who may have done some really bad things. So that’s hard,” she said.

“So how are we supporting our employees? What can we do to recruit and retain staff? I think the retention piece is really the tricky part. We need to be studying that.”