When Juvenile Court Judge Tarik Sugarmon ran against former Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael, he promised to reform Shelby County’s juvenile justice system. “You have to be intentional about treatment and rehabilitation,” Sugarmon told MLK50. “(Judge Michael’s court) has not been.”
Almost three years later, Sugarmon’s court incarcerates more children than Michael’s, even though his court sees fewer youth charged with serious offenses. The court’s recently released annual report shows that 594 children were charged with serious offenses during fiscal year 2022, Michael’s last year in office. That number had dropped to 531 by fiscal year 2024. Over the same period, the number of youth admitted to Shelby County’s juvenile detention center, called the Youth Justice and Education Center, increased from 872 to 1,142.
The court is also jailing young people for longer periods. The average length of detention increased from 33.9 days to 43.7 days between FY 2022 and FY 2024. In FY 2022, the longest period a single child spent in detention was 341 days. But in FY 2024, at least one child spent 477 days in detention.
As the report noted, “2024 recorded the highest detention admissions in the past five years, along with a notable increase in youth held for 90 days or more.”
The data raises questions about how Sugarmon’s court decides which children to jail and how long to keep them. It also sheds new light on Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s 2024 decision to stop running the detention center, following allegations that the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office barred incarcerated children from going to school and seeing their parents. At the time, Bonner complained that the facility was nearly full, which SCSO Chief Deputy Anthony Buckner said caused staffing challenges.
Longer Detention | Juvenile Detention Center by Andrea MoralesIn Tennessee, juvenile detention centers serve as the equivalent of a jail for the juvenile justice system — youth incarcerated in detention centers have been charged with a crime, but have not yet been found guilty, said Joshua Rovner, director of youth justice at The Sentencing Project. By contrast, facilities like the Wilder Youth Development Center in Somerville, Tennessee, are used to incarcerate children found guilty of a crime.
Jailing more youth and keeping them there longer is “counterproductive and damaging,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform in Shelby County. “We’ve reduced our dependence on incarceration with kids over the last 30 or so years, as we’ve learned what it does to their brains. It’s really concerning when you have a community like ours that rolls back some of the progress, especially when the people who are doing it told us that they believed something different.”
Sugarmon said in an emailed statement that his court is committed to only using detention when necessary. “Our goal is never confinement—it’s care, accountability, and healing,” he said. “We will continue to study detention trends, listen to feedback, and explore safe alternatives that reflect the values of this community and the needs of our youth.”
Why does the court detain children?
Youth should be diverted from detention whenever possible, said Rovner. “Even short stays in detention are really damaging for young people,” he said. “Not only because of the fact that the children are often kept in very traumatic conditions, but in the long run, we know that kids who are detained have much worse outcomes.”
Research indicates that detained youth reoffend more often; additionally, the longer the stay, the more likely the youth are to recidivate. “That means more crime,” Rovner said.
Juvenile courts use detention to ensure that children appear at their court date or to temporarily remove children deemed to be a threat to public safety from the community. These children are supposed to attend school, but otherwise, “the programming is not therapeutic … It’s really just a holding cell,” Rovner added.
Under Tennessee law, children charged with an offense can only be detained under specific circumstances. A judge or magistrate must find that there is probable cause to believe that the child committed an offense; further, there must be “no less restrictive alternative” than detention available. Tennessee law makes it easier to detain children charged with serious offenses.
When asked to comment on this article, the court did not directly explain why it incarcerated more children in a period where the number of youth charged with serious offenses declined. “Other risk factors” could explain why a child is incarcerated even when they have not been charged with serious offenses, a court representative said in an emailed statement. These risk factors were left unspecified. Other youth may have remained in detention because they could not be released to a guardian, the representative said.
Numbers rising | Juvenile Detention Center by Andrea MoralesThe representative added that the COVID-19 pandemic “temporarily suppressed admissions” by delaying processes within the juvenile justice system. But according to previous court annual reports, more children were incarcerated in FY 2023 and FY 2024 than before the pandemic. The last calendar year in which detention admissions exceeded 1,000 youth was 2014, a decade earlier.
The court also acknowledged that children are being held in detention for long periods. A representative attributed these extended periods of incarceration to “increased mental health evaluation requests, delays in crime lab processing, lack of a stable release plan (unavailable guardians), and the lack of accessible, community-based alternatives to detention in Shelby County.”
The court has instituted administrative changes that will allow non-transfer cases to progress more quickly, the representative added.
An ‘unprecedented and alarming’ trend
The SCSO operates the detention center. In November 2023, Bonner sent Sugarmon a letter warning that children spent too long in detention.
“The youth are now being held for extremely long periods before disposition of their matters,” wrote Bonner. “This trend is unprecedented and alarming.”
Average Daily Population | Juvenile Detention Center by Andrea MoralesAs more children have been admitted to the detention center for longer stays, the number of youth in detention at any given time has risen. Data from the SCSO shows that in January 2020, an average of 71 children were incarcerated on any given day. By January 2024, the average daily population was 120.
That increase in population may have strained operations at the Youth Justice and Education Center.
“It is no secret that there are 90 to 100+ youth in the facility every day,” Bonner wrote in the November 2023 letter, provided to MLK50: Justice Through Journalism by a representative of the sheriff’s office. “That far exceeds what was anticipated and planned for by the SCSO and our partners, including the schools, and the food and medical providers.”
When asked to provide further context for Bonner’s letter, the court declined to comment. A representative said in an email that their original correspondence with Bonner was among the records they were “unable to recover” after the court was temporarily displaced from its building last year.
In April 2024, following allegations that the SCSO did not allow incarcerated children to see their parents, go to school or go outside, Bonner said the detention center was close to maximum capacity.
As a result, the SCSO sometimes has too few staff to fulfill some of the detention center’s functions, SCSO Chief Deputy Anthony Buckner said at a press conference at the time. “When the numbers are low, we have adequate staffing. But when the population of youth in custody is high, then we do have some staffing challenges as relates to children going outside.”
That same month, Bonner announced that his office would stop running the Youth Justice and Education center and transition operations back to Juvenile Court, which operated the detention center before 2014.
Rebecca Cadenhead is the youth life and justice reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She is also a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms. Email her rebecca.cadenhead@mlk50.com.
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