The juvenile solitary confinement ordinance deferred by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners last week has another problem, advocates say: It does not include any independent oversight of the juvenile detention center. They fear that without oversight, solitary confinement could quietly return to the facility.
The legislation was intended to limit the amount of time children spend in isolation. Jerri Green, who helped write the ordinance during her tenure as policy adviser for Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, says additional oversight of the center is unnecessary because the state’s Department of Children’s Services already inspects juvenile facilities in Tennessee.
Advocates say DCS has failed to provide adequate supervision, both in Shelby County and facilities across the state. A DCS representative told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism that the agency has limited power to oversee juvenile facilities.
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The legislation comes after an MLK50 investigation found that youth incarcerated in the center between 2023 and 2025 were regularly held in solitary confinement by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office for 23 hours a day or more. Harris’ office, which has run the facility since October under the county’s Division of Corrections, says it has ended solitary confinement inside the center.
MLK50 previously reported that the ordinance was sent back to committee after community members pointed out that it appeared to allow children to be held in solitary confinement for 72 hours.
A 2021 state law already prohibits keeping children in seclusion for more than two hours at a time. Children incarcerated while the sheriff operated the center say they were isolated for far longer than that.
The sheriff’s office operated the center under insufficient oversight, said Ala’a Alattiyat, coordinator for the Youth Justice Action Council, a group of “justice-impacted and connected” youth who advocate for juvenile justice reform in Memphis. She has worked with youth who were held in solitary confinement when the sheriff’s office ran the detention center.
“I think they were given unchecked power,” said Alattiyat. “I don’t know why they chose to subject young people to that type of abuse, but I know that it was able to continue for so long because there was no oversight.”
Currently, the state’s Department of Children’s Services monitors the juvenile detention center. A loophole in DCS regulations may allow facilities to hold children in solitary confinement without violating the department’s rules.
State law and DCS currently define “seclusion,” a synonym for solitary confinement, differently. A child isolated inside a cell, but able to see or hear other children in their housing unit, would not be “secluded” under DCS’s minimum standards. By contrast, this would be considered seclusion under state law.
“People need social interaction with each other,” said Terry Kupers, professor emeritus at the Wright Institute and solitary confinement expert.
“People talk through heating vents. They scream out, and somebody answers them,” while they’re being isolated he said. “That’s not meaningful human communication.”
The state’s definition of seclusion was modified after a 2019 News Channel 5 investigation found that children in a Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center were being held in solitary confinement, but could see and hear each other while they were isolated.
In 2022, then-Deputy DCS Commissioner Darren Goods told News Channel 5 that a child is not being secluded if they can “communicate through walls or through doors.”
DCS has not changed its definition of seclusion to match state law, despite criticisms. It is currently in the process of updating its standards, a DCS spokesperson said.
DCS inspected the county’s juvenile detention center, the Youth Justice and Education Center, at least six times since it opened in 2023, but never took action to correct the sheriff’s office’s use of solitary confinement on incarcerated children.
Even if DCS updated its standards, it’s unlikely that DCS would provide sufficient oversight of the Youth Justice and Education Center, said Zoe Jamail, a former policy director at Disability Rights Tennessee who co-authored a report alleging abuses at the DCS-operated Wilder Youth Development Center in Somerville, Tennessee.
While DCS has the power to sue facilities found to be out of compliance with its standards, the department almost never acts when it discovers violations of its policies, Jamail said.
In 2025, the state comptroller’s office found that every juvenile facility the comptroller independently inspected was out of compliance with regulations in “critical areas,” despite DCS oversight. The comptroller released its findings in December 2025.
This isn’t the first time local officials have said they’ve eliminated the use of solitary confinement on Shelby County children. In 2015, following a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, the sheriff’s office began a multi-year effort to reduce its reliance on isolation in the county’s old juvenile detention center, which was located in the juvenile court building. By the end of 2017, solitary confinement was rarely used inside the facility, according to reports from the time.
But by 2020, most of the individuals who spearheaded those reforms retired or left Shelby County. Shortly after the Youth Justice and Education Center opened in 2023 as a replacement for the old detention center, children were again kept in isolation, according to dozens of sources who spoke with MLK50.
“Even if an agency is doing a good job and has the best of intentions, establishing independent and permanent oversight is what prevents dangerous conditions from making a quiet comeback,” said Jamail. “There’s no other way to ensure that.”
DCS has limited power to enforce its own standards
If DCS notices a violation of their rules during an inspection, it can file a complaint in chancery court, said Jamail. From there, a chancery court could force a facility to comply with the law.
But DCS does not have to act — and frequently doesn’t — if it finds violations, said Jamail.
A 2023 ProPublica and WPLN investigation found that the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville routinely kept children in solitary confinement as punishment for minor infractions, in violation of DCS’s policies. That improper use of seclusion was documented by DCS inspectors, but DCS never forced the Bean Center to change its practices.
In July 2024, a class-action lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Tennessee against the state of Tennessee and the DCS alleged that DCS and the state failed to do sufficient oversight of juvenile facilities. As a result, the lawsuit alleged that several juvenile detention centers in the state — including Shelby County’s juvenile detention center — illegally held children in solitary confinement.
The state comptroller’s office found that every juvenile detention center it independently inspected was out of compliance with regulations in “critical areas,” despite regular DCS inspections of those facilities, according to an audit report released in December 2025.
A DCS spokesperson said the agency has limited power to improve conditions inside juvenile detention facilities.
Taking legal action against a facility is resource-intensive and would require the cooperation of the state attorney general’s office, the spokesperson said. While DCS can ask a facility’s leadership to comply with state rules, the agency has little recourse if its requests are ignored, they said.
In its 2025 audit of DCS, the state comptroller recommended that the general assembly consider legislation that would give DCS “more direct enforcement mechanisms over the publicly administered juvenile detention centers.”
DCS inspectors often rely on the children they interview during their inspections to alert them to problems happening inside detention centers, a DCS spokesperson said.
MLK50 found that on at least one occasion, a DCS inspector did not speak with children to learn more about conditions inside the Youth Justice and Education Center.
During a March 2024 inspection, detention center leadership told a DCS inspector that children in one of the facility’s housing units, D-pod, had been separated from the general population of the center because they had misbehaved, according to the inspector’s report. An MLK50 investigation later found that D-pod was used as a solitary confinement unit.
The DCS inspector did not speak with any youth in D-pod. “I did not interview youth on this day,” the inspector wrote in the report.
Green said she is confident in DCS’s ability to conduct oversight of the Youth Justice and Education Center.
When asked about the state comptroller’s report, DCS’s failure to sue detention facilities, and the class action lawsuit, Green said that DCS likely doesn’t have enough funding to enforce its rules.
“There are limits to human capacity,” she said. “I point it back to Bill Lee and the administration, and not fully funding that office to have lawyers for whom that’s specifically their job.”
DCS doesn’t need to ensure compliance with its standards to do oversight of detention facilities, said Green. Instead, groups interested in conditions inside facilities can request and read DCS’s inspection reports.
Alattiyat said she doesn’t think DCS inspection reports provide enough insight into the center.
“Often we’re seeing things that are reported by youth that are not included in the reports,” she said. “I don’t mean one or two youth. I mean almost every single youth I interact with is telling me the same thing. It’s hard to think anything about that discrepancy other than that DCS is either not doing the inspections or not being fully truthful and transparent in their reports.”
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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