Advocates are asking for a citizen review board to conduct independent oversight of Shelby County’s juvenile detention center after an MLK50: Justice Through Journalism investigation found that incarcerated youth were regularly held in solitary confinement by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office for 23 hours a day or more.
The Shelby County Mayor’s Office, which has operated the facility under the Division of Corrections since October, has argued that it doesn’t need a watchdog to oversee its actions.
“The Department of Children’s Services already does [oversight],” said Jerri Green, who helped write the ordinance during her time as senior policy adviser for Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris. “They hold us to the state requirements.”
Get more stories like this in your inbox every Wednesday in The Weekly.
Subscribe to MLK50’s newsletter
and get Memphis-rooted news and insights
right-sized for your neighborhood.
A DCS spokesperson told MLK50 that the agency has very limited power to enforce state rules in juvenile facilities. While DCS can ask a facility’s leadership to comply with state rules, the agency cannot stop the facility from operating if its requests are ignored, they said.
The Youth Justice Action Council, a group of “justice-impacted and connected” youth who advocate for juvenile justice reform in Memphis, has developed several suggestions for independent oversight of the juvenile detention center.
Among those suggestions is a citizen review board that can access the facility for walk-throughs at any time, review complaints, and has a clear path of communication with the county commission. Ideally, this panel would be made up of youth and adults, said Ala’a Alattiyat, coordinator for the Youth Justice Action Council.
Chicago has a citizen review board comprised of “youth community advocates, youth development experts, educators, mental health specialists, physicians, and attorneys.” It functions as “an advocacy and resource group to provide public recommendations” on Cook County’s juvenile detention center.
“Citizen review boards can basically affect the same type of oversight [as the state], and that can be done on a local level,” 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.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris’ office is opposed to a citizen advisory board.
“While I understand [the Youth Justice Action Council’s] intent and while sunshine cures a lot of things, I think it’s too sensitive of an area, both security-wise and dealing with juveniles, to have the public in there,” Green said.
The Department of Children’s Services licenses and inspects Shelby County’s juvenile detention center, the Youth Justice and Education Center. DCS has been criticized for failing to enforce its own rules inside juvenile detention centers, including for allowing a Knoxville juvenile detention center to hold children in solitary confinement.
DCS’s standards on the use of solitary confinement are also more permissive than state law. DCS standards would allow a child to be isolated in a cell if that child can see or hear other youth in the same housing unit. Under state law, that would not be permitted.
DCS is currently in the process of updating its standards, a spokesperson said.
DCS inspected the Youth Justice and Education Center at least six times since it opened in 2023, but never took action against the sheriff’s office for its use of solitary confinement on children.
Green said that a citizen review board might violate the privacy of youth.
“We’re supposed to keep juvenile records sealed,” she said. “It’s hard for me to fathom how we let Joe and Jan activist off the street and come into our facility and protect the children who are in our care.”
Juvenile delinquency hearings, which are often held inside the juvenile detention center, are already open to the public under state law. Several kinds of juvenile records are also public.
Last year, a group of local media outlets, including MLK50, sued to get appropriate access to Shelby County’s juvenile court delinquency proceedings. That lawsuit is ongoing.
The members of a citizen review board would be trained, said Alattiyat.
“The type of reforms that we’re proposing are not new, and they’re not unheard of,” she added.
Independent and permanent oversight is the only way to ensure solitary confinement does not return to the county’s juvenile detention center, Jamail said.
“We have oversight in all areas of government,” she said. “Silence and darkness breeds dangerous conditions. There has to be accountability for any entity that’s charged with keeping young people safe, especially when it’s behind locked doors, and those places are really not accessible to the public.”
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.
This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.