Imagine being locked in a small room, no larger than a bathroom. No windows. No fresh air. No one to talk to.
You eat. You sleep. You stare at the walls. With virtually no human contact inside this cramped space, few things distinguish one hour, one day, one week or one month from the next.
This is the reality for children held in solitary confinement at juvenile detention centers across South Dakota.
This punishment, however, doesn’t fit the crime.
Research has continuously and increasingly highlighted the impact of trauma on human development. Trauma that occurs during childhood, in particular, has been shown to have significant and long-lasting impacts on the brain, which ultimately affects behavior. I am sure many of us have seen children being disrespectful toward authority figures, acting disengaged in the classroom and quickly escalating from anger to violence. Instead of focusing on the source of the behavior — oftentimes traumatic experiences — the common response in the United States is to throw young people in locked facilities and refuse them the one thing that truly has the capacity to make a change: human relationships.
Solitary confinement is a dangerous, damaging and counterproductive practice, and South Dakota is just one of only four states that does not have any limits on the use of juvenile solitary confinement in state law. We cannot just lock a young person away in a room by themselves and hope the problem naturally resolves itself. We have to try a little harder than that.
Thankfully, legislators have the opportunity to reform and standardize the state’s policies with House Bill 1276, commonsense legislation that would prohibit its use on children for any reason other than a temporary behavior response.
While the temporary use of isolation may be necessary to maintain the safety and security of a child or the people around them as an emergency, strictly time-limited measure, its use in South Dakota is overused and can cause more problems than it is supposedly employed to solve. Children shouldn’t be held in solitary, for example, for breaking facility rules like talking back, possessing contraband or fighting.
For adults who have been held in solitary confinement, the effects can be persistent mental health problems or worse, suicide. But the potential damage to young people – who don’t yet have the maturity of an adult and are at a particularly vulnerable, formative stage of life – is much greater. These risks are magnified for children with disabilities or histories of trauma and abuse.
Normal human contact and a range of age-appropriate services and programming are essential to a child’s development, growth and education. But while secluded in detention, children are deprived of the services and tools that they need for healthy growth and rehabilitation.
If a parent locked their child in a room for an extended period of time, it’d be considered child abuse. In fact, in 2017, a Sioux Falls woman was sentenced to six years in prison after her 8-year-old son jumped out of a second-story window to escape the room she had locked him in for 19 hours. And it’s against state law for schools to use involuntary confinement of students locked alone in a room unless there is a clear and present danger. So why are we treating children in juvenile detention differently?
Our priority should be protecting kids and helping them grow into productive and healthy adults. When children veer off course, we should rehabilitate them as quickly and as effectively as possible. We can get closer to this goal by ensuring that children in South Dakota are no longer locked in solitary with little public oversight, knowledge or legal limits – treatment that undermines healthy child development and, ultimately, community safety.
We have to stop viewing adjudicated youth as criminals and start seeing them as young people full of potential, worthy of investment and deserving of love. And we have to help them view themselves in this light as well.
While the South Dakota legislature is discussing rehabilitation and prison programming for incarcerated adults, we can’t leave behind the children who are in the care of our justice system as well. We have an opportunity to readjust our response to children who need rehabilitation the most. We need to do better for South Dakota’s youth. We need legislators to pass House Bill 1276.
