Push to end child shackling in Louisville courts

When a 12-year-old boy walked into her courtroom in late 2011, his hands cuffed to a chain around his waist, Jefferson County Judge Dee McDonald was stunned.

The boy's mother wailed from the gallery, "oh my baby." McDonald tried to calm her. But the judge, too, was shocked by the sight of a child in chains.

The Jefferson County sheriff's office that day began a practice that remains in place: They chain every child held at the Jefferson County Youth Detention Center for all court appearances, regardless of age or alleged offense.

The city is now at the center of a national push to end the practice. Juvenile justice advocates contend that "indiscriminate shackling" is humiliating and contrary to the basic intentions of the juvenile court system: to rehabilitate troubled youth, to instill in them respect for authority, to stop the cycle of crime and incarceration.

"When you treat kids like animals, as criminals, they feel that way, and they're going to act that way," said David Shapiro, with the National Juvenile Defender Center.

The debate hinges around a question that surrounds all juvenile justice reforms: whether children accused of criminal offenses should be treated as children or as criminals.

"These are not kids," said Major Gerald Bates, who runs courthouse security for the Jefferson County sheriff's office. "This isn't Sunday school. This is jail, this is court."

The sheriff's office is resistant to change the protocol. Children can be just as dangerous as adults, maybe even more impulsive and reckless, Bates said.

In the summer of 2011, a teenager, alone in a holdover cell, climbed onto a table and escaped through the ceiling panels, said Col. Carl Yates. He crawled across the ceiling, dropped down into an office and managed to leave the building. He was caught days later.

The incident spurred the sheriff's office to implement the policy to restrain each juvenile with a belly chain.

At least 11 states have banned the practice of routinely shackling all juveniles for all court appearances, and national advocacy groups recently turned their attention to Louisville.

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges released a report last month on the Jefferson County system, critical of the policy and called instead for judges to make individual decisions on whether to shackle individual children. Only those juveniles considered to be a high risk for violence or escape should be chained, they wrote.

"Instead of just being tough with these kids, we need to be smart with these kids," said Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates. "I'm not some radical purist, you won't hear me say never should a kid be shackled. But I think it should be rare, on a case-by-case basis."

Proponents of ending routine shackling point to Florida, where the practice was barred in 2006. Over the course of the next five years, Miami-Dade County processed more than 20,000 juveniles without any escaping or hurting anyone, according to a report by the National Juvenile Justice Network. Treating a troubled kid like a common criminal makes them more rebellious, more aggressive, Shapiro said.

But the local sheriff's office says anecdotally that they've experienced the opposite. Before they implemented routine restraints, kids got in fights with each other and occasionally with deputies. In the three years since, such fights have been nearly nonexistent, Yates said.

The sheriff's office refutes that the children are shackled, a word that to some infers irons around both the ankles and wrists. In Jefferson County, juveniles are secured with "belly chains," which attaches the wrists to a chain around the waist. Their feet remain free.

Juveniles leave the detention center handcuffed together, without the belly chains. They are taken through a secured tunnel to a holding cell on the fourth floor of the courthouse. Juveniles, by law, must be kept separate from adult prisoners.

The chains are put on them once they get to the courthouse. McDonald, who was juvenile judge six months before the chaining started, said she can tell when the children had arrived by the sound of their chains clanking on the metal benches outside her courtroom. They wear them throughout their hearing and back to their holding cell, where the chains are removed before they're taken back to the detention center.

"These belly chains do not hurt anyone, they keep people from being hurt," Yates said. "We cannot let our guard down simply because of someone's age. Our deputies are in the trenches, they deal with these prisoners — and that's exactly what they are."

Neither the National Sheriff's Association nor the American Jailer's Association has taken formal stances on the practice.

An unfortunate necessity

McDonald, who for years oversaw all juvenile cases, has also come to accept the universal restraints as an unfortunate necessity.

"I don't like the idea of kids coming in belly chains, but I understand the necessity of it," she said. "Emotions run high in a courtroom, and when you're dealing with juveniles they can run even higher. There's a lot of angst, and there can be a lot of anger."

McDonald was recently elected to the Family Court bench and Judge Gina Calvert took over juvenile court. Calvert did not respond to inquiries about her feelings on the practice.

The debate comes as the state tries to overhaul its entire juvenile justice system. The legislature passed a sweeping bill last year intended to reduce the runaway incarceration rate for nonviolent youths.

Beth McMahon, chief of the Louisville Metro Public Defender's juvenile trial division, said she had a client last week charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor, shackled in the same way as teens charged with murder or robbery.

As of Jan. 16, 39 boys and six girls were being held at the center. Most are 16 or 17 years old, but one is 12, six are 14, and eight are 15, according to the center's records. Their average stay is 17 days.

Six are being held on murder charges and nine for robbery, the records show. The rest are charged with a variety of drug crimes, thefts and assaults. At least nine are in on misdemeanors alone: a 14-year-old charged with fourth-degree assault, a 15-year-old booked with receiving stolen property, a 17-year-old accused of disorderly conduct.

Exposure to trauma

Clarence Williams, director of Jefferson County Youth Detention Services, spends a lot of time with the city's incarcerated children. The youth center is, by design, different from adult jail. They have movie nights on the weekends, with popcorn.

Occasionally they have problems — fist fights or bullying — but nothing more extreme than any school where kids gather, he said.

He doesn't think of his charges as criminals. He thinks of them as kids dealt a bad hand, who've grown up in broken homes and bad neighborhoods. They mostly hail from the poorest zip codes in the city, the center's records show.

"It's not that they're more prone to bad decisions, they just have more bad options than other kids," Williams said. "My guess is that if I would have gotten caught for everything I did as a child, I probably wouldn't have this job right now. I think a lot of us have made some reckless decisions as children."

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges' critique of the restraint practice was included in an analysis of how the court manages children who've been exposed to trauma. Studies have shown that 90 percent of kids in the criminal court system have been exposed to traumatic incidents, said Dr. Shawn Marsh, chief program officer for juvenile law at the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Many suffer from mental illness, some post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. The brain isn't fully developed until the age of 25.

"For them, it sends a telegraph to the rest of the world, that you're a bad person, that you're a deviant," Marsh said of routine shackling. "That impacts how that child views themselves at a time period when it's critical they have healthy images."

Reporter Claire Galofaro can be reached at (502) 582-7086. Follow her on Twitter at @clairegalofaro.