'What If This Were Your Kid?'

At the Onondaga County Justice Center in Syracuse, New York, between 2015 and 2016 more than 80 teenage offenders were regularly locked in solitary confinement. They’d spend 23 hours a day, seven days a week, in dimly lit cells measuring roughly half the size of an average parking space. In lieu of regular schooling, they were given photocopied pages of a high-school equivalency workbook, which they were left to complete, or not, without supervision or review. These circumstances are far from isolated: Across the country, young offenders in solitary confinement experience gaps in their education that can leave them unprepared to return to school upon release—if they return at all.

In Onondaga, “many of these kids had [individual education plans] in special education, and they were clearly not assessing where these kids were at,” said Louis Kraus, who is chief of the child and adolescent psychiatry department at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Kraus conducted interviews with the young detainees filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services of Central New York. “So here you have kids that are already at risk for learning disabilities and other educational struggles, and you make it far worse by not only not giving them the interventions that they need, but not even providing basic educational attention,” he said.