Learning outcomes

- Understand how the DJJ system is set up.

- Understand the varying perspectives on what the inside is like.

- Understand past allegations against SCDJJ.

Structure of SCDJJ

South Carolina DJJ’s basic structure is a Cognia-accredited school district, a private accreditation certificate that is conducted in three evaluation centers, one detention center, one high school behind the fence (Birchwood), and ten camps. The school district is made up of one superintendent, four principals, one assistant principal, one special education director, and varying numbers of teachers, assistant teachers, guidance counselors, and staff. Schooling is year-round, and security permitting is offered five days a week. Camp education is contracted to private programs, but DJJ employs official teachers who set the curriculum and give grades. Teachers of record create the lessons, review work, and give grades. The school district serves approximately 500 students at any given time. In 2023, 111 students earned a GED or diploma. The first-hand accounts of the system vary from the facts and descriptions on the official website as seen in the following narrative. Students theoretically travel from short-term detention to court to evaluation center to court to Birchwood or a camp. Education takes place at evaluation centers, juvenile detention center, Birchwood, and camps.

Detention and evaluation centers

Students’ educational experience begins in whatever detention center or evaluation center they are placed in. There is one for girls and two for boys. Because of the work being done at Birchwood School, behind the fence, after the 2017 federal lawsuit referenced below, many students stay in evaluation facilities far past their court date. Given the backlog since Covid-19, many students remain in the evaluation long past the 45-day maximum awaiting their court date. One staff member estimated that 45 or more students were in detention centers for more than 200 days waiting on court dates. This all means that students who are awaiting a court date on a simple truancy charge are being detained for the better part of a year in the same population as students convicted of murder. Everyone agrees that this situation is not ideal and puts low-level offenders at significant risk both physically and psychologically. Students report that those with low-level offenses are just trying to get by until court, hoping to go home on probation or to a low-security camp, while offenders with a determinate sentence know they will be transferred to adult prison on their eighteenth birthday. This dynamic creates an unsafe environment.

Once students have gone through the court system, they, in theory, are sent to Birchwood or to a camp. Currently, many stay in evaluation centers because of overcrowding, lack of security staff, and work being done at Birchwood as a result of the 2017 lawsuit. Ideally, serious offenders (murder, aggravated assault) go to Birchwood as a first step, and lower-level offenders go to a camp.

One glaring inequity in this system is gender. As of 2024, all girls referred to DJJ statewide are housed at Coastal Evaluation Center or a camp called Piedmont Wilderness Institute, a camp that has 20 beds available, even though girls make up 30% of the juvenile population referred to DJJ. Boys, who make up 70% of the referrals, have 262 alternative (camp) beds available, two evaluation facilities, and the long-term high school, Birchwood. Currently, the Coastal Evaluation Center for girls and women is being modified to better meet the needs of females since it was originally designed for men.

	% Referrals	# Alternative Beds (camps)	Percentage of Alternative Beds (Camps)	Facilities
Girls	30	20	7%	1 Evaluation Center
Boys	70	262	93%	2 Evaluation Centers Birchwood High School

Birchwood (high school behind the fence)

Birchwood is where the boys convicted of more serious offenders are sent. These children are housed in pods and moved to the education section of the facility as security allows. Since education is legally mandated, when students cannot move due to security reasons, teachers should go to the housing pods or isolation units to deliver daily lessons. Safety is a constant concern for teachers and impacts how and when students get their education. Each student has an individual curriculum based on their current credit level and whether they are seeking a diploma, GED, or high school credential.

Delivery of education in this locked facility is difficult due to security concerns and restrictions. Students may be placed under “no movement” with their whole pod because of fighting within the housing pod, tensions with other housing pods that preclude the groups from moving at the same time, general safety concerns, and security staffing. While these larger issues create an obstacle to educating a housing pod as a unit, individual situations also make education difficult. When a child is isolated for violent behavior, protection, or other reasons, they need a teacher to come to them. Given the staffing limitations, it is difficult to meet students’ educational needs and provide legally guaranteed services when students are in isolation.

Camps

Of the ten contracted camps, there is only one for girls. Nine camps are listed on SCDJJ’s official website, but ten is the number provided by DJJ (personal communication, 2024). Each camp is responsible to DJJ but is run independently by the education director or lead teacher hired by the contracted program. Camps vary in everything from dress code to basic rules governing conduct such as whether a student has to get up and go to school. Almost exclusively, the camps use teacher assistants who work in loose collaboration with the teachers of record. The teachers of record who work at Birchwood or the evaluation centers create lessons and materials and put them in an online portal for teacher assistants to access and deliver. Student work is then sent back to the teacher of record for review and grading.

News coverage of SCDJJ

While interviewing adults associated with the SCDJJ system elicits a sense of hope and forward momentum, news reports show a different story. Three recent and notable lawsuits in 2024, 2022, and 2017 paint a different picture of life inside SCDJJ (NAACP, 2022). The stories talk of neglect, constant violence, long-term isolation, lack of basic sanitary conditions, and shortage of educational services. Lawsuits are seeking clean water and food, dry beds, limitations to solitary confinement, and educational and mental health services. “South Carolina exposes the children in its juvenile justice system—most of whom are Black—to barbaric conditions”, said Brenda Murphy, President of the NAACP South Carolina State Conference of Branches. “Children in custody suffer from constant violence, are isolated for weeks and months, and are denied the basic rehabilitative services they need and are entitled to. Our most vulnerable children must receive support, not punishment.” (Orecchio-Egresitz, 2022)

2017 federal civil rights case—excessive force

A 2017 federal civil rights case prompted a federal investigation in which investigators spent five years investigating claims at SCDJJ. The findings were released in 2020, and on April 14, 2022, it was announced that SCDJJ agreed to fix the issues resulting from the investigation, which demonstrated a pattern of excessive force (Adcox, 2022). The investigation found that officers had broken a child’s arm, bit another child after agreeing to a fight with them, and other offenses of excessive force including prolonged and punitive isolation. Between July 2018 and May 2019, there were “134 fights and 71 assaults that resulted in 99 injuries to youth in a facility with an average daily population of just over 100”, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recent Justice Department report (Adcox, 2022)

The newest SCDJJ Director Eden Hendrick signed an agreement including “changes in officer training, restraining techniques, using isolation as punishment and how to respond to fights between teenagers. Other steps include overhauling the security camera system on campus” (Adcox, 2022).

Findings in the 2020 Federal Investigation Report stated that in a prison with approximately 100 juveniles, there were 99 injuries reported over 11 months. The specifics on the violence resulting in injuries included an “officer intervening in a fight by putting a teen in a chokehold” and a video showing “an officer failing to do anything while a teen was repeatedly attacked in his pod over three hours. Instead, the officer remained in his seat never calling for assistance, according to the federal report” (Adcox, 2022). A review of dozens of other use-of-force reports wasn’t possible due to the lack of video surveillance around the campus—a limitation of which agency leaders were aware. The report from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division ordered SCDJJ to make changes or face another lawsuit.

April 2022—civil rights lawsuit, S.C. State Conference of NAACP v. S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice

In this lawsuit, the ACLU states:

The original lawsuit demands that children be provided basic living needs such as clean water, healthy food, sanitary living conditions, and physical safety. The lawsuit goes on to require mental health basics such as freedom from solitary confinement, meaningful access to education, mental health resources, and accommodations for children with disabilities (ACLU, 2022).

The ACLU complaint includes individual stories from children held at DJJ as a method of describing the conditions that children are living in while incarcerated. One story documents a 14-year-old who is routinely targeted for abuse by other children and witnessed a riot where another child’s jaw was broken. Documentation of children held in isolation and not given any schoolwork shows the lack of education while incarcerated. Other children’s experiences reported isolation for weeks in a wet holding cell with a broken sink and toilet and no access to a shower. One child complained of being assaulted by DJJ staff five times, including one time when he was punched so hard in the ribs that he struggled to breathe the next day (ACLU, 2022).

Throughout the lawsuit, there are references to unsanitary conditions such as sewage water in the cells, feces on the walls, and cockroaches in the food provided at the facilities. Youth-on-youth violence is constant, with staff often turning a blind eye or even instigating assaults on children. There were allegations that DJJ has resorted to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement as a management tool to house sick kids, “protect” children from violence, or address even the most minor of infractions (NAACP, 2022).

Previous lawsuits show that DJJ was sued for violating the rights of children in 1990; lost a lawsuit in 1995 that forced it to implement policy changes; as well as paid $1.1 million in 2002 to settle claims that children as young as ten years old had been sexually assaulted in their facilities. Staff at a Columbia facility walked out in protest of unsafe conditions in June 2021. DJJ facilities have since been wracked by large-scale riots in 2022 and 2023 that left children injured and traumatized (ACLU 2024).

In addition to the unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, children are being denied their right to an education. Children have limited classes, lack access to any classes when disciplined in solitary confinement, and lose access to education when there is violence in the prison. This lack of consistent access is difficult for all children, especially those with preexisting learning conditions.

January 2024—Jeffcoat civil suit

A Columbia attorney called Matthew Yelverton announced a civil rights lawsuit in early 2024 representing the mother of Easley Jeffcoat, age 16 (Hughs). According to the State, the teen was being treated at DJJ rather than incarcerated. In the absence of other immediate mental health care, DJJ was treating Jeffcoat until the family could find another residential facility.¹ The lawsuit claims negligence and civil rights violations during his time there for mental health treatment. Jeffcoat attempted suicide in the infirmary at a DJJ facility on December 6, 2023, and was taken to the hospital where he died two days later. He had been moved to the infirmary because of concerns about his mental health and suicidal thoughts. Despite the reason for him being there, his self-injurious behavior went unnoticed for an hour or longer. The ACLU of South Carolina has called the death “tragic and inexcusable”. Incidents like this one will continue happening until years of systemic failures are corrected, says Jace Woodrum, the Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina (Jurado, 2023). According to the ACLU, the detention center was meant to hold 72 children, yet 130 are currently awaiting trial there. The ACLU and other advocate groups such as the Children’s Law Center are asking the DJJ to stop incarcerating children for status offenses of truancy, running away, and incorrigibility (personal communication, June 2023).

Summary

Reconciling the picture of an accredited school district and the accusations within these lawsuits leaves one to wonder what is happening. Federal investigations have found that conditions are not acceptable, and students are not being educated as required by law. This leads citizens to question the purpose of DJJ. Is it as advertised in its mission to “impact and transform young lives, strengthen families, and support safer communities through targeted prevention and rehabilitation” or is it a place to dump kids who are causing problems? Chapter 3 looks at the adults who work with children in the justice system.

Discussion questions

1. What strikes you as the biggest disparity between the advertised DJJ system according to the website in the Introduction and reports from insiders in this chapter?

2. What questions do the lawsuits bring up for you?

3. What would you do if your family member were in the SCDJJ system?

Extension activities

1. Research what actions you could take if your family member were incarcerated in SCDJJ.

2. Review the complaints in one of the lawsuits in this chapter. What stands out for you?

3. Create your version of a mission/vision statement for the SCDJJ system. How would you restructure the department to meet this new mission/vision statement?