Secure youth prisons must be reformed
Conditions in the New York State Office of Children and Family Services’ secure youth prisons are deeply troubling. Children as young as 12 are confined alone for hours, without access to toilets, education or recreation, and are sometimes forced to urinate or defecate in bottles or trash cans.
These practices are inhumane and profoundly harmful to the development of minds, compromising rehabilitation and public safety.
As a former commissioner of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services and the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, I know what is possible when leaders commit to reform. During my tenure, we closed facilities dependent on punitive segregation, eliminated segregation practices, and built systems grounded in trauma-informed care.
We understood that young brains are still developing into early adulthood. Depriving children and young adults of social contact, structure, and meaningful engagement disrupts emotional regulation, impulse control, and decision-making, causing damage that can follow them long after release.
It is important to recognize that the current OCFS juvenile detention policy was, when enacted, a national model. It limited the use of solitary confinement to genuine security emergencies and prohibited punitive solitary confinement.
These policies were based on trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate principles, reflecting a growing body of neuroscience and behavioral research showing that isolation exacerbates trauma rather than resolving it. The intention was clear: safety should never come at the expense of a child’s mental health or dignity.
Yet conditions in New York State’s youth prisons demonstrate a stark gap between policy and practice. This is not a lack of rules, but a systemic failure in implementation and control.
When young people are locked up alone for 23 hours a day, deprived of education, recreation, treatment and basic dignity, the system fails them and fails in its mission. Practices that rely on isolation as a management tool signal breakdowns in staffing, training, supervision, and accountability of leaders.
The research is unequivocal: solitary confinement of young people is profoundly harmful. Prolonged isolation increases the risk of anxiety, depression, aggression, psychosis and self-harm, and is associated with higher rates of suicide attempts. Even brief episodes can retraumatize children, especially those with a history of abuse, neglect, or community violence.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and the United Nations have all concluded that the isolation of children constitutes cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment and, in extreme cases, torture. The disproportionate impact on Black and Latino youth further exacerbates systemic inequities and perpetuates cycles of harm.
Addressing this crisis requires closing implementation gaps, not just rewriting policy.
Stronger oversight, accountability and realignment of staff, training and resources are essential to maintaining safety without isolating children. But monitoring alone is not enough.
Meaningful reform requires intentional culture change, starting with ongoing training, coaching, and leadership development that reinforces de-escalation, therapeutic engagement, and restorative approaches.
Strong mental health supports, both within institutions and in the community, are essential. New York State now has six months to develop a plan to comply with a recent class-action settlement aimed at addressing the lack of adequate mental health services for confined youth. This plan must be ambitious, transparent and rooted in evidence-based care.
The goal is not simply following the rules, but creating environments that promote resilience, responsibility, skill development and healthy development.
Under my leadership, we have proven that reform is possible. New York can and must be a national leader in the fight against punitive isolation of young people. We have a duty to the children in our care and to the public to ensure that policies intended to protect young people are fully implemented and enforced.
Anything less constitutes a failure in our moral and social responsibility.
Carrión was the former commissioner of the New York State Office of Children and Family Services and the New York Administration for Children’s Services.
