
More than 350 people have sued New Jersey for sex abuse they say they suffered in juvenile detention facilities. Some want the jails closed. (Photo by iStock/Getty Images Plus)
People who said they were sexually abused in New Jersey’s juvenile jails gathered Wednesday in New Brunswick to demand an investigation and blast state officials for failing to close the largest lockup, as two governors have vowed to do.
More than 350 people have filed lawsuits in about 10 counties over sexual abuse they say they endured at juvenile detention facilities between 1982 and last year — so many that the state Supreme Court last month ordered all such claims statewide to be overseen by one judge in Middlesex County.
That’s where the New Jersey Training School at Jamesburg, the state’s largest juvenile detention center, is located. Gov. Chris Christie vowed in 2018 to shutter that facility, and Gov. Phil Murphy repeated that promise 18 months ago after 50 men sued over the school’s “culture of abuse.” Attorney General Matt Platkin has said the state would close the school, as well as the Female Secure Intake Facility, by 2028.
Randolph McLeod joined a small crowd of fellow abuse victims, advocates, and attorneys outside the Middlesex County Courthouse Wednesday to call for justice. McLeod said he was violated at Jamesburg in ways that are “too graphic to even describe.”
“It’s a shock to me that this place is even still open,” McLeod said. “These individuals are using this authority that they have to abuse us and take out their own childhood traumas or something. It’s just ridiculous how unchecked they are.”
Stacy Hughes, an attorney representing several victims, appealed to state officials to reform the juvenile justice system to prevent future harm.
“We are here to expose what happens when state-run facilities become hunting grounds for predators and dumping grounds for children who the state believes should be forgotten and silenced,” Hughes said.
Attorney Jerome Block, who represents many of the abuse victims, pointed to Platkin’s yearslong effort to investigate clergy sex abuse and accused the state of “applying a double standard.”
“These survivors want to know that their lives matter just as much as survivors of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church,” Block said. “The attorney general, the governor, they shouldn’t just be looking into sexual abuse by the Catholic Church. They should be looking into and investigating fully the sexual abuse that occurred at the hands of state and county juvenile staff members that inflicted this horrific abuse.”
A spokeswoman for Platkin declined to comment on the complaints.
“But our office has made it clear that people who use their positions of power to abuse those under their care will not and cannot be tolerated in this state,” said Tara Oliver, a Platkin spokeswoman.
All Youth Justice Commission staff, volunteers, interns, and contractors who may encounter incarcerated youth are subject to background checks, Oliver said in an email. The commission also has implemented a policy under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act that includes training to prevent abuse and protocols to investigate abuse allegations, she added.
She and a Murphy spokeswoman dodged the New Jersey Monitor’s questions about why the youth jails remain open.
Tyler Jones, a Murphy spokeswoman, said the governor established a youth justice task force in 2018 to recommend strategies for building a more equitable, restorative, and effective juvenile justice system.
That task force issued a report in 2022 that recommended closing “as quickly as possible” the girls’ jail, Jamesburg, and another boys’ jail in Bordentown called the Juvenile Medium Security Facility. The report pans all three prisons as “too big, too far from the homes of their residents and offer too few therapeutic options.”
“Violence against any population is unacceptable and has absolutely no place in our state,” Jones said in an email.
‘A pattern of institutional violence’
Victims at Wednesday’s gathering shared stories of abuse, as well as threats from staff to keep them silent and disregard from the system when they did report abuse.
McLeod said officers warned him they would hurt his mother in the parking lot if he disclosed his abuse. Block said some children sent to secure facilities for addiction treatment were bribed with drugs to engage in sexual activity.
Block urged policymakers to expand oversight of youth jails — and ensure that oversight is independent and tasked to a third-party “that has loyalties and obligations first to the children.” He also called on juvenile justice officials to incarcerate fewer children and instead place them in rehabilitative programs — both strategies that state lawmakers said in 2021 were youth justice priorities.
Sexual abuse of minors in state custody, including at a now-shuttered psychiatric lockup called the Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center in Wall, has already cost the state tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements.
Advocates have long called for the closure of the state’s juvenile jails, and they repeated that call Wednesday.
“This is not just a failure of oversight, but a pattern of institutional violence against children,” said Ashanti Jones, a policy analyst in juvenile justice for the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. “At this point, we’ve had enough. We can’t really allow another day, another week, another year of delay while our children suffer untold harm in facilities that everyone already agrees should be closed. Every day that these doors remain open is another day that we choose administrative convenience over safety and dignity of New Jersey’s children.”
Tormel Pittman, a victim from New Brunswick, blamed the state’s failure to close the jails on racism.
“These decades of benign neglect comes from the fact that a lot of these institutions are predominantly black and Latino people, and that’s a demographic that already was voiceless before they got into these institutions,” Pittman said. “And imagine 40 years later being ignored by the same system that was responsible for you becoming a victim.”
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