A review of the state’s juvenile detention centers by a state advocacy group, which concluded with a report in February, revealed excessive use of solitary confinement at multiple facilities, even though the practice is banned in North Carolina. One mountain county juvenile facility was forced to close during the course of the review.
Cari Carson, supervising attorney for the education team at Disability Rights North Carolina, said they decided to conduct a review of all the juvenile detention centers in the state after receiving some reports that “raised red flags.”
The review period took place between July 2024 and August 2025, during which time DRNC visited all 14 juvenile detention centers across the state at least once, conducting almost 400 interviews with kids staying at the mix of state-run and county-run facilities.
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These interviews, as well as observations made by DRNC, provided the primary basis for the February report. They visited six of the facilities multiple times during the review period. One of the 14 facilities, Madison County Juvenile Detention Center, ultimately closed in January 2025 as a result of the review, the report said.
The chief concern among these facilities was the use of solitary confinement, though the majority of them also failed to meet educational and recreational standards.
Solitary confinement is defined as keeping a youth confined alone in a room for 22 hours or more, even though its use in North Carolina for youth under the age of 18 has been banned since 2016. The psychological and mental toll it takes on young people can be devastating, potentially leading to depression, psychosis, suicidal ideation and other adverse effects, the report said.
William Lassiter, NC deputy secretary for juvenile justice and delinquency prevention, said in a December 2025 letter to DRNC that while their policy allows for “administrative and temporary room confinement” when they’re short-staffed or when a youth poses a health or safety risk to themselves or others, the division ultimately doesn’t use solitary confinement in any juvenile justice setting.
DRNC’s review of juvenile facilities revealed otherwise.
Problematic solitary confinement at facilities
The swift closure of the Madison County facility was due to the use of solitary confinement as well as physical abuse by staff that involved pepper spraying and tasing. Some youth reported spending up to four months in solitary confinement, typically for disciplinary reasons, the Madison County report said.
The facility even had a designated room for disciplinary confinement, referred to as the “detox cell.” This windowless room was bare with nothing but a hole in the floor for youth to relieve themselves, and only a mat was provided for them to sleep on at night. Youth could spend up to a week or longer in this room, and staff would reportedly take them there to pepper spray them because of the lack of cameras, the Madison County report said.
Carson described the abuse and neglect there as being “so egregious” that they immediately reported their observations to a local child welfare agency, which also investigated the facility before shutting down operations there and then transferred the 21 kids there to other facilities across the state, the Madison County report said.
Aside from Madison County, multiple other facilities presented with disturbing solitary confinement practices, the report said.
Durham County Youth Home, which reportedly locked youth in their rooms for roughly 23 hours a day, had their own version of a “detox cell,” commonly referred to as “The Hole.” Youth at this facility reported spending a couple days to two weeks in this room for disciplinary purposes, and it was also used for suicide watch, the report said.
At Guilford County Juvenile Detention Center, youth reported being locked in their rooms for at least 22 hours a day. They reportedly referred to this as a “max” or “23-1” facility due to the severity of confinement.
At Cumberland Juvenile Detention Center, Dillon Juvenile Detention Center and Cabarrus Juvenile Detention Center, youth reported spending anywhere from 20-24 hours a day in their rooms, the report said. While some degree of confinement was also present at other facilities, these centers were among the worst.
A group of youth currently at the Cabarrus detention center filed a lawsuit against the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, Lassiter and others in January 2024 challenging the division’s use of solitary confinement in centers across the state and requesting they put a stop to it.
In February, The Carolina Journal reported that the case could be close to a settlement.
When asked by CPP about the lawsuit and whether Lassiter would like to comment, Debnam said: “In general, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety does not comment on pending litigation, and, consistent with that policy, will not comment on claims contained within this lawsuit.”
Not all of the DRNC report findings were negative.
Three facilities stood out as providing the best care in several areas. They were Rockingham Youth Development Center, Richmond-Jenkins Juvenile Detention Center and Alexander Regional Juvenile Detention Center. These facilities ensured youth spent significant time outside of their cells and interacting with other kids, contributing to more positive feedback from them, the report said.
Rockingham and Richmond-Jenkins are among the newest facilities that have opened within the past couple of years, Lassiter said.
Responses to DRNC’s findings
At Guilford and DCYH, two of the facilities with the worst reported conditions, leadership denied the regular use of solitary confinement, with each facility submitting a letter to DRNC in January 2026 in response to their findings. In Guilford’s letter, they claimed that youth were spending roughly 8.5 hours a day outside of their rooms at the time, and that they addressed the staffing shortage at their facility since DRNC’s most recent visit, but DRNC hasn’t been able to verify these claims yet, the report said.
In its letter, DCYH stated that while the facility was taking steps to maintain “adequate staffing levels” and had hired 10 additional staff members since DRNC’s most recent visit, DCYH was still facing a 45% vacancy rate for counselor positions at the facility.
DCYH also denied the existence of a room referred to as “The Hole,” despite reports from multiple youth saying otherwise.
“DCYH does not and will not place residents in any form of solitary confinement or ‘hole,’” DCYH said in its letter to DRNC. “DCYH does not have any rooms that are designated, labeled, or referred to as ‘the hole.’ We have Special Observation rooms that are designed for and used as mental health observation rooms.”
Matthew Debnam, communications officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, said the agency sent a letter to DCYH on March 17. In this letter, Lassiter said they instructed the facility to discontinue use of the room.
“We didn’t feel like those rooms should be used in the current condition that they’re in,” Lassiter said. “Right now, there’s nothing in the room at all, no furniture, no mattress, nowhere for the kid to sit. That’s not a practice that is allowed under our policies.”
Lassiter said they have clinicians currently working with the facility’s staff to modify their suicide watch protocol so it’s done in “a more professional way,” and the facility has been cooperative in addressing issues.
Madison County and DCYH appeared to be the only facilities with these kinds of cells, Carson said.
How did solitary confinement issues start?
A change in state law that became effective starting in August 2020 required any youth detainees under the age of 18 to be housed in a juvenile facility, even if they’ve been transferred to adult court, according to the NC DPS website. As of December 2024, youth that were transferred to adult court made up 43% of the state’s juvenile detention population, according to the 2024 annual report from the Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Those that have been transferred to adult court end up staying much longer than youth under juvenile jurisdiction. Lassiter said the average stay for youth under juvenile jurisdiction is roughly 20 days, while those appearing in adult court remain in a facility for an average of 279 days.
“It’s a very big difference,” Lassiter said. “How juvenile detention centers were originally set up were for kids that were going to be short-term stays while the court was trying to figure out what is the best thing to do with this young person moving forward. Juvenile detention centers weren’t really built or intended for the purpose of holding people long-term as we’re doing now, and that’s created some of the problems that you saw highlighted in the report, was that this population has really changed.”
Carson also acknowledged that the change in state law has affected the operation of these facilities.
Staff shortages, which were especially bad during the COVID-19 pandemic, also play a role, Lassiter said. During the pandemic, they lost roughly 70% of their workforce, and as more youth in the population have become stronger and “much more physically built,” more concerns from staff have arisen about working with them, Lassiter said.
These trends, along with the closure of a juvenile detention facility in Mecklenburg County in November 2022, which was the state’s largest facility at the time, created a “perfect storm” that contributed to some of the findings in DRNC’s report, he said.
Lassiter said his agency has been working to improve staff shortages since the pandemic. The facilities currently have an overall vacancy rate of 33%, and he said they’re currently working on sign-on bonuses, hiring fairs and brainstorming other ways to hire people.
A step-pay plan had been approved by the General Assembly three years ago but hasn’t been updated since then, so the starting salary for positions at these facilities has remained at $37,000, making it less competitive, Lassiter said.
“That’s about $18 or $19 an hour,” he said. “You have to have a four year degree and two years of experience working with kids, and when you can go work at Walmart for 20 dollars an hour, it doesn’t compute. We desperately need the General Assembly to do their job and pass a budget.”
Even with these challenges, Carson said it’s still no excuse for using solitary confinement.
“I understand that staff shortages are real and have a real impact on the operation of a facility, but using solitary confinement is just unacceptable,” Carson said. “Sometimes it appeared to us, as monitors, that part of the issue was that keeping kids in their cells had also seemed to have become normalized, in addition to staff shortages.”
Moving forward
Carson said the February report was only one step in a longer process to ensure that necessary changes are being made in juvenile detention centers across the state. DRNC plans to return to all of the facilities mentioned in the report to continue monitoring, she said, one of which they plan to visit this month.
The biggest things they’ll be looking at when they return are time-out-of-cell when it comes to disciplinary practices and access to education and special education services, Carson said.
“I’m not sure what we’ll find,” Carson said. “I’m not sure how much the facilities will have engaged with the findings and recommendations of the report. Each of the facilities also got their own monitoring debrief memos, so even before the report they knew what we were recommending and what we had found. When we’ve gone back to facilities previously, sometimes there were changes, sometimes there weren’t.”
The goal is to continue making progress in these facilities until all of the problems with solitary confinement and other issues are fixed, Carson said.
“We know we need to continue being in these facilities monitoring and continue in our advocacy work, so that these changes, these really important changes, can be advocated for and can be made, so that we’re treating our young people with more humanity and meeting their rights,” she said.
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