Children in Dallas County custody subject to unjust dayslong seclusion, state probe finds

Children in Dallas County’s juvenile detention center were unlawfully secluded for days, circumventing due process and best practices for juvenile justice, according to a yearlong investigation by state inspectors into allegations of inhumane treatment and neglect.
The Dallas Morning News obtained an executive summary of the report by the Office of the Inspector General at the Texas Juvenile Justice Department early Monday. Michael Griffiths, interim director of the county Juvenile Department, described the findings detailed in the summary as “inexcusable.”
“The report is troubling to read,” Griffiths said in an interview. “But, it is good to know since mid-July of this year, all of those things [raised in the report] have been corrected.”
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Griffiths suggested some of the problems were attributable to the “misuse” of a now-discontinued unit in the detention center and protocols enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, including reductions in staff.
The Juvenile Board — the nine-member body that oversees the county’s juvenile justice system — has not yet received the full report. Griffiths said he has submitted a formal request for the full report.
The executive summary is seven pages. Barbara Kessler, a state juvenile department spokesperson, said the full report is more than 100 pages long.
Kessler declined to provide a copy of the full report, directing The News to submit a public records request. The newspaper’s request for the report was pending Monday morning.
According to the executive summary, the county Juvenile Department unjustly used a “special needs unit” at the Dr. Jerome McNeil Jr. Detention Center, where children with disciplinary problems were secluded for up to five days and locked in their cells without access to an education, exercise, outdoor recreation or showers. The McNeil Detention Center is in the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center.
This caused “the inevitable result of frequent confinement of juvenile residents inside their cells and created systemic neglect in which multiple facility staff, educators, and administrators (past and present) were aware,” the executive summary says.
Judge Cheryl Lee Shannon, chair of the Juvenile Board, did not immediately provide comment on the findings. Shannon was presiding over jury selection for a trial Monday morning.
Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins, who is a member of the board, did not immediately respond to a request for comment via email through his spokeswoman. Commissioner Andrew Sommerman, who is also on the board, did not immediately provide comment.
The publication of the long-awaited report’s findings comes after the resignation of Darryl Beatty, the former Juvenile Department director who resigned days after an unannounced state inspection, and DeAndra Jones, a deputy director who oversaw the detention center.
The report found that the “special needs unit” had been in place since 2009, preceding Beatty. The unit “helps youth who are on formal probation with a mental health diagnosis which could lead to more criminal behavior and affect their ability to follow probation guidelines,” according to the county’s website.
State standards allow for a child to be placed in “safety-based seclusion” when they are determined to be a threat to staff or another child. In Dallas, once a child was removed from safety-based seclusion, inspectors found that the child was then placed in the “special needs unit,” where they could be isolated for up to five more days.
The department said it had disbanded the program in August 2023, the report says.
Beatty, who had been in charge of the juvenile department since 2018, previously told the board he was unaware of children secluded for lengthy periods of time until an interview with The News. The report, however, rebuked Beatty, saying he should have been aware of the “special needs unit.”
The inspector said that while Beatty didn’t have an “active role in creating the policies and procedure that allowed for neglect of juvenile residents, he had ample opportunity to take corrective action.”
Beatty did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
To ensure this outcome does not resurface, Griffiths plans to present a proposed “disciplinary seclusion policy” — something the department has operated without since 2017 — during the board’s next regular meeting in October, he said.
“We want to have the community’s confidence, the commissioners court’s confidence, and the juvenile board’s confidence in the operation of the agency,” Griffiths said.
State inspectors launched the investigation last July, weeks after a three-month investigation by The News on poor conditions in the juvenile justice detention center.
The report also said detention staff falsified or lacked observation sheets. Commissioners previously subpoenaed the Juvenile Department for its “observation sheets,” or status checks on each child in county detention from Jan. 1, 2023 to April 4, 2023.
The findings are likely to bolster calls from Lewis Jenkins and Sommerman for a “top-to-bottom” review of the juvenile system by a third party.
Griffiths has said he would bring a draft “scope of work” — a proposal listing what elements a third-party agency would evaluate — for the board to consider during its next regular meeting in October.