A new report from Congress has raised the alarm about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention, rather than getting treatment.

“Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages,” released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care.

“This should shock America’s conscience,” Ossoff says. “Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need.”

  • sparkles@piefed.zipEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Yes well…yes. Very easy for these kids to fall through the cracks. I imagine more so when a profit motive is involved.

    • Mirshe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Consider that a lot of these kids are either poor or nonwhite or both, as well.

      • sparkles@piefed.zipEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        You are right. I did fieldwork in a rich school which was very white. They had technicians just to sit with their DD population (behavioral or no) while they outplaced…every.single.one. Then I worked in a poor city school for a couple of years. Where many kids are multi-lingual. Lots of poverty. The behavior problems there were not outplaced. They were remediated as possible, but there were so, so many concentrated into that with limited resources. By the way, outpacing is hella expensive. So the poor kids grow up seeing their peers with conduct disorders or developmental disabilities. The system in those districts is much more strained, they fight against placements because it limits what resources they do have, therefore the large behavioral population has less to work with AND systemic hurdles by admin. So they stay in general education as long as they can, fall behind, engage in increased and varied maladaptive behavior…because they need services from the get go and basically it’s like “there’s a line and we still might say no even though every single person in this line needs help.” A real case of haves and have-nots.