LOCKED UP, LEFT BEHIND

One morning last May, 16-year-old Abdul Anderson stood slouched against a wall at Cove Secure, a juvenile institution on the grounds of central Pennsylvania’s Torrance State Hospital. He was scheduled to be in class, but was stuck in a dayroom in a state of profound boredom.

The next moment, his head smashed into the wall behind him — a staffer headbutting him as the other teens froze, wide-eyed and staring.

The staffer threw Abdul flat on his back onto a table, a meaty forearm across his neck — then hurled him to the floor and pinned him in place.

A Philadelphia juvenile court judge had sentenced Abdul to a secure institution nine months earlier, with the goal of rehabilitating him, after the teen pleaded guilty to a string of car thefts.

That a counselor would assault Abdul there — and that his coworkers would appear to cover up the attack by blaming Abdul for making “disrespectful comments” that required the staffer to provide “redirection” — is not surprising given the long history of abuse, educational neglect, and coercion in Pennsylvania juvenile institutions.

For more than half a century, government officials and researchers have concluded that confining youth in institutions leads to worse outcomes — lower graduation rates, worse employment outcomes, more recidivism, and, later, a greater risk of adult incarceration. Moreover, abuse in juvenile institutions has proven to be endemic: In national surveys, upward of one in 14 youth in state facilities reported sexual victimization.

Philadelphia has pulled kids out of at least eight facilities in the last decade amid allegations of abuse or maltreatment.

Yet, the city incarcerates young people at a rate about four times the national average.

Last year, Philly locked up children at a rate higher than any of the largest U.S. cities — more than triple the rate of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Houston.

And, across Pennsylvania counties, Philadelphia incarcerates the most kids per capita.

While the city is home to 13% of Pennsylvania’s teenagers, it accounts for almost half the state’s bookings into juvenile detention.

Even among teens accused only of misdemeanors, Philly’s rate of detention admissions is triple the statewide norm, a state task force found.

Also contributing to the high population totals, teens often wait months in detention after being sentenced to state institutions or referred for residential psychiatric treatment — time that, unlike in the adult system, does not count toward their sentences.

Once they are finally transferred to serve their sentences, Philadelphia accounts for about 60% of the population in state-run youth facilities — in part because Philadelphia judges sentence teens to longer terms than their counterparts in any other county.

Nationally, youth incarceration peaked in 2000, after surging crime in the 1980s and early ’90s led to panics about juvenile superpredators — and, in turn, to tough-on-crime laws.

In the years since, crime fell. Leaders across the country acknowledged the harms of confining kids and teens, and pushed to shrink and shutter juvenile institutions.

That’s true in Philadelphia, too, which reduced the number of teens sentenced to institutions by 80% in the last decade.

Still, Philly remains an outlier.

Experts and system insiders say a driving factor is a culture in which locking up kids is still accepted as the norm — at a steep price. The cost of incarceration in a state institution is $347,000 per teen per year. Though juvenile arrests plummeted, the city and state have failed to reinvest the hundreds of millions of dollars saved into building out a continuum of programs and services that can serve kids in the community.

And it stands in sharp contrast to places such as New York — which in the last decade pulled hundreds of teens out of state institutions in favor of in-home services or small group homes in their communities.

Change like that requires state and local commitment, cooperation, and investment, said Gladys Carrion, who headed New York state’s child-welfare agency at the time. “What enabled me to depopulate the state system was that New York had invested in the continuum of care and had off-ramps at each point in the system [to divert kids from court or incarceration],” she said.

Those alternatives ranged from family therapy and after-school supervision and programming to nonsecure or moderate-security group homes within city neighborhoods, often in converted rowhouses.

The result was, “unless the young person really demonstrated a risk to public safety, the default was for them to stay in the community.”

In Philadelphia, the default is still confinement, said Nicole El, chief of the children and youth justice unit at the Defender Association of Philadelphia.

Recently, El said, a young client was held at Philadelphia’s Juvenile Justice Services Center for days over the alleged theft of his uncle’s dog — even though the incident had occurred nine months earlier, and the uncle and his pet had long since been reunited.

Those decisions are made by probation officials, who are required to assess teens for detention or release using a standardized rubric, based on the seriousness of the charge and the teen’s arrest history. But about 20% of the time, the officials override the assessment, usually in favor of detaining kids, according to 2019 data published by the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force.

All told, more than half of Philly minors who are arrested are detained — at least until a hearing.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia police will stop arresting kids for some crimes under new diversion program

But hearings are held only three days a week, and at those hearings only a fraction of youth are released.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said he was proud of the city’s greatly reduced reliance on youth incarceration during his tenure. On the other hand, he said, it shouldn’t be surprising that Philadelphia still has a higher rate than other places in Pennsylvania or cities such as New York, given Philly’s high poverty rate and gun violence crisis.

The number of minors arrested for gun violence in Philadelphia has spiked since the pandemic to highs not seen in well over a decade, including more than 40 arrests for nonfatal shootings and more than 26 for homicides in 2024.

First Assistant District Attorney Robert Listenbee said that increase has strained the system, and he blamed the state for not expanding its secure institutions fast enough to take in teens being sentenced in Philly.

All told, one in four Philadelphia juvenile arrests now involves a gun. Many do not involve violent crimes, and will result in a misdemeanor-level plea for gun possession, said Sarah Burke, assistant supervisor of the district attorney’s juvenile unit.

But first, those teens will be detained, she said, for at least the six to eight weeks it takes for forensics to be completed.

El, of the Defender Association, said the default of locking up kids is harmful.

“We as a system have decided that Philly kids — Philly kids being a code word for Black children from specific areas of the city — somehow need harsher punishments,” El said, “that they need more discipline, that we don’t want to give them a chance to make mistakes.”

In Philly, racial disparities exist in every stage of the juvenile system, with escalating impacts. Data published by the Pennsylvania Juvenile Court Judges Commission show that Black kids are about nine times more likely than white kids to be charged. They are 13 times more likely to be detained, and 20 times more likely to be sentenced to a secure institution.

Once kids are incarcerated, their rights are being routinely violated, according to lawsuits, inspection reports, and interviews with kids and their parents.

The Inquirer has identified more than 650 claims of sexual coercion and physical abuse in Pennsylvania-licensed facilities, based on 15 years of Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (DHS) inspection reports, criminal filings, and civil lawsuits. More than 40 staff have been charged in connection with abuses.

Most complaints about harm are not believed.

State inspectors logged more than 7,000 abuse allegations at youth residential facilities in the last decade, but concluded 96% could not be substantiated.

Leaders of Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services have for several years acknowledged the need to build out a continuum of services, including smaller, lower-security residential facilities, as a way to bring youth back from state institutions. The city has put out, and then canceled, at least four requests for proposals for since 2022 to run residential facilities in or near the city.

» READ MORE: Philly youth are subjected to illegal lockdowns in detention, city watchdog finds

The Inquirer requested interviews with Philadelphia DHS officials. Instead, Associate Deputy Mayor Jessica Shapiro sent written responses noting the city’s continued efforts, which include the opening of a new, nonsecure detention shelter. She said the challenge has been enlisting prospective contractors, who have been deterred by staffing shortages and high costs.

Philadelphia juvenile court and probation leaders also declined interviews, but in a written statement touted the recent decline in youth in institutions.

“There are still youth who have treatment needs that can only be served in a therapeutic, residential setting,” the statement said.

But a 2023 analysis published by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office concluded the system is not working as intended: Within five years, 57% of arrested youth are arrested again.

For kids like Abdul, who were charged with stealing cars, that rearrest rate jumps to 74%.

The year Abdul turned 15, he was grazed by a stray bullet on the street. Compared with the bullets that had killed his brothers — first Rashi, near their home, then Raul, in a Kensington bodega — he insisted this one was no big deal.

“My arm still worked perfectly,” he said.

Abdul hardly had time to process the mounting traumas: his mother’s addiction and incarceration, his father’s overdose death. He started skipping school, which led to truancy court, then foster care.

Finally, his aunt Shermaine Walker took him into her West Philly rowhouse. For Abdul, it was a relief. “I felt good. I was actually around family. She cooks every night and makes sure I got money in my pocket.”

But after Raul’s murder, in October 2022, he couldn’t stop replaying the chain of events.

The brothers were supposed to have headed to the beach for that unseasonably warm weekend.

“But I was mad at him and I told him, ‘I’m not going nowhere with you.’ So that day he went outside, and that’s when everything happened,” Abdul said. After that, “I just shut down.”

The next March — the same month Abdul was shot — he and a new group of friends learned, from YouTube, how to steal a car using only a USB cable and a screwdriver. Stealing a car together, he said later, seemed like a way to feel included and accepted.

Instead, Abdul was caught in the act.

It was his first arrest, and a nonviolent case — so, under Krasner’s juvenile justice policies, the prosecutor should have offered deferred adjudication. That’s a court-based program that allows for charges to be dropped and expunged if a kid successfully completes a term on probation.

Instead, Abdul ended up pleading to a felony.

By June, he had been arrested three more times in stolen cars — on one occasion colliding with a police car. It was an accident, Abdul said, but the prosecutor charged him with aggravated assault.

Now, he was locked up at the city-run secure detention center, where advocates have lodged complaints that youth are routinely locked in their rooms for days on end, in violation of state laws, and denied access to education.

Some staffers and young people recently held there describe a climate of pervasive violence.

It’s part of the culture, said Ahmad Tyler, a 16-year-old from the city’s East Germantown section. “There’s no way you can dodge it.”

He said some staff were helpful during his five-month detention, but others instigated attacks.

He said he watched, on more than one occasion, as a staffer offered a bounty of a cheesesteak to a teen to beat up a peer who had been disrespectful. He and other youth said this was known as “putting a cheesesteak on a kid’s head.”

Then, when the assault happens, he said, “The staff knows what’s going on but they’re not about to come help you.”

Two other teens also said they witnessed such transactions in the last year.

One staffer, who declined to be named for fear of professional retaliation, said she had personally witnessed it: “It’s like putting a hit out on a kid,” she said.

One 18-year-old boy, who declined to be named because his case is ongoing, said he was tempted by the bribe. But someone beat him to the punch. Staff then put the assailant and victim each in a five-day lockdown. “Then, they gave [the attacker] the cheesesteak.”

Abdul, a lanky, soft-spoken teen who spent four months at JJSC, said he, too, observed staff offering outside food as bait for fights.

But he was preoccupied with his own battles — what he said were constant physical threats. “It was bad,” he said. “I was fighting almost every day.”

Shapiro, the assistant deputy mayor, declined to address specific allegations but said the city investigates all reports of abuse, including reviewing video. “The safety of youth in our custody is paramount,” she said in a statement.

Such allegations are not unheard of in juvenile facilities.

» READ MORE: Nearly 70 people join juvenile institution sex abuse lawsuits

In Miami, an investigation found, teens called the practice “honey-bunning” because the typical bribe was a prepackaged pastry.

And in Philadelphia, such allegations date back at least a decade. In 2014, a state inspector wrote up an incident, caught on video at the juvenile detention center, in which a staffer unlocked a teen’s room, enabling six others to rush in and assault the youth. That staff member resigned.

For much of 2023, the facility saw crisis-level overcrowding. Detained youth were forced to sleep on the floor of an admissions area, and in the gym.

A high youth detention population is a red flag, said Tom Woods, of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit that has led efforts in jurisdictions across the country, including Philadelphia, to reduce reliance on detention.

“Detention ends up being the backup, the spillover for everything else,” he said. “If you want to see how a youth justice system operates in a place, look at how many kids are in detention. … They’re absorbing the failures and the shortcomings of the rest of the system.”

In Philly’s juvenile hall, staffers said, at times they were assigned a dozen or two dozen teens — far more than the “safe” 1-to-6 ratio. That would trigger a lockdown.

A longtime staffer who retired in November 2023 said, in the months before he left, “There were floors that were sometimes not staffed at all. There were days I was there when there were no administrators, no shift manager, no supervisors.”

Shapiro said staffing is consistently sufficient to keep the facility safe and to meet state requirements.

One juvenile hall staffer who retired in 2023, Rasheem Reese, attributed the lockdowns he witnessed mostly to violent incidents.

But he said it was not up to staff to create a calmer climate.

“These are criminals,” he said of the teens, many of whom are detained awaiting adjudication. If anything, he said, the juvenile hall is “too nice” already.

Last September, a judge ordered Abdul into the custody of the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, which runs high-security, razor-wire-trimmed institutions called Youth Development Centers.

Those are the legacy of two centuries of investment in youth incarceration in Pennsylvania, which opened one of the nation’s first juvenile institutions, the House of Refuge, in 1828.

Allegations of abuse emerged from the start — though, often, they were not believed.

Abdallah Lateef, deputy director of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, said abuse is endemic to juvenile institutions, but often overlooked.

Even when abuse or harassment is substantiated, in a majority of cases staff are neither fired nor prosecuted, according to a recent analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Lateef said that, back in 1982, he personally witnessed abuse as a teenage resident at Glen Mills School, a military-style reform school in Delaware County that over the years housed hundreds of Philadelphia teens.

“And it was not restricted to Glen Mills. It was happening in every juvenile facility,” Lateef said.

He also recalled the assaults at VisionQuest — a boot camp-type institution that also welcomed multiple generations of Philly youth.

In 1994, the Department of Justice found a 20-year history of credible allegations of abuse at VisionQuest in Franklin, Pa. In 2016, a staffer smashed a child’s head through a wall at a North Philadelphia outpost.

Philadelphia did not stop contracting with VisionQuest until 2017.

The pattern repeats at other residential youth facilities. There had been a dozen reported rapes in a decade at Wordsworth, a psychiatric institution in Philadelphia — but it was closed only after a teen was killed in a struggle with staffers in 2016.

As for Glen Mills, abuse there made the news as early as 1908. In the 1990s, Chicago pulled its youth out following beatings by counselors. But Philly did not put a hold on admissions until 2018, after a teen was slammed onto a table and choked, telling staff, “I can’t breathe.” The state revoked its license in 2019, after an Inquirer expose.

The providers that Philadelphia contracts with today have also faced serious allegations.

For instance, Abraxas has faced a string of lawsuits alleging physical and sexual abuse — and, last year, was cited by DHS for abuse and improper restraints, resulting in injury to a child and a staffer’s resignation. Last year, Philadelphia inked a contract with Abraxas to run an 18-bed shelter for delinquent youth.

Today, the number of youth sent to institutions is near the lowest it’s been in decades. But because lower-security options have closed, Philly teens are now likely to end up in the high-security state centers.

State data show 84% of Philly teens in state institutions last September were deemed low or moderate risk, and two-thirds were in an institution for the first time.

A task force reported only 39% of juveniles sentenced to institutions had committed a crime against a person.

“No kid should be placed [in an institution] for property crime, ever,” said Temple University criminal justice professor Caterina Roman. “There is no existing data that says placing a young person for a property crime is rehabilitative. It is more harmful to incarcerate a juvenile on a property crime than it is helpful to society.”

In a pending federal lawsuit, the nonprofit Disability Rights Network alleged widespread physical and emotional abuse in the state youth centers — where kids were restrained more than 1,000 times a year, resulting in black eyes, cuts, even a fractured orbital bone.

The lawsuit alleged that staff intentionally provoked youth into physical fights, then labeled the kids as aggressive and in need of further treatment.

The state centers have been running at about 110% of their capacity, forcing Pennsylvania to outsource to private facilities such as Cove Secure — where Abdul was headbutted and tackled last year.

Abdul’s public defender, Brendan Lokka, said a Cove counselor alerted him to the assault — and warned him that Cove appeared prepared to “cover it up” and did not plan to fire the staffer. He said the counselor urged him to subpoena the video.

The video, Lokka said, was worse than he had feared.

The first thing he noticed was that, despite a schedule that had Abdul in class, “There’s not a book, no instruction. Nothing. It’s just a room where they’re watching TV for hours.”

Then, there was sudden violence — the staffer, Daniel Isenberg, “throwing Abdul like a rag doll.”

There was no video of what happened after Abdul returned to his room, but a written report says staff tackled him to the floor, placing him in “a multiple supine extension.” The report depicts the 16-year-old as the instigator, saying a “disrespectful comment … caused staff to enter his room and push him to the floor.”

The last video clip shows Abdul placed in a small room with his assailant to hug it out.

The paperwork says Abdul requested the meeting because the two had “good rapport.”

Abdul denied that. He said Isenberg had threatened him before.

Attempts to reach Isenberg by phone and through a letter sent to his home were not successful.

Darren Stiffler, Cove chief executive, said in an email that Cove’s school is nationally accredited, and includes 5½ instructional hours each day.

He said Cove “has a zero-tolerance policy for harassment or inappropriate behavior” and Isenberg was fired.

After the incident, Abdul’s counselor at Cove recommended him for release. But prosecutors argued that he should stay put.

“His overall adjustment while in placement had been poor,” Listenbee wrote in an email to the court.

Abdul’s aunt, Shermaine Walker, wanted him home.

“He’s a good kid. He’s got a good heart. He’s got a good head,” she said. “Following people gets him in trouble.”

The assault at Cove was May 9, and Lokka said he filed a complaint to the state’s abuse-reporting hotline, ChildLine, within a few days.

Chief Defender Keisha Hudson also wrote to the state Department of Human Services and Philadelphia court leadership to request a meeting about Cove’s handling of the incident. She said she never received a response. DHS said that it did respond.

Almost two months later, on June 28, the state DHS visited Cove to investigate. By then, there was a second allegation of a staffer tackling a child there.

The state’s report noted that both staffers were dismissed and that DHS had approved Cove’s corrective plan, which involved quarterly trainings.

Such corrective plans are the most common outcome when DHS uncovers abuse at institutions.

An investigating grand jury — convened after Delaware County’s juvenile detention center was closed in 2021 amid reports of widespread abuse — raised questions about whether the corrective plans were sufficient.

Under one such plan of correction, a staffer who had threatened a pregnant teen — saying she wanted to punch her hard enough to cause a miscarriage — was permitted to “self-train” by watching a PowerPoint presentation.

A DHS spokesperson said the agency “has several layers of oversight in place” and “works closely with providers and counties to ensure that they are adhering to the plan of correction and that counties are meeting our responsibility of serving children and families.”

When state authorities do uncover abuse, they don’t share that directly with local authorities, Philadelphia’s Office of the Youth Ombudsman noted in a recent report.

Cynthia Figueroa, a former Philadelphia human services commissioner who closed intake or removed youth from four residential facilities, recalled how that information gap compounded the challenge of monitoring how youth were treated in faraway institutions.

She recalled visiting George Junior Republic in Western Pennsylvania and finding “a credible, well-run place.”

Later, the public defenders shared video with her showing a kid was placed into isolation, while people went in and out of his room to beat him up. “That’s when I was like, ‘We’re done. No more Philly kids there.’”

That didn’t prevent other counties from sending kids there, she noted, or result in revocation of the institution’s state license. “It’s like, who’s accountable when an incident happened? Is the state shutting it down? Are we?”

As for state-run facilities, Pennsylvania’s DHS releases even less information about incidents there, though it does post a federally required audit of sex-abuse and harassment allegations.

A DHS spokesperson said its performance reviews are internal. The spokesperson said county defenders, probation officers, child-welfare officials, and parents are responsible for visiting and checking on youth in state facilities.

In 2019, after the explosive Glen Mills allegations came to light, state leaders convened a bipartisan task force to study the juvenile justice system.

The group called for increased oversight of juvenile institutions, and reached consensus on major reforms aimed at reducing juvenile confinement by 39% in five years. Proposals included raising the minimum age for most offenses from 10 to 13, creating a presumption against sentences longer than six months, and barring detention of youth under 14 or accused only of nonviolent offenses.

Last fall, the state legislature did pass a handful of juvenile justice measures. But in the wake of a spike in youth crime in the pandemic, the task force’s boldest reform proposals went nowhere.

Nationally, politicians are once again looking to crack down on youth crime.

Lateef, of the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, senses a throwback to the superpredator era.

“The same thing is playing itself out all over again 30 years later,” he said. “The numbers have decreased, but the public fear of violent crime and crime committed by youth remains.”

At Abdul’s hearing last May, Lokka played the video of the assault.

“People were crying,” Lokka said.

The prosecution agreed to Abdul’s release after all, and he was allowed home on GPS monitoring. He felt more confident after his time at Cove, despite how it ended.

“I was doing therapy there, so I learned a lot,” he said. “I let my emotions get the best of me, and I gotta think before I react.”

But the odds were against him: Among Philadelphia youth with two or more prior arrests, 80% are rearrested, according to the district attorney’s office.

Entering the new school year, as a freshman in a West Philadelphia public school, Abdul harbored hopes of going on to college.

The bulky monitor strapped to his ankle actually helped him to stay accountable, he said. But it did not make reintegrating any easier. Some people, he said, notice it and assume he’s a bad kid. “I’m not bad,” he said. “I messed up.”

By November, he was once again missing school and failing classes.

His aunt Dana Walker said later that she questioned Abdul about what was going on, and learned he’d needed money for school clothes. She wished she’d known, she said. She would have tried to help.

But by then he had been arrested — in another stolen car case. He spent almost a month in detention, staying there through Thanksgiving.

Then, Abdul got a reprieve. The prosecutor had missed an important deadline, so the case was dismissed. The prosecutor told Lokka he was planning to refile, but for now he was free.

Abdul left the courtroom, telling his aunt of the latest violence he’d witnessed in detention — one kid choking another until he was red-faced and gasping. Abdul said he’d gotten in trouble for trying to intervene.

Lokka told him to focus on preparing for his next court date. “Everything has to be perfect,” he warned.

Abdul was still in the juvenile detention uniform of navy sweats and plastic slides as he walked out into the frosty December morning. His aunt wished she’d brought him a jacket.

“I don’t care about any of that,” he said. “I’m home.”

This article was supported in part by funding from the Stoneleigh Foundation, a philanthropic organization seeking to improve the life outcomes of young people. Inquirer articles are created independently of donor support.