This case is about the District of Columbia’s failure to meet the rehabilitative and treatment needs of children in its custody and instead needlessly and unlawfully extending the time these children spend in jail-like settings.
The District of Columbia’s juvenile delinquency system is designed to be centered on rehabilitation over punishment. It seeks to “promote youth development,” “preserve and strengthen families,” “place a premium on the rehabilitation of children,” and “hold the government accountable for the provision of reasonable rehabilitative services.” D.C. Code § 16-2301.02(2), (3), (5), (7). These goals are to be achieved in the “least restrictive settings necessary.” Id. § 16-2301.02(9).
In line with these principles, when a child is adjudicated to be delinquent, the Family Court may commit the child to the custody of the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (“DYRS”), which then becomes responsible to care for the child and meet the child’s rehabilitative needs via an appropriate placement.
DYRS's placement process has entirely broken down. DYRS delays each child’s assessment and the development of each child’s individualized treatment plan, and sometimes never conducts assessments or creates plans at all. These failings result in delays to each child’s placement in a facility that can meet the rehabilitative and treatment needs of the child. These delays last for months, and in the meantime, the children awaiting placement languish at the Youth Services Center (“YSC”)—a jail-like facility that is crowded, violent, and harmful to children at a critical time in their development. As DYRS Director Sam Abed has explained at a D.C. Council Committee roundtable, YSC is “not a treatment facility, it’s a detention center.” It is “akin to a jail in the adult system.” YSC thus does not, and cannot, provide the type of rehabilitative services and programming that the children need and to which they are legally entitled.
In addition to harming children by delaying their rehabilitative programming and leaving them stuck in the jail-like conditions of YSC, the District's failures also unlawfully prolong children’s detention, as they extend the overall time that children are held in restrictive settings. This results in children being separated from their communities and families for longer than necessary and compounds the known harms of detention on children’s emotional and neurological development.
In October 2024, together with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, we sued the District for DYRS's widespread failure to promptly move the children committed to its care into appropriate rehabilitative placements. These failures violate the D.C. Code's mandate that DYRS conduct an initial assessment within 3 days of the child's commitment to DYRS custody and develop an individualized treatment plan within 14 days thereafter—deadlines the agency consistently fails to meet. DYRS’s failures also violate the children’s constitutional due process rights in two ways. First, placement delays violate due process because they deny children the treatment and rehabilitative services to which they are entitled and which are the entire point of their commitment to DYRS custody. Second, forcing children to languish for needless months in YSC subjects them to unconstitutional punishment by extending the overall time they must spend in secure detention settings. The children cannot begin accruing credit toward their release into less restrictive placements unless and until they begin their rehabilitative work at their initial placement.
Our clients' experiences illustrate these systemic failures. Plaintiffs D.J. and K.Y. are both sixteen years old and awaiting placements. D.J. has been at YSC awaiting placement since September 4, 2024, while K.Y. has been waiting since July 29, 2024. K.Y. has trouble sleeping at night due to his PTSD. Although DYRS determined that K.Y. requires a placement that can provide him individualized therapy, he has been held at YSC—where he has no access to such a service—for three months and counting.
Shortly after filing the complaint, we sought to certify a class action to obtain relief for all the children committed to DYRS's care and detained at YSC awaiting placement.