The board tasked with overseeing Rutherford County’s Juvenile Detention Center sets its sights on reform in the new year

The new oversight board tasked with reforming Rutherford County’s juvenile detention center met for the third time Monday. So far, the board has been trying to better understand the inner workings of the detention center.

It has come under scrutiny for placing children in solitary confinement under conditions a federal judge later called inhumane.  

More: Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.

The five-member board was put in place to bring greater accountability to the county’s long-troubled juvenile justice system by taking control of the facility away from the juvenile court judge.

Board member Michael McDonald questioned what the detention center was doing to truly rehabilitate kids. 

“When we have young people come through detention centers, it’s a right of passage to the prisons,” McDonald says. “In fact, there are many that might even advocate and say that we do have a school-to-prison pipeline, and detention centers are literally a bridge line to that.”

Lynn Duke, who has been the director of the facility since 2001, told the board that there is currently no method of tracking how many kids from the detention center end up in adult facilities.

“There’re young people that come in one time, and they never come back,” Duke says. “There’s some it takes a couple of times before they figure out. And then there’s those that are going to continue through the system and and visit all of the fun facilities that Rutherford County has.”

The first meetings were to lay the groundwork before the new year, when the board plans to review the detention center’s standard operating procedures. For nearly a decade, those procedures included an illegal policy for jailing kids.