Riot at Illinois Youth Center caused serious injury

ST. CHARLES TOWNSHIP – A riot among youths detained at the Illinois Youth Center at St. Charles on April 19 resulted in a serious head injury to a staff member and renewed criticisms that neither staff nor detainees are safe at the facility.

“One staff member was treated for non-life threatening injuries after a disturbance at IYC-St. Charles on April 19,” Illinois Department of Corrections spokeswoman Lindsey Hess said in an email. “The [Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice] is working with [Illinois Department of Corrections] to complete a full external investigation and cannot provide any further details at this time.”

Ashley Landrus, a juvenile justice specialist at the Illinois Youth Center and union president of Local 416 for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the incident erupted about 5 p.m., when one group of youths in one cottage saw another group walking across the campus, coming from dinner to return to their cottage.

The facility holds 138 boys with an average age of 17, but staff members look after incarcerated youthful offenders from age 13 through 21, Landrus said.

“They had two staff monitoring 20 to 25 youths who were recreating inside their unit,” Landrus said. “They had a planned attack of what they were going to do. They had rocks in socks, bricks, mop sticks and broom handles. They overrode the staff, went into a secured staff office and pressed the emergency gate button to get out of their unit to go attack the other youths.”

The staff member who was grievously injured arrived in a security van to “a sea of kids … roughly 40 to 50 kids all now fighting each other and one set is armed,” Landrus said.

There is no protocol or directive as to how to handle a situation like that – other than to quell the melee, Landrus said.

Staff are not armed and only some are allowed to carry pepper spray, Landrus said.

“He got out of his van. He said the youths surrounded him with bricks and broomsticks and all of a sudden, he felt a smack on the back of his head,” Landrus said. “The kid hit him in the back of his head with a mop stick and split his head open.”

‘They split his head open’

Landrus said she was not on duty during the riot, but she was called to Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva that night.

“When I went into the hospital, they asked me if I was OK seeing blood,” Landrus said. “I walked in and he was laying down and they were trying to control the bleeding from the back of the left side of his head. … They split his head open all the way to the skull.”

A Freedom of Information Act request to the Illinois State Police regarding the incident still is pending.

Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association, said the agency – which independently monitors correctional facilities, policies and practices – had heard about the incident at IYC-St. Charles.

“As soon as we heard about the incident, we are going to there and find out as much as we can,” Vollen-Katz said. “We will have a report in the near term.”

Consent decree

Landrus said the safety issues at St. Charles exist to some extent at all the state's juvenile detention centers. She said staff members blame a 2012 consent decree from a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of five incarcerated juveniles.

According to the consent decree, the state is supposed to address mental health, safety, welfare and education services in its juvenile detention centers.

The state’s facilities have been regularly monitored to see how they are meeting the new expectations, according to federal court filings.

“Security and education staff shortages and lack of staff training have hampered change, and particularly at IYC-St. Charles, have interrupted education and general programming,” according to ACLU attorney Lindsay Miller’s testimony.

“Understaffed facilities cannot successfully manage youth, and chronic understaffing and turnover has resulted in increased youth idleness, frustration and misbehavior,” Miller said.

Miller also called for the state to provide adequate funding.