This story references suicide.
As Virginians navigated the first few weeks of 2025 and considered their hopes for the new year, a boy incarcerated at the Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center in Chesterfield County wrote a letter to his mother.
“I am being treated like a caged animal!” he wrote on a Sunday early in January from the only state-run juvenile correctional center. “Something needs to happen with this facility, there is NO rehabilitation at all.”
Subsequent letters noted his mother’s visitation being canceled, frequent “lockdowns” impeding his ability to attend school and treatment plan meetings, and not being allowed to shower. While being restricted to his room, he also wrote that he didn’t receive dinner on Feb. 1.
VPM News is not identifying the boy or his mother due to concerns over retribution.
This week, the boy’s writing was submitted to the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice Board and the state’s Commission on Youth, along with a series of complaints against the Bon Air facility and DJJ.
“We remained on lockdown all day,” the boy wrote on Feb. 9.
It was Super Bowl Sunday, the day 11 other boys broke out of their cells at Bon Air JCC and set a fire, according to a 911 call obtained by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. VPM News submitted a FOIA request to Chesterfield police for the same 911 call and transcript, but was denied. The county cited an ongoing criminal investigation that included minors’ personally identifiable information for the exemption.
“Staff left us on the unit, in our rooms while there was a fire somewhere in the facility,” he wrote the same day the Kansas City Chiefs met the Philadelphia Eagles on the gridiron. “We could smell the fumes of whatever was on fire.”
DJJ’s mission is to enhance “public safety by providing effective accountability measures and intervention for youth.” But meeting its mission is complicated by persistent staffing issues at the facility, one of the largest juvenile correctional centers in the country. A state Senate report last year indicated that the staff vacancy rate was 50.8%.
The boys were reportedly screaming and throwing things on that Sunday in February, leading a guard — the only JCC staff member on duty in the unit — to barricade herself in an office and call for help.
“It is a lot of commotion but still can’t see them ... they are jumping all around ... . [They] know [police] are here and are prepping for them to come inside ... saying it's their Super Bowl and they are going to win,” a transcript of the 911 call reads.
Chesterfield police, fire and EMS were sent to the youth facility. A police spokesperson told VPM News pepperball guns were used while responding to the disturbance.
The call to local emergency agencies wasn’t a result of understaffing, said Melodie Martin, public information officer for DJJ. Instead, she said, it was due to Virginia code barring department staff from using practices available to law enforcement — like pepperballs or other chemical agents.
The Super Bowl Sunday disarray wasn’t an isolated incident: Between Feb. 1, 2024, and Feb. 10, 2025, Chesterfield fire and EMS said it responded to 45 calls from Bon Air JCC. Chesterfield police also told VPM News it had been called to the facility 29 times between Feb. 1, 2024, and March 28, 2025.
Call logs indicate law enforcement responded to two calls in 2024 related to suicide. And since the February incident, DJJ confirmed fires at the facility on March 2 and 6.
In a press release following the most recent reported incident, DJJ said fires are a “routine occurrence” at the Bon Air facility. They’re being set by “repeat offenders,” and the officials expect an uptick in similar incidents until “self-regulation occurs on a rehabilitative level for this group.”
‘This is a crisis’
For Andy Block, youth acting out at Bon Air suggests the facility has reverted to a state not too different from when he was first appointed director of DJJ by Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat.
Block is a longtime legal advocate for youth in the carceral system and currently leads the State and Local Government Policy Clinic at the University of Virginia. He said his appointment raised eyebrows, given the majority of his career had been dedicated to keeping youth out of the system.
Between 2014 and 2019, when he oversaw DJJ, Block became associated with significant reforms resulting in Virginia’s juvenile correctional facility population being cut in half.
Reforms implemented during his tenure — like investing in shorter-stay residential centers, rehabilitative programming and replacing juvenile correctional facilities with community and evidence-based programs — were catalyzed by a child taking his own life at Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center in Powhatan County just before Block started the job.
Under Block, Beaumont JCC closed in 2017 as DJJ focused on reducing the use of state-operated juvenile detention centers.
“I'm worried that could happen again,” Block told VPM News in late March, referring to the boy’s death. “When you have kids locked in their cells all day, when you don't have enough staff to take care of the kids, when you have old — outdated facilities that are potentially overcrowded, it's really hard to do good work and it's all too easy for something terrible to happen.”
Block said he knows how challenging work inside DJJ can be: The population of kids at Bon Air JCC is “a very vulnerable, complicated population of kids who obviously have engaged in high-risk, and often dangerous and violent behavior — but also have lots of challenges themselves.”
Challenges, Block said, like exposure to trauma, behavioral health issues, learning disabilities and more.
“Bad things happened, even on our best day, and bad things can happen even in the current [DJJ] administration's best day,” Block said. “To me, this is a crisis. And that's a strong word to use, but I think it's a fair word to use.”
Acknowledging the issues
Valerie Slater, executive director of RISE for Youth and a former juvenile justice attorney with Legal Aid Justice Center, has repeatedly expressed concern over the facility’s conditions.
“We already know that when children are incarcerated for long periods of time, it's detrimental,” Slater said about “room restrictions,” a DJJ tactic that places individuals in their rooms alone for various amounts of time. Some advocates, incarcerated youth and their families have referred to this approach as “lockdown,” a term officials have disavowed.
“Imagine being incarcerated and left in your room for days at a time,” Slater continued. “It's demoralizing. It is truly deteriorating the mental health of these young people.”
'The voices of the children, the voices of the families — they cannot be discounted.'
This week, Slater submitted a series of complaints from youth and their families — including the boy’s journal detailing life inside Bon Air JCC — to the DJJ board and the state’s Commission on Youth.
In her advocacy, Slater said she regularly faces denial of the problems.
“I can beat the drum, I can raise the alarm. I can continue to say that things aren't right and it can be challenged. But you can't challenge the voices of the impacted,” Slater told VPM News about the journal. “The voices of the children, the voices of the families — they cannot be discounted.”
She wondered aloud how the issues at Bon Air could be resolved, if leaders of the institution “refuse to acknowledge they exist.”
‘They want to help kids’
A third-party audit by The Moss Group, which DJJ commissioned, assessed Bon Air JCC’s culture. The review, released about a year ago, highlighted the idea that "idleness and boredom" in confinement could lead to increased violence.
The audit was first made public after WTVR’s Tyler Layne obtained the report through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Moss Group found the following issues contributing to problems for incarcerated youth, staff and the overall culture of the Bon Air JCC and DJJ: Critically low staffing levels; staff fatigue; decisions made in opposition to staff input; halted or reformatted education, behavioral health and vocational programs; and youth restricted almost entirely to individual cells.
“The current staff-to-resident ratio creates a safety concern—for staff and the resident population,” the report on Bon Air asserted in spring 2024. The report also noted that Bon Air staff enjoy the work they do and are “aligned with the mission to improve the lives of kids who are in [the facility].”
Advocates and experts agree on this: The staff is dedicated, though DJJ has noted that the facility’s population could increase at a “greater rate” after revising its length-of-stay guidelines under DJJ Director Amy Floriano’s leadership.
“They come to this work because they want to help kids,” said Amy Walters, senior attorney and co-interim director of the youth justice program the Legal Aid Justice Center. “But the conditions that they're trying to work in right now are really impossible for anybody to do well, because they're so short staffed, they get extra shifts, overtime and they're just overextended.”
In line with Virginia code, one direct care staff member with current certifications, including first aid and CPR, must be on duty at all times for every 16 juveniles at Bon Air. The 2024 audit said that the staffing plan was not observed.
DJJ spokesperson Martin told VPM News that as of March 12, 170 youth were being detained at the facility.
According to a department report from last year, the total number of juvenile correctional specialists was 111. Before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, the total number of filled juvenile correctional specialists positions — who at the time were referred to as residential specialists — was 245.
According to a DJJ job posting, a juvenile correctional specialist at Bon Air is responsible for providing “direct care to residents in a secure correctional environment,” ensuring “orderly facility operations” and “the safety of the youth, visitors, and staff.”
At Bon Air JCC, youth are kept under 24-7 supervision, and the starting salary for a JCS position is $44,100 a year.
During the 2025 Virginia General Assembly session, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin introduced a budget amendment allocating $1 million dollars to DJJ for a $2,231 across-the-board salary increase for security and residential specialist positions to help address employment vacancy rates.
Youth rehabilitation
While addressing staffing shortages is crucial as the population at Bon Air JCC grows, advocates emphasize that simply hiring more staff won’t fully resolve the facility's challenges.
Walters said defense attorneys, incarcerated youth and their families claim children are not being given regular access to therapeutic and educational activities while at Bon Air.
“All the things we would want our youth to be receiving from the state while incarcerated for the goal of their rehabilitation — all these are restricted in one way or the other,” Walters said. “Youth are reporting that they're on lockdowns multiple times a week, multiple times a month, and during this time, they're confined to their rooms for 23 or 24 hours a day.”
DJJ noted in its 2024-2026 strategic plan that employment shortages and increased staff turnover are being compounded by noncompetitive salaries. That could exhaust the facility’s established capacity and could “impact provisions of effective rehabilitative services.”
“I think staffing is a huge portion of it, because the people's relationships and the ability to support youth engagement, pro-social activities, therapeutic activities, education — these are all the keys to their success,” Walters said. “Short staffing definitely inhibits all of that.”
Walters said her organization and DJJ’s Floriano have fundamentally different beliefs. Instead of focusing resources on gang identification and intervention, she said, Bon Air should center its work on rehabilitative methods. The duration of a minor’s stay at the facility is also a point of contention.
Floriano declined to be interviewed for this story, and a department spokesperson did not offer answers to a list of questions VPM News submitted in late March.
Under Floriano’s leadership in April 2024, Bon Air JCC embraced a Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support methodology — a system that incentivizes positive behavior — and moved away from a community treatment model. Implementation, DJJ noted, is dependent on staff and positive reinforcement.
Walters said she doesn’t have strong feelings about the potential of the PBIS program.
“Like anything,” she said, “it requires really good staffing and fidelity to the program to be successful. As we know, [Bon Air doesn’t] have that staffing, and so [they] can't give kids direct feedback, rewards — all the things that that system is built on.”
Part 3 will be published next week, focusing on the Bon Air facility’s history and how other states manage juvenile incarceration.
