A Hampton Roads mother says after spending months inside Virginia’s largest and only youth correctional facility, her son wants to warn other kids not to end up where he is.
His shift toward advocacy, according to her, is a result of trauma — not rehabilitation.
“He writes [to] me, he tells me, ‘Mom, I helped this kid. He was having a hard time. I'm talking to him through a cell, trying to calm him down,’” she said. “He's encouraging in there to other kids that are going through the same things that he's going through.”
Her son, she says, has learned what his rights are while incarcerated at Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center under Virginia’s Department of Juvenile Justice. The mom adds that her son files his own grievances and has avoided disciplinary action despite being exposed to dangerous conditions.
VPM News is not identifying the family due to concerns about retribution.
Last week, the state’s Commission on Youth, made up of bipartisan lawmakers, penned a letter to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin calling for an independent review into systemic problems at Bon Air JCC, citing critically low staffing levels resulting in long periods of confinement, a lack of regular access to education, mental health treatment, recreation or rehabilitative programming.
In the letter, the commission warned: “These practices are harmful to a young person’s ability to grow in a healthy and rehabilitative way.”
Exploring the root causes
Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center, like many other youth detention centers across the country, is in crisis. Critically low staffing has reportedly forced the facility to restrict school, therapy and enrichment programming — leaving youth idle, bored and isolated.
Earlier this month, Virginia DJJ Director Amy Floriano acknowledged in her 130-page presentation to lawmakers that the department has exhausted staffing remedies within their control.
“Every area necessary for the successful rehabilitation of kids has staffing difficulties. Perception of safety (whether accurate or not) is a reason cited for low morale and turnover,” the slide deck stated. “Security staffing improvement could improve retention for all areas.”
But Tom Woods, senior associate at the youth-focused Annie E. Casey Foundation, said there are too many children incarcerated at Bon Air JCC — more than need to be there.
“It’s not just a staffing problem. It’s a safety problem,” he told VPM News.
In March, a DJJ spokesperson told VPM News the youth population at Bon Air JCC was 170. The operational capacity at the facility is 272 beds.
Andy Block, who oversaw Virginia DJJ from 2014 to 2019 under Democratic Govs. Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, said while staffing levels are influenced by hiring, retention and support capabilities, overcrowding at Bon Air JCC exacerbates staff coverage and access to rehabilitative programming.
“If you impact the population in one way, you can exacerbate the problem, and if you impact the population in other ways, you can mitigate the problem,” Block said.
Block told VPM News there needs to be a comprehensive look at staffing beyond ratios — including daily staff attendance — and the dangers of understaffed units.
DJJ has repeatedly declined to provide current staffing levels and staff-to-resident ratios for Bon Air JCC.
The population of children incarcerated at Bon Air JCC, Block said, are a product of a complex set of variables: length of stay, number of new admissions and availability of alternative placements.
“Or what are you doing earlier in the trajectory of that young person's life in the system to hopefully get them the right service at the right time so they don't end up doing that thing that gets them locked up,” Block said.
Alleviating staffing challenges
Reducing the number of youth incarcerated at Bon Air JCC, Woods said, would depend on the state agency’s willingness to reevaluate policies, like the 2023 Length of Stay guidelines.
“If you're in a hole, you stop digging, right?” Woods said. “This would be a time to reconsider those policies. To pause those policies, kind of recognizing that you're feeding kids into an environment that is increasingly unsafe because of this sort of blooming safety crisis.”
In 2023, DJJ revised its length of stay guidelines for indeterminate commitments, more than doubling the length of time children spent in custody without clear release dates, and increasing the overall population at Bon Air JCC.
According to DJJ’s data resource guide, in fiscal 2024 — the most recent year for which data is available — 73.5% of admissions at Bon Air JCC were for indeterminate commitments. (Virginia’s fiscal year runs July 1–June 30.)
In part 3 of ‘Idleness and Boredom,’ VPM News reported that Floriano told lawmakers staffing has been a long-standing issue at Bon Air JCC.
“To implement a policy like that in the midst of a safety crisis is very, very concerning and very problematic,” Woods said.
In addition to reevaluating length of stay, Woods said DJJ has the authority to divert children from Bon Air JCC to community placement programs (CPPs), which could temporarily alleviate the facility’s population pressure and improve safety.
“All of those are kind of levers that DJJ would have access to that could reduce the population pressure on Bon Air, and therefore help to alleviate the safety crisis and sort of buy them more time,” Woods said. “Time for their staffing strategies to work.”
CPPs are residential programs usually closer to the child’s home community.
Julie McConnell, professor of law and director of the Jeanette Lipman Children's Defense Clinic at the University of Richmond, told the Commission on Youth an “ideal youth justice system” can exist.
But in order for that to happen, McConnell said the commonwealth must be willing to invest in positive outcomes for children under DJJ’s care.
“Our programs should be developmentally appropriate and restorative, and evidence-based practices should be utilized from the very beginning to reduce our citizens. Our pursuit of an ideal system must be continuous, data driven and collaborative,” McConnell said, stressing that the lack of data provided by DJJ hinders this effort.
McConnell agrees with Woods that diversion is a key part of any effective juvenile legal system.
“We need to make sure that we're diverting the vast majority of kids out of the system,” she said. “Diversion is our most successful response. Our lowest recidivism rate is out of diversion. But what I see as a practitioner is that there are so many cases that should be diverted that aren't diverted for nonsensical reasons.”
Aside from diversion, McConnell suggested that DJJ must invest in effective individualized case management — another casualty of the staffing shortage.
“One of the important things for the department to really think about is from the day these kids start in the deep end of the system [is] how do we help them successfully get out of that deep end and back in the community,” she said.
While DJJ has expanded its vocational education offerings, McConnell said, the youth she represents can’t get into the programs due to a lack of vocational teachers that interrupts programming.
A youth’s length of stay at Bon Air JCC is dependent on the successful completion of vocational programming.
“When kids know that they can do something terrible, be held accountable, apologize and have a life after Bon Air, then they have something to live for,” McConnell said.
McConnell also stressed the importance of therapy and avoiding the practice of prolonged confinement at Bon Air JCC — at all costs.
“The reason they are setting fires and getting into other trouble is because they are bored out of their minds. And that just should not be,” she said. “We have an opportunity there to turn these kids' lives around and help them to succeed in the community, and we waste that opportunity in so many circumstances.”
If you're in a hole, you stop digging, right? This would be a time to reconsider those policies.
Imagining a different system
Valerie Slater, executive director of RISE for Youth, said one of the short-term solutions DJJ should consider is changing the facility’s culture.
“Make sure that it is an environment that welcomes folks who care about children to come in and to provide services,” Slater said. “That staff are treated also with dignity and respect.”
DJJ’s presentation on April 1 noted that critical staffing levels were not a sign or indication of shift coverage. The agency cited “[shift] drafting, premium pay, part time positions and volunteers” as the reason.
But Slater said drafting, which means a juvenile correctional specialist may be asked to stay up to an additional 4 hours beyond their assigned 12-hour shift, is having a negative impact on Bon Air’s staff.
“When staff are having to work long hours, and if no one comes to relieve them, they have to work a whole other shift or several more hours before they're able to go home,” Slater said. “It's driving staff away.”
In the long run, Amy Walters, senior attorney at Legal Aid Justice Center, said the state agency should go back to the underpinnings of its 2014 plan, which called for closing all juvenile correctional facilities and creating smaller, community-based environments.
“We have known for a long time what the evidence shows is the best way to rehabilitate youth and reduce recidivism for juvenile offending, and that is treatment in small, regional home like environments,” Walters said.
Walters also suggested that DJJ focus on building these smaller, 60 bed–or-less facilities in different regions of Virginia with a focus on rehabilitative programming and maintaining family and community connections.
“There was a plan a few years ago to build a small trauma-informed facility on the site of Bon Air, while still keeping the kids in the big facility, but that would be kind of one small step,” Walters said.
VPM News reached out to the governor’s office after he received the letter from the Virginia Commission on Youth.
Press secretary Peter Finocchio told VPM News on April 10 that the administration is still reviewing the letter.
“The Governor has deep appreciation for Director Floriano’s leadership at the Department of Juvenile Justice,” Finocchio wrote in an email.
