Studies have cataloged the harmful effects suffered by those thrown into solitary confinement: shortened lives, even after release; parts of the brain literally shrinking, resulting in memory loss; inability to tolerate ordinary things (the sound of plumbing, for instance); severe panic attacks; emotional numbness; hallucinations; impulse control problems and the list goes on.
Statistically, after release from incarceration, deaths by suicide, homicide and opioid overdose are more likely for those who’ve spent even one day in solitary than those who haven’t.
One boy was kept in solitary for over six months—23 hours per day with no human contact.
The Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville, Tennessee, has been illegally throwing children in solitary. It’s actually been doing a lot more than that. Just ask Richard L. Bean, the facility’s 84-year-old namesake, who has been the superintendent since 1972.
“What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” he told a reporter, in spite of the fact that most of his detainees haven’t even been convicted of a crime, but are awaiting court dates.
Bean likes to reminisce about the good old days when paddling children was permitted. “We didn’t have any problems then,” Bean says. “I’d whip about six or eight a year and it’d run pretty smooth. They’d say, ‘You don’t want him to get hold of you.’” Once, Bean laughs, a kid had to be held down by four guards to be spanked.
It’s no secret what goes on behind the locked gates of Richard L. Bean—shackled kids, no privacy and Bean’s favorite sadism: children in solitary confinement, often for days at a time. The atrocities have been documented for years by Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services (DCS), the agency that licenses Bean’s and other juvenile detention facilities. Richard L. Bean (the man and the facility) has been put on notice repeatedly. Year after year, Bean ignores the corrective action plans and the DCS, year after year, continues to approve the center’s license to operate with no accountability.
Other Tennessee juvenile facilities also practice solitary confinement (in violation of the state’s seclusion laws), in addition to other means of torture—practices widespread enough in the Volunteer State to merit a class action suit filed last spring by Disability Rights Tennessee, naming as defendants the state, the DCS and the commissioners of both DCS and the Department of Education.
Among the atrocities documented in the more than 100-page legal action filed on June 26, 2024 (and bear in mind these are children):
- One child was kept in solitary confinement until he was driven to rip his hair out.
- A child was shackled in his cell, then held down by staff while being pepper sprayed for being “disrespectful.”
- One boy was kept in solitary for over six months—23 hours per day with no human contact. He became suicidal.
- Another child was placed in solitary more than 50 times. His “crimes”? Refusing to take off his shoes, not leaving the toilet quickly enough, refusing to go to his room. At one point, he was kept in solitary for a full month, where he was denied sunlight and all human contact. Eventually, he announced he planned to hang himself.
- One boy was beaten up by other boys after refusing to perform sexual acts on them. He reported the fact to the staff but, instead of protecting him, they encouraged the boys to beat him up again.
These outrages may soon come to an end—or not—depending on how effective two moms and their allies are in persuading state lawmakers to take action.
The moms (names withheld) said their sons, ages 15 and 16, were locked up in solitary for weeks at a time. Guards bribed them with vapes to pick fights with other children.
“We just need our kids to have a second chance.”
“One thing that hurt me most is that, for three months, he did not see sun,” one of the mothers said.
The other put it this way: “I’m angry that children are taken out of homes and put in there where they’re supposed to be okay. And they’re abused.”
The pair visited lawmakers in Nashville during the state’s legislative session. The first meeting was with State Senator Kerry Roberts, who has run into brick walls trying to get juvenile centers to change their ways. Last year, he introduced legislation to take oversight of the centers away from the ineffectual DCS. The bill didn’t make it, and Roberts warned the women that similar bills may not make it again this year.
“Anybody who’s paid attention at all knows that it’s time that we step up and do something about this,” Roberts said. “But you know, when everybody’s gearing up for battle, the forces against it, they’re going to hire lobbyists and spend money.”
Roberts knows whereof he speaks. After a local news station aired its 2019 investigation detailing the criminal mishandling of children in the state’s juvenile centers, campaign contributions to key lawmakers skyrocketed. The newly opened wallets belonged to those with a vested interest in maintaining the no-accountability status quo: the likes of Jason Crews, co-owner of Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center and president and CEO of Wayne Halfway House—a separate entity that owns several juvenile detention facilities in the state. Wayne Halfway House created a political action committee (PAC) called FOCUS PAC in 2021 and was its only donor, directing more than $160,000 to the PAC over three years.
FOCUS PAC concentrates its beneficence mainly on members of the Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Juvenile Justice, which was formed as a result of reports of abuses perpetrated against children in the system. Lawmakers blessed by the PAC come from both sides of the aisle and both houses, and include the House Majority Leader ($13,000) and governor himself ($32,900).
State Representative Andrew Farmer, who gutted Roberts’ bill, has ties to private juvenile facility operators and was a recipient of campaign money from FOCUS PAC ($6,500), but insists this didn’t influence his vote.
The moms met with him, invoked the Bible, and told him they were embarrassed as conservatives and were failing at what God intended them to do.
Farmer agreed that, yes, the children absolutely need to be taken care of. When asked if he would sponsor oversight legislation, however, he begged off, saying he wasn’t certain he had room for that on his plate—but he would for sure look into it.
The moms left his office, but not before one of them said, “I will be emailing and calling, and if I have to come back, I will save my paid time off just to come here. We just need our kids to have a second chance.”
What’s Richard L. Bean’s take on the extra attention his illegal use of seclusion is now receiving?
“If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.”
With his recurrent flouting of the law, Mr. Bean may have earned himself a dose of his own medicine: a good paddling, followed by a month or three in solitary.
