Child advocates say the South Carolina juvenile justice system is failing the children who it is supposed to rehabilitate.
In a September 2026 report, Youth Behind the Fence, the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina (ACLUSC) said children enter a state juvenile justice system marked by racial inequalities, lengthy stays in detention and troubling conditions that can deepen the trauma many youths already shoulder.
“Some of these kids had to become tough,” said Robin Taylor, a former mental health professional at the S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), said in the report. “We made them the way that they are.”
Meanwhile Major Kieviet Driskell, a juvenile detention officer with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, echoed at least one concern she had, although she added that she had not read the report. She said the biggest change she would make would be to reduce how long young people spend in the system.
“Sometimes they have programs, but it’s not applicable to all children, so they spend a lot of time in a detention center when they don’t really have to be in a detention center,” she said. “They become worse off than they came in because they begin to pick up other bad habits. They begin to associate with other children who may have been in trouble.”
Driskell said her facility tries to look beyond a child’s offense to understand what may be happening at home and connect families with resources when they need help.
South Carolina is the only state in the nation that sends minors into its juvenile justice system solely for “status offenses” — actions that are only considered illegal due to their age. Status offenses include running away, truancy and gaining admission to a theatre with a fake ID.
For Paul Bowers, the ACLUSC’s communications director, these findings raise questions about whether the system is fulfilling its purpose.
“If a kid goes in there for help because a family court judge determined that they need rehabilitation, and instead they get physically hurt or attacked or become so isolated that they become suicidal, then the system is actively harming those kids,” he said.
Lasting impacts
Serious concerns go beyond what happens while a youth is behind the fence, Bowers said. Many young people entering the agency’s custody are already struggling with trauma or mental health challenges. Advocates say their time in the system can make those struggles even worse.
Aleksandra Chauhan, an attorney who has represented children involved with the department, said she has seen that impact firsthand.
“I have had children over there that went in without post-traumatic stress syndrome and left with severe PTSD,” Chauhan told the Charleston City Paper. “If DJJ was a parent, the judge would have taken their parental rights away,” she added in a Sept. 10 press conference.
Mental health care is not the only issue raised in the 35-page report. The numbers also show a large racial gap in who ends up in detention.
Black children make up roughly 28% of South Carolina’s youth population but accounted for more than 75% of children detained by the Department of Juvenile Justice in fiscal year 2025, according to the report.
Chauhan said most status offences are disproportionately aimed at Black children, which reflects the adultification of them.
“If [law enforcement] looks at a 13-year-old Black child, they’ll consider them to be 16-year-old,” Chauhan said at the Sept. 10 press conference. “When they look at a White child who’s that age, they still treat them as their little children, and they apply different measures to them.”
Finding a path forward
Jace Woodrum, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina, said the responsibility for changing the system extends to state lawmakers.
“We are taking childhood away from these young people, because we can’t figure out how to support them without locking them up,” Woodrum said. “I mean, that is a failure of the state.”
Woodrum said state legislators need to look past detention centers and put more resources into place that can help the children in home environments before they are institutionalized in the juvenile justice system. Examples include therapy sessions, after-school programs and support groups for families.
Bowers pointed to a recent bill, H. 3655, as an attempt to change how S.C. handles children charged with status offenses. The bill would have limited how long those children could be held in detention. It was one of several juvenile justice reform bills introduced during the 2025-2026 legislative session but failed to pass before the session ended.
Read the full Youth Behind the Fence report and the public records used to inform it online at aclusc.org.
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