Opinion: Warehousing kids makes us all less safe

Temperatures are rising in D.C.’s budget fight, and one city agency is already drowning in red ink. In a tough budget year where every agency is tightening their belt, the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services has asked for nearly $12 million more to spend over the next few months. In late May, DYRS had 126 children crammed into the Youth Services Center, a facility that has only 98 beds. For years, the secure facility that houses detained young people has been dogged by problems with understaffing, overcrowding, and violence. 

The District’s approach to public safety is broken. It’s time we remember why we closed down the notorious, overcrowded Oak Hill youth detention center in 2009. 

The average youth commitment lasts two years, but some children now wait eight months DYRS to receive needed services—meaning they spend a third of their court-ordered rehabilitation sitting in "dead time" at an overcrowded detention center. During those months, they're not receiving the treatment a judge determined they needed. They're warehoused. By doing so, we're creating a pipeline that virtually guarantees these young people will return to our neighborhoods more traumatized, less educated, and more likely to reoffend than when they entered.

When youth are finally placed, often at facilities out-of-state and thousands of miles away from home, many have deteriorated so significantly from months of lockdowns and minimal services that they're less likely to succeed. The Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services then responds to these predictable failures with more incarceration, creating an expensive cycle that benefits no one except the states getting paid to warehouse our children.

Meanwhile, proven alternatives sit unused. The agency doesn’t use enough of its foster home placements. When DYRS's own clinical assessments recommend community-based placement for a child, the agency regularly overrides them, choosing secure facilities instead.

Manufacturing recidivism

Technical violations like missing curfew or testing positive for marijuana can land a young person right back into secure detention after release. DYRS has the option to respond proportionately to these offenses, but often chooses the harshest (and most expensive) option instead. 

When young people are involved in incidents within DYRS facilities (either for violence or contraband), they are often charged with new crimes. This happened to youth 43 times in 2024 just for incidents that occurred inside DYRS facilities themselves—meaning the agency’s management of the facility is directly responsible for creating new charges against children in their care.

Compare this to Maryland's approach. Research on their Accountability and Incentives Management system shows that youth supervised under graduated responses – responding to misconduct with progressively-scaled accountability measures aimed at understanding and addressing the root causes of behavior  – were significantly less likely to violate probation or require residential placement. The effects were consistent across racial groups, proving that structured, proportionate sanctions work better than our current revolving door.

When a young person runs away from placement—often because they feel unsafe or the placement can't meet their needs—DYRS's rigid policy requires automatic detention. No assessment, no team meeting, no attempt to address the underlying problem. Just expensive incarceration that fills beds while the original issues remain unresolved, virtually guaranteeing the cycle will repeat.

Research consistently shows that incarceration reduces high school graduation by 26% and increases the risk of adult incarceration. When we warehouse children instead of rehabilitating them, we're literally investing in future crime. D.C.’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council has been clear: "secure detention is well-established to have lasting negative effects on youth such as increased risk of adult incarceration."

A smarter investment

The solution isn't more beds or bigger budgets—it's better policy. Funding proper assessments and reentry planning costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, instead of millions for more incarceration. Implementing a graduated sanctions system should be easy: there’s already one in DYRS's own manual. Even our city's juvenile prosecutor at the Office of the Attorney General is demanding timely placement decisions and meaningful discharge planning.

These aren't radical ideas—they're proven practices that save money while improving outcomes. When we respond to youth missteps with community-based solutions rather than automatic detention, we break cycles instead of funding them.

The dangerous overcrowding at D.C.’s youth jail is a crisis of our own making. Every month we delay reform, we're choosing to throw money at a system that makes our community less safe. We can't afford to lose another generation to this preventable failure.

Penelope Spain, Esq. is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Open City Advocates. Joshua Miller, PhD is Open City Advocates’ Research & Advocacy Director.