Three officers at the Department of Juvenile Justice short-term lock up in DeKalb County resigned and four others were suspended — the entire night shift — after the employees were confronted with suspicions that they had violated the agency’s policies.
DJJ spokesman Jim Shuler declined to specify which policies were at issue but said the problem was discovered during an investigation into an unsubstantiated report by a teenage boy locked up at the DeKalb Regional Youth Detention Center that he was sexually assaulted while he slept.
The Georgia Department of Corrections discovered the possible policy violations. DOC has been conducting DJJ internal investigations since the U.S. Department of Justice reported early last month that four state juvenile detention centers were among the 13 with the highest percentage of young inmates reporting inappropriate sexual contact with staff or other detained teenagers.
The day after the damning DOJ report became pubic, DJJ Commissioner Avery Niles suspended 19 investigators and the former supervisor of the Office of Investigations, which almost emptied the unit of investigators. DJJ said the 20 suspensions last month came after it was discovered that there were 20 cases of alleged inappropriate sexual contact inside one of its institutions.
The 20 remain suspended with pay while the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the Department of Corrections look into the open files and try to determine why those cases of alleged inappropriate sexual contact had been open more than 45 days, the time DJJ policy allows.
DJJ and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation initially looked into the sexual assault claim made by the teenager held at the DeKalb RYDC. It was while DOC was doing follow up that investigators came across “an unrelated case at DeKalb RYDC allegedly involving several DJJ staff members in potential policy violations.”
“A corrective action is already underway and a replacement night shift staff is already in place,” Shuler said.
Some staff were moved from other assignments to replace the suspended nightshift workers. Members of the unit that responds to disturbances also have been assigned to the night shift at DeKalb RYDC. And the agency expects to hire more officers to fill in the gaps, Shuler said.
“Supervisory personnel and executive staff will make regular round- the-clock checks on the facility to ensure the entire schedule is running smoothly again,” Shuler said in an email.
He said, however, that other shifts did not lose personnel as officers are moved to fill the jobs left vacant on the night shift.
DJJ has been the subject of a series of negative reports since the release last month of the Department of Justice’s findings in an anonymous survey of locked up youth that is required by the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.
The Paulding RYDC led the nation with 32.1 percent of the teenagers surveyed anonymously last year reporting they were victimized sexually by either staff or other juveniles. That was more than three times the national rate of 9.5 percent.
Also included in the list of the 13 U.S. facilities with the highest rates of sexual victimization were the Eastman Youth Development Campus in Dodge County, the Augusta YDC in Richmond County and the Sumter YDC in Americus, all hold juveniles after their cases have been ajudicated.
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