The Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center has been punishing kids with seclusion more than any other facility in Tennessee. And as the laws and rules on how to treat kids changed, the facility failed to keep up. Co-published with ProPublica. Sign up for Dispatches to get Propublica stories like this one as soon as they are published. With a glint in his eye, Richard L. Bean reminisces about the days when children in his detention center could be paddled.
Bean took the helm of this East Tennessee detention center — now named the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center — in The laws and the science on how to treat children in detention have changed a bit since then. Yet Bean has held on to an old-fashioned approach to his work. Most of the children in the Bean Center are not in for murder — in fact, most have only been charged with a crime, but are awaiting court dates. At 83, superintendent Bean uses a bamboo cane to give a tour of the bed facility.
The proof was right there, being collected by the state and laid out, for years, in an annual report. Yet no one flagged that kids were being jailed at a staggering rate, and no one seemed to try to stop it. Kids have been locked alone in a cell here more often than other facilities in the state, sometimes as punishment, and sometimes for an indeterminate length of time. And even as the state has implemented reforms that would have made seclusion less common, the Bean Center remained reliant on the practice.
Bean Center has repeatedly been put on corrective action plans. In , a suit in Rutherford County challenged the use of solitary confinement in the juvenile detention center after a child was kept in solitary for days for disrupting class.
Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated.
