Youth Detention Center Overcrowded

Milwaukee County’s youth detention center is once again running out of beds for the children in custody there, after the Milwaukee County Board voted against a deal that would have provided some relief for the center.

In September, officials with the county’s Division of Children, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) went before the board seeking funding for an agreement with Racine County wherein Milwaukee would pay them to hold up to 10 youth in their detention facility. The board voted down the proposal, then immediately afterward approved a similar proposal to pay Racine county to take adults from the overcrowded Milwaukee County Jail.

As of Oct. 20, all the children not ordered by a court to be held in Racine have been moved back to Milwaukee and the current population at Vel R. Phillips Juvenile Justice Center is 129 youth, two more than the number of beds the facility has.

Three children who were in a Racine County program offering an alternative to incarceration in a state-run youth correction facility have been allowed to stay, and Milwaukee will continue to pay a rate to Racine. The program in Racine is called Alternative to Corrections Through Education (ACE); it involves a shorter period of incarceration in a detention facility during which time the youth have access to education, drug and alcohol counseling and therapy.

The three children were ordered to this Racine program by the courts, and Milwaukee County’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) will continue to pay Racine County for the children’s detention. “This is the same process and responsibility for all youth placed in out of home care, regardless of where the placement is,” Kelly Pethke, CYFS administrator, told Urban Milwaukee.

The cost of sending youth to state-run facilities like the infamous Lincoln Hills or Copper Lake has taken a chunk out of the DHHS budget, as the rate has been increased and more children have been sent to state facilities this past year than the department had budgeted for.

While the county detention facility has experienced overcrowding throughout the year, with the population there running over the capacity by more than 20 youth in May, the Milwaukee program offering an alternative to incarceration at state youth prisons has had a waitlist. This has caused the courts to change the placement of some children to state facilities, “because they can take the kids right now,” Pethke explained to the board in June.

In his final message to the county board, the former CYFS administrator, Mark Mertens, warned in late 2021 that overcrowding at Vel. R. Phillips Center was setting off warning lights for him. “If we impose conditions on our staff that, over time, make that difficult to sustain, I fear that we may be repeating history,” he said, alluding to the terrible conditions and allegations of abuse uncovered at the state-run facilities, which resulted in an FBI investigation.

Opposition to the Racine agreement proposed by CYFS was articulated in arguments that Milwaukee officials don’t have oversight of the jail, that children would be further from their families and that the courts couldn’t be trusted not to incarcerate more children because of the policy. Sup. Ryan Clancy said a board meeting that the choice was “some temporary comfort for the opening of new beds; and knowing that this would mean more kids being put in more cages.”