The conditions in New York State’s Office of Children and Family Services’ secure youth prisons are deeply troubling. Children as young as 12 are being confined alone for hours without access to bathrooms, education, or recreation, in some cases forced to urinate or defecate in bottles or garbage bins.
These practices are inhumane and profoundly harmful to developing minds, undermining rehabilitation and public safety.
As a former commissioner of both the New York State Office of Children and Family Services and the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, I know what is possible when leadership commits to reform. During my tenure, we closed facilities reliant on punitive segregation, eliminated isolation practices, and built systems grounded in trauma-informed care.
We understood that young brains are still developing well into early adulthood. Depriving children and young adults of social contact, structure, and meaningful engagement disrupts emotional regulation, impulse control, and decision-making, causing harm that can follow them long after release.
It is important to recognize that the current OCFS juvenile confinement policy was, when promulgated, a national model. It restricted the use of isolation to true safety emergencies and banned punitive solitary confinement.
These policies were grounded in trauma-informed and developmentally appropriate principles, reflecting a growing body of neuroscience and behavioral research showing that isolation exacerbates trauma rather than addressing it. The intent was clear: safety must never come at the expense of a child’s mental health or dignity.
Yet the conditions in New York State’s youth prisons demonstrate a stark gap between policy and practice. This is not a lack of rules, but a systemic failure of implementation and oversight.
When youth are locked alone for 23 hours a day, denied education, recreation, treatment, and basic dignity, the system is failing them and failing its mission. Practices that rely on isolation as a management tool signal breakdowns in staffing, training, supervision, and leadership accountability.
Research is unequivocal: solitary confinement in youth is profoundly harmful. Prolonged isolation increases the risk of anxiety, depression, aggression, psychosis, and self-harm, and is associated with higher rates of suicide attempts. Even brief episodes can retraumatize children, particularly those with histories of abuse, neglect, or community violence.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and the United Nations have all concluded that isolating children constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, and in extreme cases, torture. The disproportionate impact on Black and Latino youth further compounds systemic inequities and perpetuates cycles of harm.
Addressing this crisis requires closing the implementation gap, not merely rewriting policy.
Stronger oversight, accountability, and realignment of staffing, training, and resources are essential to maintain safety without isolating children. But oversight alone is not enough.
Meaningful reform requires intentional culture change, beginning with continuous training, coaching, and leadership development that reinforces de-escalation, therapeutic engagement, and restorative approaches.
Robust mental health supports, both inside facilities and in the community, are critical. New York State now has six months to develop a plan to comply with a recent class action settlement addressing the lack of adequate mental health services for confined youth. That plan must be ambitious, transparent, and rooted in evidence-based care.
The goal is not merely compliance with rules, but the creation of environments that foster resilience, accountability, skill-building, and healthy development.
During my leadership, we proved that reform is possible. New York can and should be a national leader in ending punitive isolation for youth. We owe it to the children in our care and to the public to ensure that policies intended to protect young people are fully implemented and enforced.
Anything less is a failure of our moral and social responsibility.
Carrión was the former commissioner of the New York state Office of Children and Family Services and NYC Administration for Children’s Services.
