Sacramento County’s housing of foster kids in jail cells is illegal and reprehensible | Opinion

Sacramento County is keeping children inside jail cells. County officials have bounced approximately one dozen foster children under the age of 18 from one inappropriate holding facility to another each time these barbaric living conditions are made public. Right now, no less than a dozen children in Sacramento sleep in jail cells inside the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center every night, in defiance of state law.

It’s not only illegal but also morally disgusting and reprehensible to take these children from deeply troubled situations and place them inside a youth detention center. It is an atrocious and shocking desertion of the profound duty we owe to these minors, who are often in this situation through no fault of their own.

A county spokesperson declined to allow reporters from The Bee to tour the facility, citing youth privacy concerns. But state officials who visited the center in August say they saw children sleeping in cells with metal bunk beds, near toilets covered with wood. The imagery somehow seems even worse than when Fresno County’s Social Services Department was found housing foster children in abandoned offices in 2021 and forcing them to sleep on conference room tables.

How have we so abandoned our children that we can allow this to keep happening?

According to a letter of concern sent last year by the California Department of Social Services, Sacramento County’s reliance on the Warren E. Thornton Youth Center to house foster children ages between the ages of 12-17 “shortens the pipeline” between these foster children and jail.

“The physical space of the facility and the facility environment has potential to re-traumatize or trigger youth, leaving children to feel physically and psychologically unsafe,” Department of Social Services Foster Care ombudsperson Larry Fluharty wrote in the letter sent last September. “Housing children at a former youth detention facility has long-lasting impacts on youth.”

Sacramento County shuffled children to the current detention center after the it stopped housing unplaced foster children at a county-leased office on the campus of the Children’s Receiving Home in 2020 and moved them into a Rosemont office building that was found to be deficient. (The county continues to send unplaced foster children to the Children’s Receiving Home’s Short-Term Residential Therapeutic Program.)

When the state sent more letters raising concerns about the conditions in that office building, the county moved the children yet again in August of 2022 — this time to the Thornton detention center. The county plans to apply for a state license to allow it to keep using the former detention facility to house these foster kids, despite pleas from the state Department of Social Services to move the children into a more accommodating space.

Sacramento County clearly hopes the public will forget about these children, as they already have, at some point in this ceaseless shuffling. Given their heartbreaking circumstances, these kids have a right to a comfortable and safe home. They are not criminals. They are human beings in a tragic situation.

Sacramento County must do right by these minors, many of whom depend on the kindness and care of the government during the worst weeks and months of their young lives. They have already been torn away from their families and suffered every kind of abuse, and now these children live, sleep and play in jail cells.

Surely, Sacramento County can do far, far better than literal jail cells. It’s unacceptable that these children must endure yet more trauma.

This story was originally published April 13, 2023 at 5:30 AM.