Legislature stops plan to shuffle youth correctional system, opts for study

By Noelle Annonen , Multimedia Reporter

March 23, 2026, 7:30 p.m. ·

The Nebraska State Capitol. (Nebraska Public Media News file photo)

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Senators pulled a plan to shuffle youths around the state’s correctional system after an outcry from youth advocates.

The measure would have relocated the inhabitants of every significant youth correctional facility to a new building, including sending some youths to an adult, maximum-security prison.

Activists and lawmakers who opposed the plan raised concerns that the move would disrupt the education and rehabilitation efforts for youths in the system.

Additionally, some were concerned that the plan did not include moving educators and personnel in charge of the youth treatment with their patients to their new facilities, or even retaining their jobs at all. Activists said that youths who are moved to a new facility would then have to create a whole new support group of trusted therapists and educators in order to fully recover and rejoin society when they grow up.

Sen. Terrell McKinney (Photo courtesy Nebraska Legislature) — Terrell McKinney

Sen. Terrell McKinney proposed taking the plan to shuffle the youth correctional population out of the bill it was placed in, saying that any plan to reorganize the system needs more time. He called for a study that would not only delay any move but analyze where best to place youths in the correctional system and how to get them there safely with follow up treatment and rehabilitation plans in place. McKinney also objected to the aspects of the plan that placed male youths in adult systems.

“We should look at them in a different light, in a different way because a 13-year-old or a 14-year-old should not be in the same facility with a 50-year-old or a 35-year-old,” McKinney said.

McKinney added that while the study as currently proposed does not include a survey, it should. That study should focus on how much of the prison population consists of people who went through Nebraska’s child welfare system.

Senator Ashlei Spivey said she asked corrections director Rob Jeffreys during the hearings about how the plan was made. She said Jeffreys reported that the plan came from internal restructuring conversations. But Spivey insisted that the plans need much more time and thought than that.

“If you think about young people as being the most apt population for being rehabilitated, you start to institutionalize them in a way that doesn’t align with what they say the intent of corrections really is,” Spivey said.

Spivey and other senators noted that moving the incarcerated youths would separate them from their families, unmooring them during some of the hardest years of their lives. McKinney said any facility that youths are moved to should be built for them and with the youth and their rehabilitation at heart.