Nebraska’s prison and child welfare watchdogs raise questions about proposal to move incarcerated youth between facilities

A state plan to move the populations of Nebraska’s youth detention centers to new facilities was met by pushback from current staff as watchdog agencies raised a number of questions about how the plan would impact staffing and safety.

In a memorandum sent to the Legislature’s Health and Human Services, Judiciary and Appropriations committees last week, Inspector General of Child Welfare Jennifer Carter and Inspector General of Corrections Doug Koebernick outlined questions and observations about the proposal to shuffle incarcerated youths between existing facilities. The inspectors general did not take a position on the merit of the plan.

Memo to legislators from Inspectors General

The proposal, which was included as part of Gov. Jim Pillen’s mid-biennium budget adjustments, would impact facilities run by both the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS) and the state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

DHHS operates three Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Centers, or YRTCs, in Kearney, Hastings and Lincoln. The agency also runs Whitehall, which is a psychiatric residential treatment facility in Lincoln for youths to receive treatment for substance abuse or rehabilitative services after sex offense convictions.

Only one NDCS facility, the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility in Omaha, would be impacted by the changes. In addition to juvenile offenders who are charged and sentenced as adults, NCYF also incarcerates a few dozen young adult men and some adult prisoners who serve as live-in peer mentors.

The largest youth detention center in Nebraska is the YRTC in Kearney, which holds an average of 95 to 110 male youths each month, according to the memo. The facility has recently been plagued by allegations of staff sexual abuse, leading to at least one criminal prosecution and accusations of a lack of transparency, according to reporting from Flatwater Free Press.

Under Pillen’s proposal, all male youths incarcerated at the Kearney YRTC would be moved to the campus of the NCYF in Omaha. Most of the boys incarcerated at the Kearney YRTC are from Lincoln and Omaha, which DHHS officials have touted as a benefit of the plan. The NCYF would no longer be run by NDCS and would instead be operated as a YRTC.

Carter and Koebernick raised a number of questions about potential safety and classification concerns associated with the move. The Kearney YRTC campus is larger than the NCYF campus, and is home to four housing units instead of three. The watchdogs questioned if the smaller space would cause challenges in classifying youths and keeping boys with gang affiliations or conflicts away from one another.

Those incarcerated at the NYCF would be scattered around Nebraska’s prison system. The juvenile population would move to a separate wing of the Reception and Treatment Center, an adult prison in Lincoln, while the peer mentors and young adult population would be placed at prisons across Nebraska.

Federal law strictly regulates how incarcerated juveniles may interact with incarcerated adults. Juveniles are required to have a separate housing unit without “sight, sound, or physical contact” with adults, and any interaction outside of the housing unit must be directly supervised. The memorandum questioned if and how youths will interact with the adult offenders at the Reception and Treatment Center – including if the classrooms, gymnasium and other communal spaces will be shared between populations, and how that would impact access for both groups.

An average of 13 female youths also are held at the YRTC in Hastings. The proposal would move them all to the YRTC in Kearney.

And the population of Whitehall, home to the Substance Use Disorder and Youth Who Sexually Harm Programs, would move to the Hastings YRTC. Carter’s and Koebernick’s questions on this shift mainly focus on staffing and programming. For example: Would staff at the YRTC be allowed to keep their positions despite the shift in focus from detention to more intensive treatment? Does DHHS have concerns about filling positions in Hastings, a more rural area than Lincoln?

Whitehall, which has an aging, dilapidated campus, would close under the proposal. It isn’t clear what would become of the campus.

DHHS officials defend plan amid pushback

The plan is contingent on legislative approval of LB1013, which makes the required statutory changes to allow the population shuffling.

In a Health and Human Services Committee hearing on LB1013 last week, DHHS’s Child and Family Services Director Alyssa Bish said the programming will move along with the populations, and the department doesn’t anticipate major staffing challenges.

She said the current plan is to begin recruiting for staff at the new Omaha YRTC in May, and start moving small subsets of the Kearney YRTC population to the Omaha facility shortly thereafter.

“I think it’d be fully transitioned by the end of the year in 2026, but the biggest thing will be hiring staff in Omaha,” Bish said.

Opponents, including the state Fraternal Order of Police and current staff members at Whitehall and the YRTCs, said the move would damage morale and cause staffing and safety issues. Jay Wilson, the president of the FOP Lodge 88, said he was “wholly opposed” to the move and expressed particular concerns about moving youths from the NYCF to an adult prison.

“They’ll be separated,” Wilson said of the adult and youth inmates. “Security will keep everybody in check, you know, to the best of their ability. But what happens, God forbid, if there’s a riot, a fire, a tornado, emergency evacuation – and now we have these youth mixed in with the other population, the grown men?”

Alex Johnson, a youth security supervisor at the Kearney YRTC, said such major changes to the populations served at each facility would lead to staffing issues in jobs that already deal with high turnover and vacancy rates.

“When you’re talking about essentially starting, what, four or five different facilities from zero, you’ll have the staff that stay,” he said. “You’ll have your regular turnover that you have to deal with. And then you’ll have to deal with the issue of staff in Omaha going, ‘We didn’t sign up to do treatment.’ You’ll have the issue of staff in Kearney going, ‘We didn’t sign up to deal with girls.’”

In a separate hearing Monday on Pillen’s budget proposal for DHHS, senators pressed Nebraska DHHS CEO Steve Corsi on his responses to the questions posed by Carter and Koebernick in the Feb. 5 memorandum. Asked if DHHS consulted with the Inspector General’s office in coming up with the plan, Corsi said he wasn’t sure.