MACON, Ga. (WGXA) — U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff’s bipartisan investigation has found that kids with special needs in dozens of facilities nationwide are being locked up instead of getting mental health care.
A bipartisan investigation led by U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff and Congresswoman Jen Kiggans recently uncovered a “national crisis” where children with special needs are being incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities because of a lack of available mental health care.
This is a bipartisan investigation that I launched nearly one year ago,” Said Senator Jon Ossoff. “This is a national crisis. Children with special needs and mental health conditions who are behind bars, not because of anything they’ve done, but simply because the care they need is not available in the community.
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Ossoff’s investigation team found that 75 facilities across 25 states reported incarcerating children who could be eligible for release to mental health care programs outside the facility but who remained incarcerated because the care they needed was not yet available.
They also found that 20 facilities across 13 states reported incarcerating children without charges or children whose charges would not “ordinarily lead to placement in a juvenile justice facility,” many of them due to the children’s need for mental health care.
And it doesn’t stop there; 12 facilities across nine states reported incarcerating children who had “never been charged with delinquent offenses that would ordinarily lead to placement in a juvenile justice facility” because the children needed mental health care that was not yet available outside the facility.
Lastly, six responding facilities across 6 different states reported incarcerating children whose charges had been dropped or who had already served their full sentences because they needed off-site mental health care that was not yet available.
“It’s well understood that incarcerating children causes lifelong trauma,” said Ossoff. “I want to remind everybody what happened in Georgia just a couple of years ago when juvenile justice judges told my investigators told investigators in the senate that Georgia’s foster care system had suggested incarcerating foster kids because there weren’t enough placements for them in the rest of the state. We have a deep child welfare crisis in Georgia, which is what prompted this investigation.”
In a virtual press conference, Sen. Ossoff was joined by Amandy Figures, a Georgia mother whose son suffers from mental illnesses, including ADHD, depressive disorder, agoraphobia, and generalized anxiety.
Figures expressed that despite her son’s mental health struggles, he always has a smile on his face, he is caring, warm, personable, very smart, a quick learner, enjoys writing and, when upset, she said he calms himself with gospel music.
She explains that her son “did not get the proper mental and medical care he needed throughout his childhood, which led to him having problems in school. He is easily triggered by other people, which led to him acting out and making threatening statements to teachers and other kids. Ultimately, this led to his first experience in a juvenile detention center in Georgia in 2018, when he was in the tenth grade.”
Figures explained that things for her son worsened when he was transferred to a large school in his 11th grade year, where he had a major meltdown that led to crisis stabilization, and his second stay at a juvenile detention center. He went back a third time in September of 2019.
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“At this point, I told my lawyer I could not take him back home because I was not able to get him the care that he needed in the community,” said Figures. “I asked the court to find somewhere else for him to go where he could receive the health services that he needed, yet he still experienced instability. He was eventually sent to a group home in Cobb County, where he stayed for about three months. I later learned that he did not get any mental health services the entire time he was in the group home. He’s my child, and I want him to be better. When he was locked up, I was hopeful that he would get the help he needed, but he didn’t. He deserves quality mental healthcare.”
Dr. Rebecca Fix, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also helped unveil the findings of Sen. Ossoff’s investigation.
“During my years conducting mental health intake assessments in juvenile facilities in several states, there were never enough mental health professionals to meet the needs of hundreds of children cycling through the facilities,” said Fix. “Many of the youth described have autism, developmental disabilities or were experiencing self-harm or psychiatric crisis, including suicidal attempts, and even when facilities have some mental health people on staff, they often lack the training needed for dealing with children with special needs.”
This probe follows a broader pattern of congressional oversight into youth facilities, including a 2024 Senate Finance Committee investigation that labeled residential treatment centers as “warehouses of neglect” due to systemic abuse and a focus on profit over care.
In Georgia specifically, the investigation found that juvenile court judges previously testified that they were pressured by state child welfare leaders to inappropriately lock up children with mental and behavioral problems while waiting for placements.
Put simply, these children were incarcerated, not because of risk or sentencing but because they had nowhere else to go,” said Fix. “More than half of the surveyed administrators reported their facilities holding these children for months while waiting for healthcare that was not available. According to a survey, some children waited for over a year. Many of these children were never meant to be ushered into the legal system at all.
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