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On a grassy hill overlooking Lake Mendota, Wisconsin’s most psychologically challenged teenagers receive care unlike anywhere else in the state.
For decades, the answer to a violent, traumatized child in the criminal legal system was a locked room and a list of consequences. But the result was often a kid who left custody angrier and more dangerous than when they arrived, with the recidivism to prove it.
Most youth detention facilities still run on a sanctions-based approach, but research shows young people dealing with extreme trauma typically do not respond well in an environment designed for compliance over healing. For a certain population of young people, those carrying the heaviest burdens of abuse, mental illness and development trauma, healing is essential to have any hope of disrupting a cycle of criminal behavior.
Young people at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison are proving this approach works, said Greg Van Rybroek, a psychological consultant and former director of Mendota Mental Health Institute, the adult psychiatric center that oversees the juvenile facility.
Opened in 1995, the facility is staffed with psychologists instead of corrections officers and placed under the state’s health department instead of the Department of Corrections, a structural choice meant to differentiate the rehabilitative nature of the center and to represent the idea that what these children need isn’t a stricter cage but treatment, compassion and trust.
Though designed to feel more like a school, Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center still has most of the security measures of other youth detention facilities including locked doors on every room, hallway and unit.
Courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services
That’s not to say the young people being involuntarily held at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center don’t face strict limitations. The center is still considered a secure detention facility, and the teenagers being held there have been convicted of serious crimes and were typically referred to the center from other high-security juvenile prisons for which they were considered too dangerous.
Like a prison, the center has locked doors for every room, hallway and unit, surrounding fences made of material that’s difficult to climb, extensive surveillance and windows designed to withstand the force of a crowbar for about 60 minutes. While the goal is for residents to move through their days unrestrained, staff have the ability to use psychiatric restraints if the young person is presenting a danger to themselves or others.
But, for the most part, you have to squint a lot closer to notice the security measures at Mendota, said Van Rybroek.
A recent redesign of Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center aimed to make the secure facility seem more like a high school and less like a prison, according to Greg Van Rybroek, a psychological consultant and former director of Mendota Mental Health Institute, the adult psychiatric center that oversees the juvenile facility.
Courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services
A recent redesign of the center during expansion has the facility looking more like a secure high school than a prison, he said. The floors and furniture are colorful, natural daylight streams through large, shatter-resistant windows and reinforced steel doors are covered with wood paneling.
Today’s actions decide tomorrow’s options
Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center has long employed what it calls the “decompression model” of youth institutional treatment.
Van Rybroek, who coined the name alongside adolescent psychologist Michael Caldwell, says the model places the majority of decision making power with the young people in custody.
Those being treated at the center are presented with a range of therapeutic options on any given day, including one-on-one meetings with clinical staff or dialectical behavioral therapy, and they are able to choose what suits them best. Their behavior during that treatment or during classes — whether they follow rules and behave appropriately towards staff or other residents — will decide what privileges are granted to them the next day.
“Today’s behavior dictates tomorrow’s level of privilege,” Van Rybroek said in an interview with the Cap Times.
Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center has two outdoor patio spaces, one on the ground level (shown here) and a second, fully-enclosed patio on the second floor unit for girls.
Courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services
The idea behind decompression originates from the circumstances these young people typically come from, he explained. Trauma, mental illnessness, adversity and neglect compress a young person’s nervous system into survival mode. The goal of presenting options for treatment for the juveniles being treated at the center is to ease them out of a survival mentality into one that can accommodate healing.
Greg Van Rybroek, a psychological consultant, speaks during a media tour at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center. Van Rybroek served as the director of Mendota Mental Health Institute, which includes MJTC, for 26 years.
Ilana Bar-av
As the youth residents “decompress”, they can move up in the decision-making process, Van Rybroek said. As behavior and rule-following improve, the residents are allowed to participate in the center’s more enjoyable activities like sports, gardening, life-skills building, art and music therapy and time in the center’s recreation room with exercise equipment, televisions and arcade games.
During a recent tour of the center, music program coordinator Isaiah Oby spoke highly of one boy who had reached five consecutive weeks of “exemplary behavior” and, in turn, had gained access to the center’s music studio to produce and record original songs he had written, as long as his time there didn’t conflict with classes, meals and sleep.
This kind of treatment approach has shown positive results.
Over the years, data has shown rates of violent recidivism are 50% lower among young people treated at Mendota as compared to incarcerated youth who go untreated.
Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, speaks during a media tour of the facility. Caldwell helped develop the center’s “decompression” treatment model.
Ilana Bar-av
Ten years after the center opened, a study by Van Rybroek, Caldwell and others of 141 juvenile offenders — half of which received treatment in traditional prison settings and half of which received treatment at Mendota — found that two years after release, the young people who received standard treatment in conventional juvenile detention centers were twice as likely to commit violent crimes than those who received the style of treatment offered at Mendota.
In years since, Mendota’s success has drawn attention from other researchers and national media, including a 2017 article in The Atlantic that said what Van Rybroek and Caldwell “have done, by trial and error, is achieve something most people thought impossible: If they haven’t cured psychopathy, they’ve at least tamed it.”
Expanding to serve girls in 2025
The Department of Health Services broke ground in 2022 on an expansion of the center to accommodate more residents and open treatment availability to girls after serving only boys for 30 years. The expansion was completed and Mendota began accepting girls in January 2025.
As of May 18, there were nine girls ages 15-18 at the center, according to the Department of Health Services. The center has the capacity for 20 girls in the new unit on the second floor of the center. Similarly to the downstairs boys’ unit, the second floor has secure, 120 square-foot residential rooms, recreation spaces, classrooms, art and music studios and secure patio space. On an alternating schedule, the girls are also able to use the downstairs gym, recreation room and larger enclosed outdoor space on the first level.
While the physical space is largely similar, Van Rybroek said the center had a lot to learn about providing treatment to girls and how their intervention approaches needed to change.
The first thing to understand is that all of the young people being treated at the center have experienced severe adversity throughout their childhood, clinically referred to as ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. These are usually scored on a range of 1-10 based on how extreme the experience was.
Most average adults have an ACE score or 1 or 2. A majority of the young people at Mendota have an ACE score of at least 7, Van Rybroek said. For some of the girls, that trauma includes trafficking.
While Van Rybroek has observed that boys at the center are more likely to act out physically when unsettled, girls may close themselves off more from treatment.
“There’s a higher instance of self-harm with the girls and bullying type behavior,” said Gynger Steele, administrator for the Division of Care and Treatment Services within the Department of Health Services.
That said, even with the learning curve, expanding services for girls was the center’s “missing piece,” Steele said during a tour of the facility.
Center will expand capacity again in June
As of May 18, there were 34 boys ages 14-18 held at the center. The center plans to expand capacity for boys again this year, with the goal of being able to accommodate up to 55 by the end of June, according to the Department of Health Services.
The expansion of services has been in the works for years, initiated through the juvenile justice reform act in 2017 under former Gov. Scott Walker, Van Rybroek said. That law aimed to close Wisconsin’s two troubled youth prisons, located about 30 miles north of Wausau in Lincoln County, by increasing capacity at Mendota and building newer youth prisons elsewhere in the state.
Now, nine years later, Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth detention centers are still open, but the state is still moving toward their eventual closure by expanding Mendota as well as allocating funds and selecting sites for the new youth prisons in Milwaukee and Dane Counties.
Gynger Steele, administrator for the Division of Care and Treatment Services within the Department of Health Services, speaks during a media tour at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center on May 19.
Ilana Bar-av
The average stay for a person at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center ranges from six to nine months, according to the health department, though some young people who face greater challenges have stayed for multiple years, according to program director Brett Ritz. He also said some who have been convicted of particularly egregious crimes will end up staying at the center until they turn 18 and are then transferred to an adult prison.
But even in the most serious cases, the facility has long focused on ending isolation in youth treatment, Steele said. That included sending center staff to a certificate program at Georgetown University focused on that tenet.
“These kids aren’t going to get better unless we get them out of the rooms,” she said. “It’s easier in some venues to stick them in on the cell and lock them up, and that’s not the point here.”