Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Uncovering Abuse in a Juvenile Detention Center

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

In the U.S., many kids in trouble with the law are sentenced to juvenile detention facilities. In New Hampshire, the largest such facility is a place commonly known as the Youth Detention Center, or YDC (recently renamed the Sununu Youth Services Center). YDC was founded with good intentions: keep kids out of adult jails and prisons and care for them. But now, nearly 1,300 former residents of YDC have come forward, filing lawsuits over alleged abuse at the facility. The allegations include hundreds of cases of assault and rape that span over six decades. It's become one of the biggest youth detention scandals in American history.New Hampshire Public Radio's Jason Moon and his colleagues on the Document team spent the last year investigating the Youth Development Center. They combed through the cases, worked around legal roadblocks, and spoke with residents and staff who'd never before told their stories.This week on The Sunday Story, host Ayesha Roscoe and Moon discuss what may have happened inside YDC and how the allegations stayed under wraps for so long.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. Heads up, today's episode contains discussion of suicide, sexual, and physical abuse. Today we have a story that's hard to hear. It's about crimes perpetrated on children. But it's also a reminder of the power of investigative journalism to bring voice to those who felt silenced. This past May, a jury in New Hampshire awarded 42-year-old David Meehan a record-breaking settlement of $38 million. It was the largest personal injury verdict in state history. Meehan had sued over abuse he said he'd suffered as a child

while confined to New Hampshire's main juvenile detention facility. It's known as YDC, the Youth Development Center. Meehan was the first alleged victim to come forward. But since 2020, nearly 1,300 other people have also filed suit over alleged abuse at YDC. Some claim they were brutally beaten. Others allege they were brutally beaten. Others alleged they were repeatedly raped. New Hampshire Public Radio's Jason Moon and his colleagues on the document team spent the last year investigating the Youth Development Center. They combed through hundreds

of cases, worked around legal roadblocks, and spoke with former residents and staff who've never before told their stories. After the break, the Youth Development Center. Stay with us. Jason, welcome to the Sunday Story. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Your new podcast, the Youth Development Center, it's really an incredible example of investigative reporting. these stories are just tragic, heartbreaking, and they show really just a massive failure by those responsible for caring for these kids. Let's start at the beginning. How and why did you decide to undertake this investigation? Yeah, so this is a story that's been kind of slowly unfolding in New Hampshire over the last several years. It first came onto my radar in 2020 when the first lawsuit was filed over alleged abuse at the Youth Development Center or YDC. already in New Hampshire, but then the number just kept growing and growing and growing.

It was a few hundred, and then it was over 500. Today, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,300 alleged victims who've come forward who are alleging physical, sexual, and psychological abuse as far back as the 1960s and as recently as a few years ago. And so basically the size of this scandal had just become too large to not look into. And we went into it with this really basic question of how could this have happened at this scale and for this long? That really is the question, right? So what can you tell us about the Youth Development Center and the role that it served and how long has it been around?

Yeah, it's an interesting story. Basically, the Youth Development Center, YDC, it is the juvenile jail for the state of New Hampshire. Today, the official name is the Sununu Youth Services Center, named after a former governor. But a lot of people still call it YDC. And it goes way, way back. It goes back to the 1850s. At the time, the idea of having like a separate correctional facility for youth was this new kind of radically progressive concept. You know, we were going to stop putting kids in adult jail and put them in a place that was instead going to be not punitive, but supportive and rehabilitative

and educational. And it's still, you know, basically the same mission today. Unfortunately, in the case of YDC, it's not exactly turned out to have been what happened there. So who ends up there? And like like why are kids sent to YDC? Yeah, kids get sent there for really all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it was for, you know, serious violent acts, you know, up to and including murder in some cases. But most of the time it was for a lot less. You know, in many cases, we're talking about kids who were serial runaways from abusive or unstable homes. You know, one person who's now the state. Like, that number is shocking. And it's very hard to get your head around it. How did you get access to all of this information? They filed lawsuits, and those lawsuits were all public documents. There's just so many of them. You know, you have 1,300 different narratives about how a kid ended up at YDC, what happened to them while they were there. So when we first started to report on this pretty early on, we decided, you know, we should just get all these lawsuits and read them.

And so we did. It took probably about two and a half months. And it was kind of like piecing together this mosaic of stories from across, you know, over six decades. And all these patterns would emerge. You know, you'd read one lawsuit that, say, would, like, accuse a particular staffer in, like, the 1970s of a specific kind of abuse. And then I'd read another lawsuit accusing that same staffer of the very exact same kind of abuse, but it's like 20 years later.

And so we started to realize that these lawsuits were not just a way to read the allegations and get familiar with what people were saying happened, but it was also this incredible kind of data set that was illuminating these types of patterns. What are the roadblocks that you came across for this story? Yeah, juvenile facilities, juvenile justice in general is hard to report on.

That's mostly because of juvenile privacy laws that make most of what happens in the juvenile justice system confidential. And those laws are well-intentioned. You know, you don't want something that, you know, a kid did when he was 12 years old that got him in a delinquency proceeding to like get on the internet and follow him around for the rest of his life. But on the other hand, the secrecy of the system, it sets up a situation where, you know, the public has virtually no ability to scrutinize what's happening inside a state-run, publicly funded facility. And so trying to corroborate those stories is incredibly difficult. You know, I can't file a public records request from YDC.

I can't just show up. You're not allowed on the property. I can't just like write a letter to a kid inside. I can't even learn the names of the kids who are currently inside of YDC. So, you know, one of the key things for us in this reporting was a former YDC resident who we were talking to named Andy Perkins. He requested his own file from the facility and then shared it with us. That was crucial because it allowed us to get our hands on kind of our first tranche of internal documents that hadn't been seen by anyone else in the public up to that point. So Andy really was then your window into YDC. Can you tell us more about Andy?

Yeah, Andy was a kid who got sent to YDC in the early 90s. He says he basically broke into a house with a friend. It was like a house where kids in his neighborhood would go and party, basically. And he breaks into this house. That gets him put into the juvenile justice system. Eventually, he ends up at YDC. And when he gets there, he's 15 years old, and he is terrified. He's like, wow, this is real jail. I'm closed off from the world. He's like, I want to spend as little time here as possible. So he says he goes on his best behavior and he's volunteering to do things and mopping the floor and yes, sir, no, sir. And what he's trying to do is earn a weekend pass home, which is something that would happen at YDC. So he's well-behaved. He earns this weekend pass home.

But just before he is allowed to go home, the staff tell him he has to go see this YDC administrator whose name is Lucian Paulette. And Andy actually found it easier to write down what happened next in a letter. And I had him read it for me in a studio at NHPR. I was told I had to speak to Lucian before I went home. I took a seat in front of Lucian's desk. Lucian asked why he should let me go home for the weekend. I was confused. I had never spoken to Lucian and thought I had done everything required. I replied, I've done everything I was told I needed to do, plus volunteering for extra jobs. Lucian laughed and said, you haven't done everything.

I asked what I had done wrong. Lucian laughed and said, you haven't done everything. I asked what I had done wrong. Lucian laughed again and then replied, it's not about you did wrong. It's about what have you done for me? I was very confused. I barely ever spoke into this guy. What the hell does he mean? I thought. I told him I didn't understand. He asked how badly I wanted to go home. I told him it's all I can think about. I told him how much I miss all my friends and family. I told him I did what I was told was needed, but if I missed something, I would make up for it.

Lucian giggled and said, good. I'll never forget how he said the word good. It was evil. Lucian then said, let's get started. He pushed his wheel-desk chair from behind the desk so I could see all of him. You could see an erection through his pants. He slapped his inner thighs and said, I need help with this. I couldn't look at him after this and didn't know what to do.

I felt sick. He kept telling me to look at it. Look at me. Look at it. It's okay. Don't be shy. Look at me. Look at it. It's okay. Don't be shy. He kept talking. Five minutes from now, you could be going home.

Just look at it. He began to unzip his pants. I stood up and walked to the door. It was locked. I started to panic. I was scared. When I finally could speak, I said, It's okay. I'll just stay at the cottage. I don't want to go home anymore.

He told me to sit down. I begged him to just let me leave. He got angry, zipped his pants up, and yelled, Fine. I knew you didn't want to go home, he said. And he says, before Lucian kicked him out of his office that day, he warned him, you know they won't believe you if you say anything. Yeah, that seems, in cases like this, unfortunately, it seems like, especially because the kids have already gotten in trouble, that a lot of people don't believe them or they don't have the space to speak up. Yeah, I mean, I think you put your finger right on it. These kids were an incredibly vulnerable population because they were already looked upon as these, you know, quote-unquote bad kids.

You know, they're there because they lie, right? You know, so Andy says that's all, you know, Lucian had to sort of call upon to assert that power dynamic. You know, it's not just that Andy's a kid and Lucian's an adult. It's that Andy's an incarcerated kid and Lucian's a supervisor at YDC. And, you know, I should say here that, you know, Lucian Paulette, he declined comment through an attorney. He's also facing criminal charges for other alleged sexual assaults at YDC. He has pled not guilty. He's still awaiting trial. But that kind of power dynamic, it was possibly the most important ingredient that led to this decades-long culture of abuse at YDC. And even situations where

there was, like, say, solid proof of abuse, even then it wasn't enough. A separate incident where Andy describes two staffers assaulting him in his cell with one of them choking him on his bed to the point where Andy loses consciousness. Afterwards, he tries to report this abuse. He even fills out an ombudsman form and says that he even managed to get access to a phone and dial 911 from inside this juvenile jail. Because we got Andy's internal records from YDC, I was actually able to corroborate this specific attack and Andy's complaint about it. And what you see in the records is that an administrator reviews Andy's complaint. He even writes in his report that Andy has finger marks on his neck. But then nothing, nothing happens. No one is criminally charged. No one is fired. You hear from a lot

of people who went through YDC that speaking up earned you retaliation. And not just for kids, this was for staff too, by the way, who tried to speak up about things. You know, there's a former staffer who was there in the 1990s who said that she tried to speak up about mistreatment in the girls' cottage. And this staffer says that other staff told her, you know, you're digging your own grave. You shouldn't be doing this. And she says that one day she left work, got in her truck to drive home, and then the wheels of her truck fell off because someone had loosened the lug nuts. And this is something that we were actually able to corroborate this with an internal YDC memo. So that just gives you an image of the fear that you could live under just for trying to

speak up. I mean, it almost sounds like organized crime. I mean, it's so systemic. Like there has to be a culture here, right? Yeah. If you step back and you just look at the number, the sheer number of different staffers accused of abuse, it is staggering. There are at least, as very conservative, there are at least sexual abuse, the hundreds and hundreds of rapes that are alleged. It created a perfect environment for that kind of behavior to go unpunished. When we come back, the story of one staff member of the Youth Development Center and what she says happened when she tried to speak up for the kids. Because if you start letting a dog bite you and think, well, it's okay, the dog bites. It's going to escalate.

Of course it is. This is a Sunday story. I'm talking with New Hampshire Public Radio's Jason Moon. Moon and his colleagues on the station's document team spent more than a year investigating the state's main juvenile detention facility, the Youth Development Center. Jason spoke to former detainees who told disturbing stories of sexual and physical abuse. He also spoke to a former staffer who tried to do something about it. So tell me about Karen Lemoine and how you tracked her down. Yeah, Karen, she worked at YDC in the late 80s and early 90s. And she had this harrowing, absolutely harrowing experience there that for decades, she thought she was not allowed

to talk about because of those juvenile privacy laws that I was mentioning earlier. She emerged because she saw on the news that all these people were coming forward with their allegations of abuse. And at that point, you know, the state police had set up a hotline for folks with information to come forward. And so she called it. And then she started to talk to lawyers who are representing many of these alleged victims and then eventually through those lawyers she agreed to meet with me but she was she was very hesitant at first do you have any idea what that's like for me to have to tell you this shit i don't want you to hear this you

shouldn't have to hear this. Any of it. There's also a lot of power in telling this. Is there? Is this going to be the same thing as when here I thought I was helping them all the time I was working there? All I was doing was fueling those guys to hurt them worse. Well, I'm glad that Karen was able to tell her story. And you can just hear in her voice kind of the pain and the guilt that some of it off her chest. Karen told me her story, and it starts in 1989. She was a young single mom. She gets this job at YDC. And at that point, she believes in the mission. She wants to teach and nurture these kids. So when she starts there, she's working a night shift. And basically, her job was to do bed checks on the kids.

Like every 15 minutes they're asleep, but she has to go around to their cells and look in on them, make sure they are okay. And this is when she starts to notice some of the first red flags. And one of the things she notices is the way that kids will react whenever she needs to enter their rooms for one reason or another. They didn't even have a response. They didn't even say, get out, or I hate you, or I don't want to be here. There was no response. They were just frozen or crying uncontrollable, but no words. You know, this was just the beginning of a series of things that seemed off to Karen. She began to see bruises that seemed suspicious. She saw staff humiliating kids, including a kid who was very suicidal.

And Karen says there was a group of staff who would just mercilessly bully this kid for having attempted suicide. And Karen says she tried to complain to supervisors about it, but would just get brushed off. I could see that nobody was listening to me, even at the point where somebody would die. And at that point, I was scared. I realized I was working in the wrong place. But she keeps speaking up. She gets this reputation as a troublemaker amongst some of the other staff. And eventually it makes her a target.

So what happens is one night, Karen, she's actually making cookies with the kids in the common area of one of these cottages that she's monitoring. And she's with these two kids at a table and they're sort of mixing cookie dough. And these kids, they try to warn her. And at first, Karen thinks they're just like messing with her. But then one boy tells her something terrible is about to happen. He leaned over the table and he put his hand over my hand, which I thought was so odd, but in a nice way. And he looked me right in the eye. He said, Karen, they're going to rape you.

I mean, that's terrifying. I mean, who was going to rape her? According to Karen and according to one of these kids who warned her, who I also spoke with, other staffers at YDC had been trying to bribe kids in this cottage to attack Karen. And after she is warned of this plot by two kids, she goes to management. She complains about it. Ultimately, there is a disciplinary hearing, but it results in no real punishment. And then eventually, sometime later, Karen is attacked. And she is pretty seriously injured and ends up leaving YDC not long after it. Karen's story, like I said, it's corroborated by one of those former YDC residents who tried to warn her. That person is now one of those people suing the

state for abuse at YDC. He is suing anonymously, as many of the plaintiffs are, he's known as John Doe 441 in the court documents. He told me after he warned Karen, he suffered extreme retaliation from other staff. The beatings almost started the next day. This is where it gets hard. They subdued me with a pressure point behind the ear and put my hand in a door and slammed the door. They let go at the last minute. I got most of my hand out except for this one.

They took me over to the infirmary, and I was forced to tell them I slammed my own hand in the door. Did you speak to other staffers? Did you get any other points of view on what it was like to work there? Yeah, we did speak with the longtime superintendent of YDC, a guy named Ron Adams. And he described like an alternate reality almost. He totally disputed the idea that there was a toxic culture at YDC.

He said he never would have condoned abuse. He told me that the handful of times where he had concerns about abusive treatment of kids, he took action. And, you know, when you ask him, well, you know, how can there be, you know, all these hundreds of allegations of abuse that happened, you know, while you were in charge, he was largely in disbelief, I guess you could say, or perhaps denial. It's hard for me to say. I think that's what's so hard about this story because the kids are so powerless. But finally, somebody did do something. Someone finally spoke up. What happened? Right. Yeah, someone spoke up and people believed them, I think, is, you know, really the thing that started to happen recently that didn't happen before. So, you know, this huge flood of abuse allegations that we've been talking about, these roughly 1,300 victims, this all started with one guy named David Meehan. And this is David, the one who just won that $38 million

verdict against the state of New Hampshire. Yeah, that's right. He says that he was raped and beaten hundreds of times at YDC by a handful of different staffers. He left YDC in the 90s. He decides that he is, he's finally going to talk about it. He's finally going to tell his wife about the abuse for the first time. So I meet her at Applebee's in Epping. And it just kind of comes out. See her standing there.

So we hug, and I start crying. And I can't get out anything other than they raped me. We hear about so many instances, whether it's the Native American children in residential schools or celebrities like Paris Hilton's alleged abuse at a boarding school and abuse within the troubled teen industry. And we always hear about these stories way after the fact. Like, how does this keep happening? Like, why do they stay under wraps for so long?

Yeah, yeah. It is what is so sad about this story is that we've all heard some version of it already, like you were saying, you know, the church, schools, even Olympic gymnastics. One of the common threads in all of these institutional abuse stories is the power imbalance. And at a place like YDC, that imbalance is just they're off the charts. You know, these are not just kids. They're bad kids. David Meehan actually sort of talked about this during his – the civil trial with his lawsuit. He was cross-examined by the state, attorneys representing the state who were trying to undercut his case. They spent a lot of time reminding the jury of all the bad things that David Meehan

did as a kid in order to get sent to YDC in the first place. And eventually, David lashed out at this idea during the trial. Because what, I'm the bad guy? I was a bad kid, so I deserved it? Or I was a bad kid, so that proves I'm a bad man now and was a bad kid, so I deserved it. Or I was a bad kid, so that proves I'm a bad man now and I f***ing made it up. That hurts. What about the staff? What is happening to them? Are they being held responsible? Well, so far, there are nine former staffers currently facing criminal charges for sexual assaults. It was 11. One was found to be not competent to stand trial. He's a man in his 80s. passed away, who was a criminal defendant. That sort of speaks to the difficulty in bringing justice through the means of, you know, criminal prosecutions because the abuse allegations stretch back so far. A lot of these people are dead now. And it's been very upsetting for a lot

of the alleged victims who say, well, you know, what about my abuser? Why haven't they been arrested? And when are they going to be, you know, put on trial? And keep in mind, a lot of these people are people who've been through the criminal justice system themselves. And so they see this double standard of, you know, well, when I did something, you know, the handcuffs were put on me. They've been frustrated at what they see as a very slow pace of the criminal investigation up to this point. But then we're going to have to see, you know, will these prosecutions stick? Will they be successful? These alleged abusers were employees of the state. Is the state at fault? Like, how does that work? How will the state hold people accountable?

Yeah, it's a really interesting and weird and contradictory role the state has in all this because the state is conducting this criminal investigation into YDC. But it's also being sued by the alleged victims. And so on the criminal side, they're sort of playing offense and saying this abuse happened and these people should go to jail. And on the civil side, where they're on defense, they're saying, well, it wasn't our fault. It was just these rogue employees who were doing bad things and we weren't aware of that. So there's only been one settlement so far. Will all these other alleged victims also get their day in court? The hope is that no, not all of them will actually have to go through a trial.

The state has been trying to get YDC victims to settle out of court. The legislature created this giant settlement fund. And so the idea is that rather than sue us, you can apply for a settlement through this fund and receive a payout much faster. But one of the sort of darkly fascinating things about this settlement fund is how they've had to establish a formula to decide how much each claimant will receive. And each type of abuse is worth a different dollar amount. So just for instance, anal or genital rape is worth $200,000. Oral rape is $150,000. Physical abuse resulting in permanent or life-threatening injury, $50,000.

Then you apply this frequency multiplier based on how many times that category of abuse happened. Then you add these aggravating factors. You know, did the rape result in a pregnancy? If so, you add $200,000. Or did the rape result in a pregnancy? If so, you add $200,000. Or did the rape result in an STI? If so, you add $100,000. It is a very sobering type of math. But even just understanding this formula gives you a good sense of the types of abuse that people suffered at YDC and just how much

harm that needs to be still accounted for. You know, after hearing all of this, you know, I have to ask you, like, how were you able to take in all of these stories about abuse? You're a human being. So having to hear all of this trauma, that's also traumatic. Yeah. It was hard at times. This is not easy stuff to be immersed in. You cannot pretend that spending all day reading this incredibly graphic and horrifying child abuse or doing interviews where people are sharing their trauma. You can't pretend that's just like a normal day at work, you know, it's not. But it came to really actually motivate me as part of why we needed to get this story out there. As a society, we have a hard time talking about child sexual abuse. And I think it is easier in many cases for us to just sort of wish the problem away or just imagine that it happens about a juvenile jail or really any type of youth facility, this type of abuse should come into your mind and maybe second guess. Do we need this type of facility given the

risks for this type of abuse that come along with these types of facilities? You know, if we can plant that idea for listeners, I think that'll have been worth it. Jason, thank you so much for joining us and just sharing this reporting. It's so important. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That was Jason Moon on the Youth Development Center podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio.

To listen to the full series, visit ydcpodcast.org. This episode was produced by Hazel Feldstein and edited by Jenny Schmidt and Liana Simstrom. It was engineered by Maggie Luthar and James Willits. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Andrew Mambo. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.

Have a great rest of your weekend. The NPR app cuts through the noise, bringing you local, national, and global coverage. No paywalls, no profits, no nonsense. Download it in your app store today. Hey, this is Elsa Chang from NPR, where we practice active listening. You know, when we're interviewing someone, we're not just throwing out questions at them. We are listening to the answers, following up, trying to make sense of things so that you have an opportunity to be an active listener, too. Keep listening with NPR.