By Dave Savini, Samah Assad
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — Hundreds of people are suing the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, where they say they were sexually abused by staff. For the first time, survivors detailed their experience exclusively to CBS News Chicago.
For decades, unsafe conditions and mistreatment of children ran rampant at the detention center. The 600,000-square-foot facility is meant to house convicted youth or youth awaiting trial. At one point, it was notorious for overcrowding and continues to be criticized for mismanagement and abuse of youth by staff.
For their safety and privacy, CBS News Chicago Investigators has concealed the identities of the survivors who decided to share their stories and is not using their names. They said they are coming forward because they do not want this abuse to continue to happen to others. This report contains details of sexual assault.
Two pregnant teens sexually assaulted by male staff members The first woman who spoke with us was 15 years old and pregnant in 2000 when she said she was arrested for loitering in Chicago.
“I was in my third trimester,” she recalled. “I was very close to my due date.”
She spent only two days in the detention center, but said she was raped by a staff member in her cell during that short time.
“I’m a little girl, pregnant. I screamed, I kicked, but nothing, nothing worked,” she said. “And I carried it around for so long because the only person that I ever shared it with was my mother.”
Hundreds of former residents like her, both girls and boys, now say they were sexually abused since the 1990s. Four hundred people have filed sex abuse lawsuits over the past few years against the detention center, Cook County and the Cook County Chief Judge’s Office, which oversees the facility. Leading the litigation is Chicago-based law firm Gould Grieco & Hensley.
The woman said her abuse began with isolation and starvation by a male employee. She said she begged him for anything to eat, even just a cracker. But when he entered her cell, all she got was insults.
“He was like, ‘Don’t act like you’re some kind of prize. Someone already made a fool out of you,'” she recalled.
She said he then covered her cell door’s window to hide what he was about to do.
“He threatened if I tell, I’d never get out of there, or that nobody would believe me,” she said. “After the assault, my baby was moving really, really weird. So I’m like, ‘I know something is wrong, I know something is wrong.'”
She said she was released from the detention center the next day. Several weeks later, she said doctors couldn’t find her baby’s heartbeat. She had a stillbirth, and believes the sexual assault was why she lost her child.
“I always got the question in the back of my mind, like, ‘I wonder what my son would’ve been like?’ or ‘I wonder what would he be doing now?'” she said.
The second woman who shared her experience was also 15 and pregnant when she said she was placed in juvenile detention for a misdemeanor in 1999.
She said her abuse started with a male employee groping her, and she reported it to a counselor. When her abuser found out, things got worse. She said he raped her for weeks.
“The first time he did it, he just said, ‘Don’t act like you’ve never done it before,'” she said. “I felt disgraceful. I felt so dirty. I felt disgusting.”
Overcrowding, no cameras, abundant master keys facilitated abuse, former administrator says The accusations and stories shared with us and in the lawsuits do not surprise Earl Dunlap, the transitional administrator who was in charge of the facility from 2007 to 2015.
“[The staff] could get away with anything. You could get away with anything,” Dunlap said.
Dunlap is retired now, but he built a national reputation for juvenile justice work. He was appointed by a federal judge to clean up the chaos after the American Civil Liberties Union won an eight-year-long battle for a consent decree.
The consent decree required major reforms to the facility’s living conditions and how youth housed there were being treated.
Dunlap said it would have been easy for an employee to access youth in their cells at any time because, before he got there, there were no security cameras and an unknown number of county workers had master keys.
“They could access the facility any time they wanted to. They could get into areas anytime they wanted to,” he said.
And it wasn’t just the lack of screening and training staff; overcrowding created chaos at the facility. CBS News Chicago cameras were allowed inside the detention center in 1991, around the time of many of the abuse allegations. By 1996, the facility – which had 498 beds – was jammed with as many as 800 kids.
“I felt pretty much like I was walking into the gates of hell on the first day that I walked into the facility,” Dunlap said. “It was worse than bad. It was the treatment of the kids, the conditions of the building, the quality, the staff. The whole place was just dysfunctional and dangerous.”
While the facility is no longer over capacity, with about 150 youth housed there today, some of the lawsuits filed allege abuse took place at the detention center as recently as 2023.
How often is abuse alleged? Chief Judge won’t release records In an effort to figure out how often youth accuse staff of abuse at the detention center, CBS News Chicago requested records from the Cook County Chief Judge’s Office, which oversees the facility. The request asked for data showing every time physical or sexual abuse was reported by detained youth, as well as the associated investigative reports. But Chief Judge Charles Beach denied the request – and our request for an interview – citing the ongoing litigation.
“We need to know that they’re treating these kids well because these kids are going to come back into society at some point,” said Elizabeth Monkus, who previously worked as a senior attorney for policy center Chicago Appleseed, which monitors transparency in the courts. “It’s definitely outrageous.”
Monkus said because the Chief Judge’s Office is part of the judicial branch of government, they are not required by law to release any records and are not subject to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.
“We can’t get information about very serious things,” she said. “You’re discussing incidents of abuse within the system, but you also can’t get information about more simple procedural stuff.”
She does not believe they should be shielded from turning over records.
“They are, first and foremost, our government,” she said. “We need to be able to understand what it’s doing, why it’s doing what it’s doing. And we need public oversight. We need public access to that.”
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) does track some abuse allegations at the detention center, but only when the abuse involves foster children. It’s one of the only datasets that gives some insight into how often abuse is alleged in the facility.
Our analysis of DCFS data found the agency investigated 519 total allegations of physical or sexual abuse reported at the facility over the last three decades – from May 1995 to May 2026.
There were 52 allegations involving sexual abuse, with one case as recent as April of this year. The overwhelming majority, or 77 percent of all sexual abuse allegations, were deemed unfounded.
The federal government also requires detention centers to report some statistics under a law called the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Since 2015, the juvenile detention center in Cook County reported 61 allegations of sexual misconduct or abuse by staff on youth, according to our review of the annual PREA reports. Only two cases were substantiated.
A spokesperson for the Chief Judge’s Office said the staff in both cases were terminated, but would not say whether they were criminally prosecuted. And since Chief Judge Beach won’t release records about any of the cases, the details of what happened are unclear.
“There’s a huge gap in information there that could be shielding anything,” Monkus said.
The abuse survivors who shared their stories said they want the detention center and Cook County to be held accountable for the trauma they endured.
“I don’t want this happening to anybody else,” one survivor told us.
In a statement, Chief Judge Beach said he “has made a priority of improving the experience of youth” in the detention center, including hiring a new director of juvenile services. He also said he is working to find a new superintendent and director of juvenile probation.
“We are building a more accountable, transparent and effective juvenile justice system,” the statement said. “We are instituting nationally recognized best practices for the youth entrusted to our care, delivering better outcomes for these young people.”
Timothy Evans, the chief judge who oversaw the facility for nearly two decades before Beach, was recently appointed to the First District Appellate Court. He also wouldn’t comment, and through a spokesperson said judges are not permitted to comment on pending or impending legal cases.
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