Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle has stated that the County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) should be gradually evacuated, the Chicago Tribune reports. In 1999, the ACLU of Illinois sought to bring to light the substandard conditions of the facility in the class action lawsuit Jimmy Doe v. Cook County. The Tribune spoke with ACLU of Illinois' Associate Legal Director Ben Wolf, who also directs the Institutionalized Persons Project which handled the case, about the conditions at the JTDC:
"The place was a filthy, overcrowded, violent, chaotic mess," said Benjamin Wolf, associate legal director for the ACLU of Illinois, who referred to the children as forgotten.
That followed a lawsuit more than a decade earlier, in which the ACLU asserted that youths were being held at the center well after a judge ordered their release because parents and guardians didn't claim them. Some spent up to a year waiting.
