The Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice has failed to comply with reforms called for in a 2017 critical inspection report, including better security and medical staffing, on-site mental health care and less use of solitary confinement for the teenagers in its custody, according to an independent audit released Wednesday.

As a result, despite years of outside scrutiny, the department’s eight juvenile justice centers continue to be mismanaged, with cruel isolation policies and high levels of extreme use of force, according to the audit.

In addition, the department last year equipped its security staff with pepper spray without providing a policy to clearly define when it should be used, according to the audit. Staff in Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers have been using pepper spray at a rate 73.9 times higher than in federal prisons that house adults, auditors wrote.

The Herald-Leader reported last September that juvenile detention staff sometimes have misused pepper spray as punishment, even spraying it into cells where youths could not escape the burning chemicals or wash them off.

Just this week, a federal lawsuit alleged that a mentally ill 17-year-old girl spent much of the summer of 2022 locked — sometimes naked — in a filthy isolation cell in the juvenile detention center in Adair County, where security staff mocked her smell and ignored her cries for help.

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“The state of the Department of Juvenile Justice has been a concern across the commonwealth and a legislative priority over the past several years,” state Auditor Allison Ball said in a prepared statement.

“The findings from this review demonstrate a lack of leadership from the Beshear administration, which has led to disorganization across facilities and, as a result, the unacceptably poor treatment of Kentucky youth,” Ball said.

The General Assembly last year instructed the auditor’s office to hire an outside firm to review the operations of Kentucky’s troubled juvenile detention centers. The $460,000 contract went to CGL Companies LLC of Lexington, a consulting firm for criminal-justice facilities.

“As a previous assistant Floyd County attorney who prosecuted juvenile delinquency cases, I am alarmed by the findings of this report, but I am hopeful this will provide clear direction for the numerous improvements needed within our juvenile justice system and open the door for accountability and action within DJJ,” Ball said.

Kentucky’s juvenile justice commissioner, Vicki Reed, resigned effective Jan. 1 after a long series of problems at her agency’s facilities, including neglect, excessive force, riots, assaults and escapes. Her immediate superior, Justice and Public Safety Secretary Kerry Harvey, also recently announced his departure.

In 2017, the nonprofit Center for Children’s Law and Policy of Washington, D.C., sharply criticized the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice in a report citing a near-total absence of mental health care in the detention centers; chronic staff shortages and inadequate employee training; a lack of special education for youths with learning disabilities; and few opportunities for residents to file grievances that could reveal abuses.

The report saved its strongest criticism for the controversial practice known as “room confinement” — leaving youths with little supervision in small concrete isolation cells as punishment for misbehavior.

State officials agreed to spend $130,000 on that investigative report after a tragedy.

In 2016, 16-year-old Gynnya McMillen died from a heart condition while being ignored in room confinement at the Lincoln Village Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Hardin County, now closed. Her death went undiscovered for more than 10 hours. An investigation showed that detention center staff falsified logs to make it appear they were checking on the girl’s safety throughout the night.

However, few of the problems uncovered in 2017 have been fixed, auditors for CGL Companies LLC wrote in their new report.

“Our review found little if any of the findings from 2017 report issued by the Center for Children’s Law and Policy have been corrected in DJJ facilities,” auditors wrote.

“Findings regarding the overuse of isolation and room confinement, the use of a punishment based behavior management system, the poor quality of their policy manual, and specific medical and mental health findings have not been addressed,” they wrote.

On isolation, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice has no clear set of policies for when it’s appropriate, and it even uses different terms for the practice, such as “room restriction” and “room confinement,” auditors wrote. But whatever it’s called, it involves locking youths alone in a room behind a closed door for a period of time, and in Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers, officials misuse it, they wrote.

Because it threatens their mental health, isolation of youths should only be used briefly and in specific instances, such as when a youth poses an immediate safety risk to himself or others, the auditors wrote.

However, isolation is much more widespread in Kentucky’s juvenile detention centers, they wrote.

“Isolation is utilized in Kentucky DJJ inconsistently,” they wrote. “Site visits revealed isolation used for disciplinary, non-behavioral, and housing assignment purposes.”

Lawsuit: Mentally ill teen girl abused in filthy cell at KY juvenile detention center

State lawyers: KY juvenile detention center keeps youths in lockdown too much