By Dana DiFilippo
Reprinted with permission
New Jersey Monitor
Ongoing lawsuits filed by people who say they were sexually abused as children while in juvenile detention centers, foster care, and other state-supervised placements could cost New Jersey at least $340 million, judging by past payouts.
The state has already shelled out tens of millions of dollars to resolve such claims, with the median cost of the settlements at $975,000 as of March, according to budget documents. Two past lawsuits over sex abuse children endured in foster homes decades ago cost the state almost $19 million alone in 2024.
But about 350 cases remain active, and more could come, because state lawmakers in 2019 expanded the statute of limitations for sex crimes to give victims a longer timeline to file civil lawsuits.
New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner last year consolidated about 250 cases against the state Youth Justice Commission at the request of victims’ attorneys and assigned them to Superior Court in Middlesex County. Those cases remain in the discovery phase. The other 100 or so cases name other state agencies as defendants and are proceeding separately through the court system.
Many of the lawsuits accuse guards, counselors, teachers, and other staff of wide-ranging abuses at a long list of the state’s youth jails and secure residential programs.
Victims said they were forcibly raped or coerced into unwanted sexual activity, with staff securing their silence with bribes of food, cigarettes, pornographic magazines, and other contraband or threats of discipline and loss of privileges. Some reported illicit strip searches that turned predatory, and one accused a staff member of using a broomstick to rape him. In some cases, the victims allege, other staff saw the abuse and did nothing to intervene or hold abusers accountable.
Most of the current cases stem from alleged assaults at the New Jersey Training School in Monroe, the state’s largest and oldest juvenile jail.
The feds identified the facility in 2010 as one of the nation’s 13 worst for sexual misconduct and use of force by staff, with as many as 35% of boys who were surveyed there reporting sexual victimization by staff. A follow-up study in 2012 found that abuse at the facility had declined but persisted, with up to 15% of boys surveyed reporting sexual victimization by staff.
Former Gov. Chris Christie said in 2018 that the state would close it, along with a girls’ jail in Bordentown. Both jails, though, remain open. Workers began construction late last year on two replacement jails in Ewing and Winslow that are expected to open in late 2027.
Jerome Block is an attorney with the firm Levy Konigsberg, which represents about 150 people who said they were abused at the New Jersey Training School and another handful who reported abuse at the Female Secure Care and Intake Facility, which is known as Hayes, and the Skillman Training School for Boys.
“Sexual abuse that is this widespread really cannot happen in the absence of negligence or even worse,” Block told the New Jersey Monitor. “The point of the juvenile system is to educate the child, to rehabilitate the child, and for them to come out in a better position than they were when they went in, and in a position to get on the right track and have a productive adult life. Instead, these children went into these facilities, they needed help, and they were damaged even worse by these child sexual abuse traumas that they experienced at the hands of the staff members.”
Michael Symons, a spokesman for the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment. In a response filed with the court in September, the state’s attorneys largely denied victims’ claims and demanded a jury trial.
The lawsuits accuse the state of negligent hiring, retention, training and supervision of staff, cruel and unusual punishment, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things.
