In the spring of 2017, after a preliminary injunction hearing, a federal judge ordered Ruthford County to stop using the filter system, their policy for legally detaining kids. The impact of that decision was massive. The number of county kids sent to jail dropped by almost 80% over the next year, which was good for the kids of Ruthford County. And that injunction was also good for Wes and his legal team who were still a lawsuit against the county.

We thought, Great, we've got the injunction, and then they're going to have to settle this thing or face a trial and we have all these good arguments and we're going to get these experts. We would have a really great shot at convincing a jury of the value of these claims.

So, Wes and the two other lawyers on the case, Mark and Kyle, started gearing up for the trial of their careers. They did more depositions of jail and court staff and hired an expert witness to testify on the trauma and impact of jailing kids so young. In preparation to wow a jury, they hired a photographer to take specialized photos of the jail. Their plan was to put VR headsets on jurors so they could feel what the kids did, being locked up in a tiny cell. But there's a problem with gathering all that evidence. That's a ton of damn money. Here's Mark. I remember getting the expert witness bills and being like, Oh, my God. We'd get the bill and then there'd be another one a month later for another $10,000 or $15,000. That $15,000 was just a kick in the balls. While the lawyers were bleeding money, the county was raking it in. Because the thing is, Rutherford County's juvenile jail wasn't just a place for its delinquent kids. It was a place for other county's kids too. As illustrated by an infomercial the county sent out across the state.

Built in.

2008, the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center is a 43,94-square-foot facility that is located in the heart of Tennessee.

It's narrated by Judge Davenport, and it's called What can the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center do for you?

Well, for starters, there are 64 clean and secure detention beds, with 48 of those being in a single occupancy rooms that have a toilet seat, water fountain, private shower, desk, and intercom system.

Over drone shots and B-roll of kids in gray and white striped jumpsuits, Davenport makes her pitch to neighboring counties.

Facility? Check. Grady employees? Check.

You should send your delinquents to Ruthiford County's state-of-the-art juvenile jail.

Please contact us and let us be your partner for the safe custody and wellbeing of the detained youth of your community.

In.

The year after the county stopped using the filter system. After the number of Ruthiford County kids in the jail plummeted, the detention center's revenue doubled. Ruthiford County was still very much in the business of jailing kids, and business was booming. A federal judge had ordered the county to stop jailing kids under the filter system, finding it was likely unconstitutional. But this was only a temporary injunction, not a definitive ruling. There seemed to be no real fallout from it. No consequences for any county employees, not even a public apology. To the lawyers, this lawsuit felt like the only avenue to some justice and accountability for what happened, which meant they either had to win the case definitively in a trial or negotiate a large enough settlement so the kids would get restitution. But time is its own commodity in these kinds of cases. And as the months and then years went on, time worked in the county's favor. Their lawyers filed motions to get the case thrown out, and the federal judge held off on ruling on these motions, possibly to push the two sides to settle, which just caused more time to slip away. And while that's going on, life happened for Wes, Mark, and Kyle.

First, Kyle's marriage fell apart. Then Mark and his wife moved to Canada, where she grew up. He could still work on the case from there, but it was a lot harder for everyone involved. As for Wes, he'd been sober for over three years until- I.

Thought it won't hurt just to try.

He got back on oxy.

I could just do just one just today. It'll be fine. I won't mess anything up.

That relapse actually happened earlier in the case and lasted a few months. Mark and Kyle didn't even find out. But then he had a second relapse on alcohol and prescription drugs, which was far worse. He would end up in an impatient rehab for four months. Another lawyer had to come in and help out while Wes was gone. Then back to Mark. His marriage eventually ended, and so did his sobriety. He started drinking again.

The.

Lawyers told me the relapses didn't affect anything. Mark and Kyle both said there was enough of them to pass the work around. Do I totally believe none of this affected the case? I'm not so sure. But still, they were limping to the finish line. From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Maribon Knight. This is The Kids of Rutherford County, episode four. The dedicated public servants.

In the fall of 2020, the lawsuit rolled into its fourth year, and the lawyers were getting increasingly concerned. They'd sunk nearly $100,000 of their own money into the case, and they didn't know how much longer this whole thing could drag on. A few more years, maybe more. What if in the end they lost? Kyle, usually so confident, said the decision to settle was a product of fatigue. It's cool and all to be these shoestring lawyers, he told me. But he acknowledged that there's a reason these kinds of cases are often backed by a big firm with deep pockets. By June 2021, the lawyers in the county had a deal. Here's what they agreed to. First, the preliminary injunction against the filter system would become permanent. Second, the county would pay out as much as $11 million in fees and restitution to kids who've been wrongfully arrested, jailed, or both. In the end, because of the statute of limitations, it was determined that only about 1,200 kids would qualify. While $11 million is significant, the had made a big concession to get there. The process for paying the kids. What they'd agreed to was a claims-made settlement, which meant that each kid who had an eligible claim, that kid had to fill out a bunch of complicated paperwork and send it in themselves.

The lawyers would help, but it was an arduous process. For each valid claim, a kid would receive about a thousand bucks for a wrongful arrest and 4,800 for an illegal jailing. But a recent study of these types of settlements found that only about 9% of eligible claimants ultimately file claims. For this case, the lawyers had allowed the county to keep any money they didn't pay out. In order to make the county really pay the full settlement amount, $11 million, the lawyers were going to have to find these 1,200 kids. What's more? There was a hard deadline. The lawyers had just four months to cold call people, cold email people, cold door knock people and let them know, Hey, put in your claim. Get your money and make the county pay for what they did to you. Wait, what's in the box?

There are snacks and drinks and vape pods. Eye drops? Yeah, I get dry eyes.

In early October 2021, a little less than a month before the deadline, I took a ride with Wes and Kyle. Wes had just gotten back from rehab. He and Kyle were searching for people to file claims. They had a printout of a bunch of names and addresses they wanted to hit. These were the high-rollers of the lawsuit. Kids, most of them now adults with multiple detention claims, meaning the lawyers believed they were illegally jailed at least three or four times, often more.

Like Wes, I heard that there was someone with 10 claims.

There's someone with 10 claims?

One person.

Is that the most you've.

Found so far? Yes, that's the most of it. That's by far the most.

There are- Ten claims added up to $48,000. So Wes and Kyle started referring to the kid as their grand prize winner. It was exciting to think about this young guy answering the door to this news. A sudden and unexpected windfall of almost 50 grand. We pulled up to the address, a rundown apartment complex, and we decided Wes and Kyle would go in first, then let me know if the grand prize winner was comfortable with me recording. All the information they were going off of, the names and addresses was confidential, so they had to be really careful with what they could share with me. I sat in the back seat of Wes's black Sedan until they came back with news. What happened?

Someone is there who says I've never heard of that person. And I've lived here since 2013. I've lived here since.

2013, so. They debated what to do next. Should they take another crack or let this one go? But there's one thing I've left. Ultimately, they decided to move on. -thanks, one. -to keep going down their list of plaintiffs. As we drove off to the next address in search of the next kid on the list, I stare out the window trying to process what just happened. That's very sad. Did $48,000 just vaporize right then and there? At a subdivision of low income apartments, things didn't go any better.

All right, so we ended up talking to someone who seemed like maybe the apartment manager. Yeah. And that family was evicted in May. No forwarding information. No forwarding information.

It started to occur to me that the people who needed this settlement money the most, people who were already struggling financially, who didn't have a stable address, they were the least likely to get what's owed to them.

So this is it. It's either this place or nowhere. In the.

Seven and a half hours we spent driving around Rutherford County. We had a working class neighborhood.

Well, Maribah. Well, it ain't looking good so far.

A quiet cul-de-sac dotted with single-family homes.

All right, well, nobody answered the door even though there's two cars sitting here.

The house was dark inside. And a handful of bum addresses. No luck.

Marquette.

Is a bad address. Like a house number that led to a shed in an empty field.

There's nothing there but trees.

And by the end of the day...

Brutal.

-we've gone to 22 stops and nothing.

-a swing and a miss.

Not a single person to file a claim.

Tragic.

My back of the envelope math was that more than $430,000 was left on the table that day. 430,000 that kids maybe wouldn't get despite what was done to them. In the weeks that followed, I continued to wonder about the grand prize winner. The kid was $48,000 in.

Claims.

So I kept checking with the guys, asking if they'd gotten any leads on him, but nothing. They couldn't find him. He was far from the only one. Other claimants were just as unfindable to the lawyers. No matter how many public records databases they scrubbed, a few had been killed. Some were now in prison.

Wes.

Was shocked at how few people were responding. The lawyers didn't give up, though. They got students at two local universities to doorknock and make calls. They did a media campaign, getting stories into the local TV news, the local paper. Kyle even went on WGNS, the same radio station Davenport appeared on, to spread the word.

If you're sitting on a packet from the mail about this, you need to call.

You.

Need to call. Don't leave.

The money on the table. Ladies gentlemen, we will be right back and we are paying some bills. Finally, the deadline came. According to the lawyers, 278 kids got payouts from the county. 278 kids. That's 23 % of the total eligible. Wes was happy with this number. It was way above average for these kinds of settlements, which again, is a dismal 9 %. But I have to admit, I felt deflated by the outcome. I've reported on many lawsuits, but nothing that I got to watch play out until the bitter end. I had no idea about what really came after the flashy headline of kids win $11 million in federal lawsuit. Because in the end, Ruthford County paid just a little over $5 million, less than half the total settlement. Almost three million of that went to the lawyers and administrative costs. The kids only got 2.2 million, and the county got to keep the rest, almost $6 million. The county also admitted no wrongdoing. I couldn't help thinking of the 900 or so kids who didn't get paid, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands of others over the years who weren't even eligible because their arrests or detentions fell outside the statute of limitations.

I told Wes I found this settlement a little bit heartbreaking. Wes, understandably, found me a little bit annoying.

Sure. In ideal world, there would be a hundred million dollars and the county would have to plow the detention center under and do all these things they should have done instead of building Supermax Kid Prison. That's ideal, but there is no mechanism or possibility for that to occur. Within the context of what's possible here, I feel like it's a really great outcome.

I understood Wes's perspective. At least he got some kids paid. But how do those kids feel about it?

Yes, ma'am. I actually made $16,000 off of it.

You met Zeb in the last episode. He was the kid arrested for taking a Bluetooth speaker from his grandma when he was a teenager. Zeb is now 22 years old.

What was it like to.

Get that $16,000?

Honestly, it felt really good, but it's still $16,000 wouldn't make up for the traumatizing experiences I actually felt in juvenile system.

Zeb still remembers his time in Juvie, the booking process, the cold shower in front of the guard, then into his jumpsuit, and into a cell, which was also freezing cold. Lots of people told me how cold the jail was. Everywhere, just so cold. Zeb remembers finally going in front of Judge Davenport, who he says sent him back to the jail for two more weeks. He remembers that at some point, he had an anxiety attack. He remembers calling for a guard, but says it took two hours for someone to finally check on him. Nearly a decade later is when he got his payout from the county. He says the money felt like an acknowledgment of what happened to him, but not like an apology, not a reckoning.

It felt like they were just paying for the wrongs I did, not knowing that they put a lot of emotional abuse on people that didn't deserve it.

Zeb knew others who got payouts, too. His brother got a claim and also...

Basically, one of my great friends got it, too. Wow, who is that?

Or maybe are you still in.

Touch with him? Yeah, he's in jail now. He just filed these community corrections, but his name was Quinterious Fraser.

Wait, I know Quinterious.

Wait, is he back in jail? Yeah, he's in jail now. I talked to.

One- Quinterious Fraser, the kid from the solitary case in episode two. Turns out he, too, was paid by Rutherford County. Just like Zeb, he'd gotten around $16,000. He's also 22 years old now. He's been in and out of the county jail for the last few years, mostly for probation violations stemming from cases when he was a juvenile. He's back this time on another set of violations: drinking, smoking weed, not letting his probation officer search his phone. He's been locked up for about a year. It's hard to disentangle what's going on with Quinterius today with what happened to him in the past. But you've got to wonder. Several of the kids I spoke to told me they felt going to Juvie, especially for such minor stuff, marked them for the rest of their youth. You don't fit in with the good kids anymore. You're now a bad kid, one said. I really am like a bad kid now, another told me. And so some lived up to that, swapped one identity for another. A number of studies I've read say that kids who are arrested and jailed are more likely to re-offend, more likely to drop out of school, and more likely to end up in the adult system.

Not too long ago, I had lunch with Quinterius's mother, Sharika. I asked her where the settlement money is now, and she told me it's almost gone. With no other income, Quinterius had been spending some of it on his commissary and phone calls from the county jail, meaning a good chunk of his settlement money had actually gone right back to Rutherford County. Once the lawsuit wrapped up and the claims had all been submitted, the lawyers were ready to move on. Mark was off in Canada, eventually going to rehab for his drinking. Kyle had just remarried and was looking for his next big case. Wes, he too had new lawsuits to file, other municipalities to sue. He told me cases fighting for sex offenders rights are, quote, so hot right now. But I wasn't so ready to move on from Rutherford County. It felt like I got away with something, not just because of the money, but also because the adults in charge still had their jobs. Judge Davenport, who oversaw a juvenile justice system that had wrongfully arrested and jailed over 1,000 kids, she was about to run for another eight-year term. Lynn Duke, who put together the filter system, who called the jail a well-oiled machine.

She was still the director there, going on her 21st year. I wondered how much could have really changed if all the people running the place were still the same. More on that after the break.

You've gone deep into the kids of Rutherford County, and now you want to know even more. Here's one way. If you're in the Nashville area, you can come here, Maribah Knight, in conversation live with Madeline Baron of the In the Dark podcast. They'll shed light on their reporting and how their work confronts systemic issues. Nashville Public Radio presents this one night event with ProPublica on November 29th. It's happening at the independent nonprofit, Bell Court Theater in Nashville. Find a link to the tickets and more at wpln. Org/kids.

I've circled around this story for years, and in 2021, I published a long article about it in pro publica with my colleague Ken Armstrong. We wrote about the Hobgett arrests, about Judge Davenport's directives on arresting kids, about the jail's filter system and its use of solitary confinement. We dug into how the county and the state had allowed all this to happen. What we found in our reporting was a troubling lack of oversight. For example, on the state level, every year, the Tennessee Department of Children's Services inspected the jail. They talked with children, even reviewed the jail's manual, the same one that had the filter system right there in plain sight. But the inspectors never flagged it. When I spoke with those inspectors, they confirmed that yes, it was their job to make sure the detention center was following the law. But obviously, I missed the filter system, one told me. Or take the county. We learned that back in 2003, Ruthiford County had hired a consulting firm to come up with proposals for a new juvenile jail. In their report, the consultants told the county they were jailing significantly more kids than other Tennessee counties, and they were overusing the jail for kids accused of the most minor offenses.

The consultants recommended diverting more kids away from the jail and building a smaller juvenile detention center. The county rejected the firm's advice and instead, built one of the largest juvenile jails in the state. It appeared Judge Davenport and the people who reported to her were allowed to run this system the way they wanted because either the oversight just wasn't there or nobody seemed to mind what they were doing. Once we published the story, it got a lot of attention.

An update now on one Tennessee County's pattern of putting.

Children in jail. According to a scathing, pro-publica report, that Tennessee County was. Rutherford County, Tennessee has detained a record- Three police officers went to an.

Element- One juvenile court judge in Rutherford.

County, Tennessee. The story went national, and then there were meaningful demands for change. Eleven members of Congress wrote a letter to attorney general, Merrick Garland, asking for the DOJ to investigate Rutherford County. Tennessee's Republican governor called for a review of Judge Davenport, and state lawmakers introduced a resolution to oust her. Just get her off the bench as soon as possible.

Hi there. Thank you for joining us today. Late Friday afternoon, Representative Johnson and I.

Filed a report- In a press conference over Zoom, state Senator Heidi Campbell explained why they took such a drastic measure.

While judges are given judicial discretion to interpret laws, they are not allowed to make up their own laws. The constitutional.

Provision for removing- This was January of 2022, and Judge Davenport was up for re-election that August. I'd been wondering if she still planned to run, and all my sources were telling me she was. But the day after that state senator's press conference, she issued a statement that read, in part, After prayerful thought and talking with my family, I've decided not to run for re-election. I am so proud of what this court has accomplished in the last two decades and how it has positively affected the lives of young people and families in Rutherford County. After more than 20 years on the bench, Judge Davenport was retiring. Suddenly, all the calls for investigations, the resolution, it all just stopped. There would be no disciplinary action. Instead, Judge Davenport would remain on the bench for another seven and a half months, hear hundreds more cases, and leave with her pension intact. Here's the question. What has changed in Ruthford County and what hasn't? Well, on the change side, local police stopped using Davenport's arrest policy and the jail stopped using the filter system, which had a huge effect. This past fiscal year, there were just 96 kids from Ruthford County jailed.

A big difference from its peak of 1,400 in 2008, the year the filter system was written into the jail's manual. In addition, the counties now set up an oversight board for the juvenile detention center, taking authority over the jail away from the judge, and giving it to a team of citizens. The board members inspect the jail, scrutinize its policies, and even have the power to hire and fire the director. After the oversight board was announced, I reached out to one-long-time county commissioner, Jeff Phillips. Jeff has been a county commissioner off and on since 1990. He's not on the oversight board, but he helps set it up. For more than 10 years, he sat on the Public Safety Committee, which met monthly with the jail's director and approved its yearly budgets. I wanted to know what Jeff made of the revelations from the lawsuit and what lessons the county was now taking from all this. But as soon as I started in with my first rather innocuous question, he cut me off.

I know what I'm about to say sounds a little suspicious, but to what end? What are you doing? Why are you doing this? I'm just trying to figure out why. Why are you bringing this up?

I understood Jeff's concern. Ruthiford County had gotten knocked around pretty good in the press, and he just wanted the whole thing to go away. But I explained to him that I was curious, from his perspective, about what happened and what could have gone differently, so that history isn't doomed to repeat itself. Jeff got that, but still.

I just don't know how rehashing all this stuff is in the best interest of everybody in Rutherford County to go back and say over and over and over again that these kids were treated unfairly. It appears that all of them were treated unfairly. We made a mistake. Let's fix it and just move forward. We'll try not to make those mistakes again.

Jeff said the county commissioners, they're just a legislative body. They approve funding, provide resources. They don't have the knowledge or expertise to really oversee the operations of the justice system. That's the point of the new oversight board, to staff it with local citizens who hopefully have professional skills they can bring to bear. He said that as soon as the revelations came out about what's been happening in the court and the jail, the county really has tried to make amends.

We are not arguing that, at least I'm not, and I don't know of any other commissioner that would be arguing that what happened was the right thing to do. I think we're just trying to say, Okay, this happened. And we're not saying that it was our fault that it happened or it was anybody's fault that it happened. I think it was a mistake that was made during the judicial process. And that process, there are mistakes made there like there are everywhere. And we weren't aware that that was happening. I'm pretty sure that the juvenile detention center was not aware that they were breaking a law either. Maybe they should have been. I don't know.

A longtime county official admitting pretty clearly that the system was a mistake. It's significant, a meaningful starting point to some real accountability. But it wasn't totally clear to me what Jeff thought that mistake actually was or who made it, which brings us to what hasn't changed in Rutherford County. To my mind, if you're willing to admit that this policy was a mistake and harmful to kids, then the logical extension is to hold the people responsible for it. Well, responsible. Have them face consequences for implementing this system that went on for more than a decade and was ultimately the mass jailing of children. But that has not happened. Like I said, Judge Davenport got to leave on her own terms with no formal punishment for her actions. Lynn Duke, the woman who implemented and oversaw the filter system, she still has her job. Despite the fact that the jail she runs has now been forced to comply with two federal injunctions, one over the filter system and the other over its use of solitary confinement. And all this has cost the county significant money. But ever since the lawsuit is settled, county officials have rallied around her.

Rutherford County's mayor told the local paper, Ms. Duke is doing a fine job. And those on the new oversight board have said they have no plans to replace her. She has our support, one board member said. In my conversation with Commissioner Jeff Phillips, when I pressed him on who was responsible for what happened, did he think it was Davenport? Duke? He was Resolute.

You get this really clear. I am not going to mention names and I'm not going to point fingers at anybody else. I'm just not going to do that.

Why is it important for you to not do that?

Because I think there are some dedicated public servants out there whose lives have the potential to be ruined because of something that might be said from a negative perspective about them and how they've conducted their professional life. I just don't think that that's fair.

What strikes me about Jeff's response is how he and other officials are so willing to extend grace to Duke and Davenport. Two people who so often refuse to extend that same grace to the children who came before them. Recently, I went back to Ruthford County to the juvenile courthouse. It's a brutalist, Beige building that sits across the street from a car dealership. And now a new judge is in charge, Travis Lampley, who sailed through the election on the Republican ticket. When I asked him what needs to change, he said, This county needs a judge that will follow the statutes, which he seems to be doing. But that doesn't mean the system is operating totally fairly. For one, even though a lot of kids are not being jailed by the county anymore, there's some pretty significant disparities in which of them are. The year before the filter system was stopped, the racial disparities of the kids arrested were pretty aligned with the rest of the country, where a disproportionate number of kids locked up were Black. But once the filter system ended, the racial disparities shot up. Last year, 67% of the kids locked up from Rutherford County were Black.

This isn't a place where just 17% of the population is Black. It appears that the filter system, with its vast overreach, had its own twisted desegregation effect. Beyond that, the jail continues to house kids from other places. More than 40 different counties across Tennessee, almost half the state, send their wayward kids to Rutherford County. When I took a close look at what's happening to those kids, the out-of-county kids, I noticed something. Reading reports from the last few years, I see the jail has been holding some of them for too long on small charges. Truancy, held for two days. Unruly, held for six days. A runaway, seven days. Another runaway, 10 days. All of them, clear violations of the law. But the thing is, these are kids from other counties with different judges making their own decisions on how long to jail them. Sound familiar? When I asked the state monitor who compiles the reports about this, she said, You're always going to have one somewhere. A judge who tells you, This is my court, and I'm just going to do what I need to do. When I eventually make my way into the juvenile courtroom, I take a seating the back, sliding into a long wooden pew.

I still see what I've always seen: a room full of anxious kids and parents, tired-looking attorneys, court staff streaming in and out. It's Tuesday, which means it's plea day, so a docket full of kids taking plea deals. Their charges run the gamut, from possession of marijuana to having a firearm underage. There's a lot of domestic assaults, kids fighting with parents, also evading arrest, theft, burglary. The deals they make are often community service or probation. For many, the of expungement, the case wiped from their record, but they got to follow the program. No more bad choices. I noticed the courtroom is less colorful now. Davenport used to have lots of pictures drawn by kids hanging on the walls. I assume she took them with her when she left. But today, one picture catches my eye, one that wasn't here before. It's a large, almost life-size portrait of Judge Davenport. It hangs right next to the bench, peering over the shoulder of the new judge, smiling wide and proud. The mother of Ruthiford County.

The.

Kids of Ruthiford County is a co-production of serial productions, The New York Times, Pro Publica, and Nashville Public Radio. It was reported by me, Maribon Knight, with additional reporting from Ken Armstrong. The show was produced by Daniel Guimet, with additional production by Michelle Navaro, editing from Julie Snyder and Jen Gwera, along with Sarah Bluestain and Ken Armstrong at ProPublica, and my colleague, Tony Gonzalez, at Nashville Public Radio. Additional editing from Anita Batajoh and Alex Cotlowitz. The supervising producer for serial productions is Enday Cheubu. Research and fact-checking by Ben Phalen, with additional fact-checking by Naomi Sharp, sound design, music supervision, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. The original score for our show is from The Blasting Company. Susan Westling is our standards editor and legal review from Dana Green, Alamine Sumar, and Simone Procus. The art for our show comes from Pablo Del-Con. Additional production from Janel Peifer. Mac Miller is the executive assistant for Serial. Sam Dolnik is the deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Kathy Sinbach and Chris Kleiser. Ben Holland and Pam Holland at Spotland Productions. At The New York Times, a huge thank you to Jeffrey Miranda, Nina Lasem, and Mahima Chalblani.

The Kids of Rutherford Countyis produced by Serial Productions, The New York Times, ProPublica, and Nashville Public Radio.