Broken Bones, Shackles, and Silence: New Hampshire Still Can’t Protect Its Children

More than 1,100 survivors. Millions in settlements. The largest youth detention abuse scandal in American history. And it is still happening — on camera — inside the same facility.

On March 9, a child inside the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester picked up the phone and called the one office in New Hampshire state government that exists to listen. The child asked the Office of the Child Advocate to send someone. The child had something to say about what was happening inside those walls.

What Child Advocate Cassandra Sanchez and her team found when they arrived — and during subsequent unannounced visits over the following weeks — is documented in a March 30 letter to the Executive Council that should make every resident of this state physically ill.

A child’s arm broken during a physical restraint. Video footage showing staff holding the child face-down in an illegal prone position for more than three and a half minutes. A delay in medical treatment for the fracture. Restraints used without imminent risk of harm to justify them. A six-week lockdown during which roughly 15 children, ages 13 to 17, were confined to their sleeping quarters, shackled when they moved, denied outdoor access, forbidden from interacting with each other during meals, and stripped of a full school day.

“We are in jail now. I don’t want to become one of those mental kids, but this is going to make me one.”— A child detained at the Sununu Youth Services Center, as reported by the Office of the Child Advocate, March 2026

A Correctional Mindset in a Treatment Facility

The Child Advocate’s report identifies a disturbing shift at SYSC under new leadership. Joshua Nye began serving as Bureau Chief of Secure Treatment Services in late January, appointed at the request of DHHS Commissioner Lori Weaver. Under his direction, the facility moved from a treatment-centered model — the approach advocates and legislators had fought for over years — toward what the report describes as a correctional mindset. Programming was cut. Movement was restricted. Children were isolated.

This is not a staffing problem. It is not a resources problem. It is a leadership decision. Someone in authority looked at 15 children in state custody and decided that shackling them, locking them in their rooms, and denying them an education was an acceptable way to operate a facility that is supposed to rehabilitate them.

The state’s response? Boilerplate. DHHS spokesperson Jake Leon issued a statement that could have been written by an algorithm: “We take seriously our responsibility to provide for the health and safety of the youths at SYSC and examine all allegations of abuse or neglect.” That is word-for-word the same language this department uses every time someone documents abuse at this facility. It is not accountability. It is a press release.

The Scandal That Never Ends

The Sununu Youth Services Center used to be called the Youth Development Center. The name changed. Nothing else did.

More than 1,100 former residents have come forward with allegations of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse spanning decades. The state has paid millions in settlements through a claims administration fund created in 2022. Criminal trials have been held. Staff have been acquitted. Survivors have testified publicly about being raped, beaten, and broken as children in state care.

This is, by any reasonable measure, the largest youth detention center abuse scandal in American history. And the state of New Hampshire’s response to that scandal — the reforms, the oversight, the promises — has now produced a facility where a child’s arm is broken on camera and the first instinct of leadership is to review and respond at a pace that suggests the word “urgency” means something different inside the Department of Health and Human Services than it does in the English language.

Chuck Miles, a survivor of abuse at the facility who now serves on the board of Justice for YDC, said it plainly in a statement to the New Hampshire Bulletin:

“I was one of many children abused in state custody because of its institutional failures. The fact that grievous physical abuse and neglect are still happening — and on video, no less — at a time when the facility is under such intense scrutiny should be deeply troubling to all New Hampshire citizens, legislators, and government officials. At this point it is clear the state cannot credibly investigate itself.”— Chuck Miles, Justice for YDC board member and abuse survivor

He is right. And the fact that a survivor has to say it — because no one in state government will — tells you everything you need to know about how seriously New Hampshire takes the welfare of its most vulnerable children.

A Subcommittee Is Not Enough

Senate President Sharon Carson has convened a subcommittee. Senators Victoria Sullivan and Representatives Kimberly Rice and Jodi Nelson have visited the facility. They have met with the Attorney General’s office and the Disability Rights Commission. They plan to interview children and staff directly. Governor Ayotte has instructed the AG’s office to review the claims.

These are not nothing. But they are not enough.

A legislative subcommittee investigating a state facility that is overseen by a state department that reports to the governor who appointed that department’s leadership is not independent oversight. It is the state investigating itself — the precise thing Chuck Miles says it can no longer credibly do.

New Hampshire needs an independent, external investigation with subpoena power and no reporting obligation to the agencies under scrutiny. Not a subcommittee. Not a DHHS internal review. Not a statement from the governor saying allegations will be “thoroughly investigated” by the people who allowed the conditions to exist in the first place.

If we have learned anything from the YDC scandal — from the decades of abuse, the thousand-plus survivors, the criminal trials, the millions in settlement payments — it should be this: the state of New Hampshire cannot be trusted to hold itself accountable when it harms the children in its custody. The pattern is too deep. The institutional reflexes are too strong. The boilerplate comes too easily.

There are 15 children inside that facility right now. One of them picked up the phone on March 9 because nobody else was going to.

That child did more for accountability in a single phone call than every layer of state bureaucracy above them has done in decades.

It’s time to stop letting the state grade its own homework.

Dexter Dow is a journalist, author, and publisher based in Northfield, NH. He is the founder of Granite State Report and covers child welfare, state accountability, and civic affairs across the Granite State. Contact: granitestatereport@gmail.com