Same Walls. Same Failures.

The state’s child advocate reported that a child’s bone was broken in an illegal restraint at the Sununu Youth Services Center and that fifteen kids were locked down for six weeks without outdoor access. She made those findings while serving in holdover status because Gov. Ayotte tried to replace her in January. The Attorney General’s Office later disputed both. The facility is the same one at the center of one of the largest youth detention abuse scandals in American history. New Hampshire didn’t learn. It just renamed the building.

According to the Office of the Child Advocate, on March 17, inside New Hampshire’s only state-run youth detention facility, a staff member held a child face-down on the ground — a prone restraint — for approximately three and a half minutes. The child’s bone broke. Security camera footage of the incident did not match the facility’s own written account. Medical care for the fracture was delayed. The prone restraint is illegal under New Hampshire’s own regulations. The discrepancy between the video and the paperwork is not an administrative error.

The restraint was not the first sign of trouble. Eight days earlier, a child inside the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester had contacted the Office of the Child Advocate to report that something was wrong. Cassandra Sanchez, the state’s child advocate, sent investigators. What they found was a building operating like a jail. Children locked in their rooms during meals. Denied a full school day. Forbidden from going outside. Staff allowed one concession: a child could stand in an open doorway and feel the air on their face.

The lockdown had been in place for approximately six weeks. Roughly fifteen children — some accused of crimes, others involuntarily committed for mental health crises — were living under what Sanchez’s office called a “correctional mindset” rather than the treatment model the facility had spent years claiming to adopt. One child told investigators: “We are in jail now.”

The Building Has a History

The Sununu Youth Services Center is the renamed Youth Development Center — the YDC — and it sits at the center of one of the largest youth detention abuse scandals in the United States. More than 2,200 claims of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have been filed by former residents, spanning decades of operation. The state established a settlement fund in 2022. About $239 million has been paid to victims over four years, across roughly 425 agreements, with some 1,600 claims still pending.

The state does not have insurance to cover these claims. Taxpayers are paying. One civil trial — the case of David Meehan, who was abused in state custody in the 1990s — produced a $38 million jury verdict. The state argued it should only owe $475,000, and a judge upheld the statutory cap, reducing the award to that figure.

The reforms were supposed to prevent exactly what Sanchez’s office found in March. The population was reduced. The mission was reframed around stabilization and treatment. The name was changed. The building is the same building. And when the Child Advocate’s investigators arrived, they found children living under conditions that a former YDC abuse survivor recognized immediately.

Chuck Miles, who was abused at the facility as a child and now serves on the board of Justice for YDC Victims, put it plainly: “At this point it is clear the State cannot credibly investigate itself.”

The Watchdog Ayotte Tried to Replace

The person who uncovered the abuse is serving on borrowed time. In January 2026, Sanchez learned that Gov. Kelly Ayotte would not renominate her as child advocate. Her term had expired. The governor’s office did not explain the decision. Sanchez, who had served since 2022 and previously worked at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, said she believed the real reason was her public opposition in April 2024 to a series of Republican bills targeting LGBTQ+ children — including bans on gender-affirming care and requirements that teachers reveal students’ sexuality to parents. Ayotte denied the connection.

The governor nominated Diana Fenton, a Department of Education attorney and former assistant attorney general, to replace Sanchez. Fenton had no child welfare experience. Sanchez warned of a “huge learning curve.” Fenton withdrew after facing criticism over potential conflicts of interest. Ayotte’s office has not contacted Sanchez since. She remains in holdover status, running an office that was cut from nine staff to four after $500,000 in budget reductions.

The sequence matters. The House voted in 2025 to eliminate the Office of the Child Advocate entirely — a move pitched as cost-cutting but accompanied by a Republican lawmaker’s accusation that the office had “interfered” with legislation. The Senate restored the office at reduced funding. Ayotte moved to replace the advocate. The nominee withdrew. And it was this diminished, half-staffed, leader-in-limbo office that caught a child’s bone being broken on camera inside a state facility.

If the office had been eliminated, as the House voted to do, nobody would have taken that child’s call on March 9. Nobody would have reviewed the security footage. Nobody would have noticed that the facility’s written report didn’t match what the camera recorded. The lockdown would have continued unchecked.

What the Executive Council Heard

On Wednesday, April 15, the Executive Council got its first official briefing. Associate Attorney General Christopher Bond confirmed that the Department of Justice has opened an independent investigation, separate from reviews by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Child Advocate’s office. “The first step any time something like this happens,” Bond said, “is to ensure that the safety of the residents, staff and everyone is currently protected.”

DHHS Commissioner Lori Weaver told the Council that “safety is paramount” and that “when allegations like this come up we engage immediately.” She also disclosed that the facility currently has ten staff members out, with two workers’ compensation claims — including one staff member with a jaw broken in two places and another with facial lacerations. The violence runs in both directions.

Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill, a Democrat from Lebanon, called the reports “shocking” and noted that “the state is under considerable liability.” She asked whether budget cuts to DHHS had affected conditions at the center. Weaver said no.

Republican Councilor John Stephen of Manchester pressed on the point that matters most: he said he wanted assurance that the investigation is “truly independent.”

The $36 Million the Council Would Not Spend

At the same April 15 meeting, the Executive Council voted down a $36 million design contract to rebuild the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord. The prison, first built in 1878 and expanded in the 1980s, has infrastructure that state officials say creates safety risks and legal liability. Councilors balked at the cost trajectory: they expect the total project to land around $700 million, up from estimates of $600 million in 2024, and one councilor said publicly she had been told it could reach $1 billion. The contract would have gone to DLR Group of Omaha for a 750,000-square-foot facility housing 1,500 people.

Concord city officials have pushed for relocation, arguing the site could generate tax revenue as commercial or residential development and that the prison places an outsized burden on city emergency services — the fire department responded to state-owned properties over 500 times in 2025 while the state paid Concord $125,000 for the year, roughly $238 per call.

So the ledger from that single meeting reads like this: the Council refused to authorize $36 million in design work for the adult prison, and it received a briefing on a youth facility where a child’s bone was broken in an illegal restraint. Neither the prison nor the children’s facility walked out of that room with money. What the children have is an investigation. What the state has, for both populations, is a set of aging buildings and a cost curve nobody wants to sign.

A facility from 1878 should be replaced. That is not the argument. The argument is about what the state is willing to fund before the bill arrives as a lawsuit. The children’s watchdog office that caught the abuse on camera got its budget cut and nearly axed.

Ayotte’s Ownership Problem

Kelly Ayotte ran for governor on public safety. She branded herself as a former attorney general who understood accountability, a prosecutor who wouldn’t flinch from hard truths. She took office in January 2025. Everything that has happened at the Sununu Youth Services Center since that date belongs to her.

On her watch: Sanchez was pushed toward the exit. The nominee to replace her had no child welfare background and withdrew under pressure. The office’s staff was cut by more than half. Children were locked in their rooms for six weeks straight — no outdoor access, abbreviated classes, meals in isolation. The child advocate reported that a staff member broke a child’s bone in a restraint the state’s own rules prohibit. The video told one story; the paperwork told another. The settlement fund that pays past abuse victims was restructured to give Ayotte’s attorney general approval authority over awards.

The governor’s response — “I take any allegations of abuse seriously, and this will be thoroughly investigated” — is the same sentence every governor has issued about this facility for a decade. The words change nothing. The investigations produce reports. The reports produce new procedures. The procedures produce a new name on the door. And then a child calls a watchdog and says they feel like a prisoner, and the cycle starts over.

What the Children Said

One child told the Child Advocate’s investigators: “We are in jail now.”

Another: “I don’t want to become one of those mental kids, but this is going to make me one.”

These are children aged 13 to 17. Some are there because a judge ordered it. Some are there because the state determined they needed help. All of them spent roughly six weeks in conditions that the state’s own watchdog described as punitive and, in the case of the restraint, illegal.

The facility’s stated goal, posted on its own website, is “comprehensive mental health treatment” focused on “stabilization, mitigation of risk, and preparing youth for a successful return to the community.” A child who spends six weeks locked in a room without going outside, who watches a peer get held face-down until something snaps, who tells an investigator that the experience will break their mind — that child is not being stabilized. And the state that runs the building is now investigating itself to decide how seriously to take it.

The Compounding Failure

In Generational Malpractice, the argument is that institutional failures don’t resolve — they compound. Each administration inherits the damage, applies a surface-level fix, and passes the unremedied harm forward. The YDC abuse scandal stretches back decades. Former governors presided over it. Former legislators funded it. Former staff committed the acts. But each new revelation is treated as an isolated incident — something to investigate, resolve, and file away. The settlement fund compensates past victims. It does nothing to prevent future ones.

The reforms that followed the scandal were structural on paper and thin in practice. The population dropped. The name changed. The stated mission shifted from corrections to treatment. And in March 2026, a child was held in a prohibited restraint until a bone fractured, inside a facility that was supposed to represent the state’s redemption. The failure is not one superintendent or one staff member. The failure is a state that has never fixed the staffing shortages, the turnover, the underfunding, or the reflex to punish children whose behavior it cannot manage.

Meanwhile, the settlement fund is itself in crisis. Ayotte’s administration pushed legislative changes in 2025 that moved the fund administrator’s appointment and gave the attorney general approval authority over settlement determinations. The former administrator, retired Chief Justice John Broderick, who had served since the fund’s inception in 2022, opposed the changes. Survivors challenged them in court; a Superior Court judge rejected their arguments and the decision was appealed to the state Supreme Court. The fund went roughly nine months without an administrator, from the previous administrator’s departure in summer 2025 until March 2026. A new one, former Concord Circuit Court Judge Gerard Boyle, was confirmed in late March and started May 1.

The state is simultaneously litigating against the people it abused in the past and investigating new abuse happening in the present — at the same facility, under the same roof, managed by the same executive branch.

What Comes Next

Four separate reviews are underway: the Attorney General’s independent investigation, a DHHS internal review, the Child Advocate’s ongoing inquiry with weekly facility visits, and a Senate subcommittee appointed by Senate President Sharon Carson. That subcommittee — Sen. Victoria Sullivan and Reps. Kimberly Rice and Jodi Nelson — has visited the facility. House Speaker Sherman Packard said House leadership “has been treating this matter with the utmost urgency.”

All of that is procedural motion, and none of it solves the problem at the center of the story. The Attorney General investigating the facility holds approval authority over YDC settlements. The DHHS commissioner runs the division that manages the facility. The Senate subcommittee includes legislators from the party that voted to eliminate the office that uncovered the abuse. The child advocate who caught it has no confirmed appointment, a half-strength staff, and no signal from the governor that her position will survive.

The question is not whether the investigations will produce findings. The question is what happens in the next six-week window — when children are locked in rooms and nobody outside the building knows, because the one office designed to know has been defunded, its leader pushed toward the exit, its staff cut by more than half.

Update: The Attorney General’s Office released its review on July 7, 2026. It said the child “caused the injury to his own hand by punching a window,” described a one-week “initial restriction period” followed by a “modified schedule,” and found “significant operational challenges and dysfunction” that created “serious safety issues” (NHPR). It found no evidence of physical abuse of youth by staff; Sanchez said her office was not interviewed. She left the child advocate’s post in late July 2026 after six months in holdover status, and Gov. Ayotte named former Manchester police chief Allen Aldenberg acting child advocate (New Hampshire Bulletin). The office’s own final report had not been released as of July 30, 2026.

The walls at the Sununu Youth Services Center are the same walls that housed the Youth Development Center. The children inside them are different. The failures are not.

Dexter Dow is the editor of Granite State Report and the author of Generational Malpractice.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.