Iowa paid dearly for holding this troubled teen in isolation for up to 21 hours a day. He's not the only one being locked away.

For nearly 2½ years, JaQuan Bradford — a boy with emotional and mental disabilities — was held in isolation by the Iowa Department of Human Services for most of each day.

Beginning in 2008 when he was 12, Bradford was kept alone for as much as 21 hours a day at the Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo and often wasn't allowed to attend school.

He began pulling out his hair, hallucinating, defecating on himself and contemplating suicide. He imagined that the staff was putting harmful substances in his food, so he stopped eating, plummeting from around 150 pounds to 97.

This month, a state official acknowledged for the first time that what Iowa did to Bradford was wrong. That acknowledgment came just before the Iowa Appeal Board approving a $175,000 payment to settle a federal lawsuit in the matter.

“Our expert that we hired believed some of the records indicate some inappropriate confinement, and that’s what this settlement reflects,” Jeff Thompson, a deputy attorney general, told the Iowa Appeal Board earlier this month, just moments before its three members unanimously voted to approve the settlement.

But despite Bradford's payout and another $225,000 settlement in a separate case, the Department of Human Services continues to use the policy that locks up juveniles in solitary confinement — also called isolation or seclusion — as a form of discipline.

Several national experts contacted by the Des Moines Register said such policies are outdated, unnecessarily excessive, severely harmful to child development and far outside the national norm.

And a separate federal lawsuit is challenging the department's  ongoing use of solitary confinement for children.

DHS spokesman Matt Highland said the agency would not comment on its use of the seclusion policy, citing the federal litigation.

Mother LaRisha Bradford, said silence and lack of accountability is a large part of the problem.

She testified in her son’s case that she contacted Human Services social workers, voiced concern to judges and reached out to several attorneys in hopes of ending her son’s isolation — but she said no one took her concerns seriously.

“I guess because I was just one single voice, I didn’t matter,” LaRisha Bradford said.

JaQuan’s history and the systems that failed him

Bradford’s family had concerns about his behavior before preschool.

He was diagnosed at an early age with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and multiple other behavioral or mental disabilities that contributed to volatile behaviors such as self-harm and aggression.

Now 22, he has an IQ of 83, which is below average.

As a boy, he witnessed domestic abuse and experienced physical abuse from his mother’s boyfriend, court records show.

Those records also show: By age 12, the Des Moines boy had been charged with multiple crimes, including criminal mischief, disorderly conduct and interference with official acts.

He had violated the terms of home detention related to some of those charges by attacking his cousin and being disorderly.

At his mother's request, Iowa’s court system in 2010 labeled Bradford a “child in the need of assistance,” removing him from his mother’s care and placing him at the Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo.

Bradford had difficulty adjusting to the juvenile home, being placed in isolation for 843 of the 844 days he was at the facility, court records show.

The juvenile home staff determined Bradford needed to be monitored any time he was in close proximity to another resident because he was a risk for “sexual acting-out behavior.”

Despite that designation, the juvenile home staff allowed Bradford to participate in a trial early-bed program that court records show resulted in him engaging in sexual activities with at least one other resident of the home.

Human Services officials investigated and confirmed the incident as a case of child abuse for its employees' failure to provide supervision, court records show.

Bradford was placed in the juvenile home’s infirmary before the child abuse case was investigated. His behavior “required restraints and being locked at the infirmary for his behaviors,” Human Services reported in a Nov. 4, 2010, document.

And a DHS case review from June 9, 2010, showed Bradford sometimes received his schoolwork but no classroom instruction.

At one point, when officials told Bradford they were returning him to the infirmary he became angry, pushing both hands through a glass window and lacerating his arms. He was flown from Toledo to the University of Iowa Hospitals, where he underwent extensive surgery.

The incident left Bradford with nerve damage, and his right hand is permanently clinched.

Bradford was transferred to Eldora Boys State Training School when he was 14 and ultimately released to his mother’s care shortly before turning 18.

Was the settlement a way to make the Bradfords 'hush?'

He is unable to work because of his mental and physical health issues. He doesn’t have a high school degree or GED.

He says — and his mother confirms — that he has flashbacks to his time in isolation, feeling anxious when he is alone.

And his legal difficulties have continued.

In 2014, JaQuan Bradford was convicted of theft for punching a woman in the face at Merle Hay Mall and helping a group of men steal her cellphone. While in the Polk County Jail in 2014, he was convicted of assaulting an officer and criminal mischief for intentionally damaging plumbing.

And in 2015 he was sentenced to five years in prison for a Waterloo burglary, being released April 8.

LaRisha Bradford believes her son’s difficulties were made worse by the isolation and treatment he received in the juvenile home. She said she doesn’t believe the settlement is sufficient but the family agreed to it because they want to move ahead.

“You have groups like the Humane Society fight for dogs and cats, but who fights for people like JaQuan?” LaRisha Bradford said. “I feel like the settlement is them saying, ‘Hey, what we did was maybe wrong so here ya go. Now hush.’”

Iowa’s seclusion policy is an outlier

Gov. Terry Branstad ordered the Iowa Juvenile Home closed in January 2014 after a series of Des Moines Register investigations detailed its use of long-term isolation and failure to comply with federal special-education laws.

Branstad based his order largely on the recommendations of a five-member task force whose chairman was Jerry Foxhoven, who is now the Iowa DHS director. Foxhoven in 2014 was the director of the Neal & Bea Smith Legal Clinic at Drake University.

“I know there will be criticisms of this, but I don’t think there is any question that implementing these recommendations is the best thing for the kids there,” Foxhoven said in 2014.

In addition to JaQuan Bradford's recent settlement, Iowa in 2015 paid Jessica Turner of Okoboji $235,000 to settle a separate lawsuit alleging she was wrongfully secluded at the juvenile home in Toledo.

Turner said she spent 280 of her 528 days at the facility in an isolation cell.

There are no other pending lawsuits related to seclusion at the former Toledo facility.

The State Training School for Boys in Eldora, however, is the focus of an ongoing federal lawsuit filed by Disability Rights Iowa and Children’s Rights Inc., a New York nonprofit.

The lawsuit does not seek damages but instead asks the court to order Human Services administrators to make fundamental changes in the way they address the needs of youth at the facility, who range in age from 12 to 18.

Disability Rights Iowa contends the use of isolation should be used sparingly in tightly monitored situations when there is an immediate risk of harm.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three juveniles at the facility, but Disability Rights officials said they will seek class-action status.

It remains unknown how widely the isolation policy is being used at the Eldora facility, which holds 100 to 130 boys.

Disability Rights said previous reviews of the facility showed that most of its residents were sentenced to at least some time in isolation.

Other Human Services facilities are not known to isolate children as punishment, Disability Rights officials said.

“There was a time when solitary (confinement) was thought to be a good thing,” said Nathan Kirstein, an attorney for Disability Rights Iowa. “But now we know the damage that can be done to the human psyche by not having human contact.

"We’re social beings, and this is something that should be used very, very minimally, if at all.”

Iowa is one of seven states that has no set time limit on keeping juveniles in isolation for disciplinary purposes, according to a July 2016 report by the Lowenstein Center for the Public Interest. The other states are Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan and Wyoming.

President Obama in 2016 issued an executive order banning the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders, writing an opinion piece published by the Washington Post that called unnecessary solitary confinement “an affront to our common humanity.”

Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Indiana and Mississippi have either sharply reduced or eliminated isolation at juvenile facilities while Colorado and Nebraska lawmakers have passed legislation to limit its use, according to the group Stop Solitary of Kids.

The group is a collaborative effort of the Justice Policy Institute; Center for Children’s Law and Policy; Georgetown University’s Center for Juvenile Justice Reform and the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.

Dozens of scientific research papers cited on the Stop Solitary for Kids website concludes that isolation generally is ineffective.

Its use has long-lasting effects on children that include psychosis, anxiety, depression and an increased risk of suicide and self-harm, the studies generally conclude.

 “What you are doing is causing a lot of harm to children,” said Natalie Kraner, an attorney for Lowenstein. “Solitary is not a good environment for rehabilitation and it doesn’t make us safer as a community.”

Iowa workers injured; is seclusion a factor?

Eldora’s staff have been injured at least twice in the past year, the latest in May when a boy knocked out a worker’s teeth and broke bones in his nose, cheeks and an eye socket. 

It’s unknown if seclusion played a role in the injuries. 

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees said Disability Rights’ complaints about the state facility have emboldened residents to disobey staff members.

Danny Homan, the union’s Iowa president, declined to outline what seclusion levels his group might support.

“I’m going to leave it to the very qualified staff at that (Eldora) facility to come up with policies that are reasonable," Homan said.

Kirstein, the Disability Rights attorney, said he believes there is a misunderstanding in his group’s efforts. He believes Eldora’s staff would be safer if Iowa revised its use juvenile seclusion.

"When you reduce seclusion and have more educated and better-trained staff, you have a safer facility," Kirstein said. "Facilities that have undergone these transformations show that."

Colorado’s human services department reformed its policy in 2014 on its use of juvenile seclusion in light of research and concerns that some of its methods were ineffective.

The state had stopped using seclusion as punishment almost 20 years ago but still used it widely in other situations.

Now agency workers must check on juveniles in seclusion every five minutes and document the reasons for an emergency that justify its continued use. The agency also now must obtain a court order if it wants to hold a child in seclusion more than eight hours in two consecutive days.

Since the changes in Colorado, the rate of seclusion incidents in its youth facilities have fallen, violence is down and graduation rates have increased, Colorado records show.

The average time of Colorado’s juvenile seclusion is now 33 minutes, compared with 15 hours nationwide, according to tracking from the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.

“Although not popular with many folks in corrections for a long time, it’s certainly the right thing to do with people we are caring for,” said Anders Jacobson, the director of youth corrections for Colorado's Department of Human Services.