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For more than a century, New Hampshire sent its troubled youth to the same juvenile jail. It was called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. The young people were supposed to be cared for and then live productive lives. Instead, many of them were physically and sexually abused. More than a thousand people have said that the adults in charge at the YDC abused them. A statewide settlement fund established by NH lawmakers has so far paid out over $95 million to settle lawsuits filed by former detainees.
Jason Moon is a senior reporter and producer on the Document Team at NHPR. Moon’s investigation into the abuse at the YDC is now a three-part investigative podcast called “Youth Development Center.”
Moon’s other work includes “Bear Brook,” an investigative podcast into a brutal murder in New Hampshire that has been downloaded more than 31 million times. He also contributed reporting and music to The 13th Step, an NHPR podcast about abuse in New Hampshire’s addiction recovery centers which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the prestigious duPont-Columbia Award.
Moon said of his investigation into the Youth Development Center, “A lot of these kids didn’t necessarily have very strong advocates for them at home coming to try to find out what they could. So you have that enormous power dynamic, you have the secrecy that’s built into the system, where really the only information that can make it out of the system is written by the adults in charge. They write all the reports, they have complete control over the narrative that makes it out of the building, and if anything does make it out of the building that they don’t like, there’s an easy kind of response to it, which is ‘these kids they lie, they manipulate, that’s why they’re here.’”
“I would hope that all of us reflect on in the wake of a situation like this the extent to which we as a society sort of buy that argument,” Moon said.
